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I'm just going to throw this into the ring because, skimming the comments it hasn't come up yet, but it fundamentally changes the game.
The first commercial gene therapy received FDA approval in 2017. More received approval after, and more are in the works.
In 2000, it took over 10 years and $2B just to sequence a single genome. Now, sequencing costs are under $1,000. Genetic engineering is no longer science fiction and is now a real (but expensive, at around $500,000) technology. All that is necessary is that the industry continues to advance at this pace for another 20-30 years, and the situation with genetics will be fundamentally changed.
Most libs, even most very smart libs, have not heard that genetic engineering is now a real technology, or have not internalized it into their world model. Like many of the contemporary far right, they are stuck in a despair trap based on genetic fatalism. They are convinced that if something is genetic, it cannot be changed except through bloody methods.
Only once genetic engineering becomes as routine as heart surgery, hitting two degrees out on people's social graphs, will they automatically realize that it's a thing and start to understand the implications. However, smart liberals could potentially understand the situation early if someone told them. If so, they might be peeled off the SJ coalition.
If we're going to get genetic engineering tech in 30 years anyway, then heavy moral investments in either "corrective" discrimination or social darwinism don't make sense at this time; at the very least we'd want to see what genetic engineering can't do first before we go all-in on either left-racism or right-racism.
The old WW2 theories of inevitable Malthusian total war were upended by TFR of developed countries falling below replacement around 1973, a gap of about 34 years.
Edit: Gonna be honest here, I'm actually surprised you guys haven't noticed this and started including it in your maneuvers. In 2013, Scott wrote,
In 2014, he wrote, "Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable." Yudkowsky and Scott are the leaders of 2012 era Rationalism, and while Yudkowsky didn't have a lot to say about this, it's a pretty straightforward interpretation that Scott's position is that we should hold the line until something like a broad spectrum genetics industry comes online. This would then be sort of the 'default,' unspoken Rationalist position.
I'm embarrassed to admit that though I was aware of CRISPR, I wasn't aware of the 2017 gene therapy until 2023 (I found out around the time Doom Dance was released). Is it just me and (by extension) the people who read mitigatedchaos that noticed? Should we assemble sources and ask Scott to write a follow-up article?
We are in a golden age of biological research, CRISPR for instance is an incredible tool because it lets scientists/technicians cut the genetic code at an exact point. Furthermore, we are also at the point where our knowledge of genetic determinism is going to increase exponentially as this is literally one of the best use cases for machine learning -- multivariate analysis on extremely large datasets. We will be able to analyse not only the effect of genes, but also the interaction between different genes over the whole organism and compare that to other combined genotypes.
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imho, the genome and genetic engineering is one of the biggest letdowns of the past century. The idea or promise of harnessing thee genome to improve or optimize life has not materialized except for select/limited instances. Cancer treatments have not improved much, only detection. Yes, there has been progress in immunotherapies on certain type of cancers, but not on the more common sarcomas.
The hope of modifying humans is still in the realm of sci fi, and see little reason for this to change. After a century, the state-of-the-art treatment for obesity is an injectable that effectively turns people into anorexics, not something that rewires the brain or other aspects of metabolism to make people thinner
We just sequenced the genome for the first time around the year 2000. We haven't actually been at this that long.
IMO, it should be given another 30 years before categorizing it with commercial nuclear fusion in terms of 'indefinite' difficulty.
the main problem is the things we want to treat or modify , like weight, are highly polygenic or only partially explained by genes
I think what's currently being done is that first someone does a GWAS study to figure out the markers for whatever we want to control, like height. Then in vitro fertilization techniques are used to make dozens of fertilized eggs, they're all sequenced, and you look at the markers given by the GWAS study on each and pick the one you prefer. That's not do-everything genetic engineering yet, you're still rolling the same old dice, but now you can roll them on the lab bench, look at some of the numbers early on and pick the one you like best.
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I expect this (and IVF+polygenic selection) to mainly have the effect of those already smart selecting for IQ, which might worsen disparities.
It's also worth noting that current fertility trends are having a dysgenic effect—it's not like within-group IQ is fixed.
Right now gene therapy is mostly focused on severe monogenic disease, either crippling or lethal disease, where the high price and potential risk are worth it.
When it comes to health, such as heart health or lifespan, in general, between { strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, weakly positive, strongly positive } gene variants (as subjectively defined - I am not making an "objective" ranking), I would expect relatively few { strongly positive } to exist. { weakly negative, weakly positive } will be somewhat difficult for the industry to detect, and if each gene editing operation incurs risk and expenses, are likely not to be targeted until later. { strongly negative } should be easier to detect, has a stronger moral and political case to support it, and is likely to be funded by governments for insurance-like reasons in combination with political reasons.
I think we should expect a lifting of the left tail of the health distribution, rather than much of a boost at the high end. There are natural limiting factors in that the more edits someone makes, the farther away the kid is from being "their" kid, so it's likely that relatively few people would pursue something as radical as DNA synthesis, at least around 2050. Beyond then, it's more difficult to predict. There may also be ideological manias around 2050 that might distort the response.
I'm mostly thinking about it's probably going to be the rich and tech-friendly who use it most, who I'd expect to be higher IQ on average. You're probably right, though, that it would work best to stop the strongly deleterious, but I assume with statistics and with the current cheapness of getting genetic data, it's probably pretty doable to get more information.
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Is it likely that you can inject someone with boost-my-IQ? It'd work on eggs and sperm or embryos, I get that. We could do that today? But could you really upgrade a mature adult's intelligence significantly? Nootropics seems only to eke out marginal gains.
It seems like that you would be rewiring brain cells, a complex task. Is there even much spare volume to work with once the skull finishs growing? With sufficiently advanced tech you could do anything, I think uploading is possible after all. But civs that can do that are in a whole other league.
Maybe.
I'm sceptical that you could get the ball rolling for just 800K but I'd love to be in the civilization that just does it, on the off case it would work.
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Not an expert on this by any means but I have seen some encouraging results on in vivo (as opposed to in utero or in vitro) gene editing. Here's a sample paper discussing the state of the field. There's also a further question whether in vivo gene editing for intelligence would produce the kind of behavioural impacts we care about; as far as I know, that's an open uncertainty.
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Look at the way we treat LLMs, the only intelligence we have complete root access to. Intelligence is dangerous. If we get workable genetic engineering, it will not be used to produce intelligence but to produce meekness.
I believe that's likely to be a future issue and cause a split within the contemporary left coalition as genetic technology improves, resulting in a shift in the makeup of the coalitions.
I have proposed the term "Biosocialism" to cover "the elimination of genetic inequities that are an obstacle to the formation of a global, classless society." Governments have an insurance-like incentive to reduce genetic diversity, and markets are also likely to be a homogenizing force, meaning that this is likely to be a future conflict. I think we might want to get a solid body of theory set up first, so that we're in a better position once various aspects of the genetics industry undergo political polarization.
They arguably have an incentive to reduce phenotypical diversity. They don't have much incentive to reduce genetic diversity, except so far as it reduces phenotypical diversity. Neutral selection theory is true and most genetic diversity is neutral. More genetically diverse groups like the Khoisan or Pygmies aren't more phenotypically diverse than other more homogenous groups. All non-Africans put together are less genetically diverse than the Khoisan put together, but the non-Africans display a much wider range of phenotypes, because genetic variation is largely neutral in practice.
Flattening out the distribution of realized traits has similar problems to flattening out the distribution of underlying genes, as I'm sure you realize.
Additionally, what the genetics industry actually detects will be what they pay to detect, so there could end up being a reduction in underlying genetic diversity even if there are many variants with the same overall outcome naturally.
Yes, but, most variation is neutral.
All that data is there for you to look at yourself. No one denies the actual data, because it is true.
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