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Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.
Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.
Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.
Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.
(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?
Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:
Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.
Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.
You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.
Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.
Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.
Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.
The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?
This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.
The problem with this is that it assumes that problems have solutions. Easy mistake! But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ. No set of incentives will find a way to generate negative net entropy, or move faster than the speed of light. People can successfully build a bridge or fight a war, sure, but contemporary politics have solved most of these tractable problems.
PGT-P, polygenic testing for diseases for pre-implantation embryos in IVF, is available right now. The exact same technology works for IQ, and could be used today if people weren't worried about legal/regulatory/PR pushback. 50% chance it already is being used secretly.
Also, even before that, we know how to increase IQ: use sperm/eggs from smarter parents. This isn't something most average parents would want, but it'd work. In a few decades, there'll probably be direct gene editing for something like 'your kid looks like you but has the intelligence-related-genes of someone much smarter', and even though valuing your child looking like you but not valuing them acting like you is quite confused, that'll probably sell. Black on the outside, jew on the inside.
Yeah, that's not about to happen. Especially in the face, a lot of those genes are doing multiple jobs and almost anything else in the body also affects the brain/neurons.
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Large mammals, such as polo ponies and police dogs, can be cloned. Not only do these animals not have health problems, but they are able to perform their role very well. It's not difficult to extrapolate from that and conclude that human cloning is technically possible. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that some large, powerful nation-state has a human-cloning black project going...those super-soldier Navy SEALs might be in elementary school now, being raised by their SEAL fathers or CIA agents or something like that.
I'm pretty sure that isn't happening, although I wish it was.
Too expensive? I mean, the Chinese government is pretty goddamn ruthless and if they wanted to they could easily pull this off. Maybe it's more expensive to clone 1,000 Navy SEALs and hope that a hundred of them decide to follow in their fathers' footsteps. You've got 900 guys who are doing something with their lives other than being SEALs. Take David Goggins...there might be 1 David Goggins and 9 fat truck drivers (which Goggins was, more or less, at one point) from your cloning program.
What I've always suspected very strongly, but wasn't sure about until the happening on 24th February, is that people tend to be very mistaken about «ruthless» states. It's not ruthlessness a la evil AI picking the most instrumentally useful move in its strategic agenda to dominate the light cone, it's the ruthlessness of an unemployed wife-beater who sometimes shows her an inkling of kindness to keep mooching off. This geopolitical gobbledygook is cope, generated on auto by the pro-regime intelligentsia for the masses with superficial interest in politics; the elites of those regimes don't even notice it for the most part, and are exclusively invested in inner «stability» and individual survival, to the point of undermining the whole system's survival odds, to say nothing of its Grand Civilizational Future. If Putin couldn't be assed to make the army procure some drones or inflatable plyboard fake tanks… scratch that clever-ass stuff, even tyres or med kits – why would Xi invest in creepy, speculative projects like cloning? Does he even believe in genetics in the first place? Why would anyone below him risk checking if he does?
So it goes.
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The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.
To my dismay of course, I think we should absolutely be engaging in that kind of activity, but the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.
If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.
Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?
Not limited to fiction.
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I don't know about that. There's definitely genetic editing that we probably should be doing: metabolic diseases like Huntington's come to mind. Then there's things where we've got trade-offs...where a little of it can be OK but a lot is straight up crippling, like autism and ADHD. The issue we have with cloning is that maybe a hundred or so different types of human become fashionable and that kind of monoculture is going to fuck us up royally. If it's a few hundred Navy SEALs or something it's all good though.
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I hope you recognize the irony of your handle in light of this.
Not in the least Hlynka, but such nuance is lost on poor folk like me who have to translate to "Indian" in their head, with the mental overhead that entails.
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I don't have great insight into this field but I think you overstate the science somewhat. A number of genes have been 'implicated in' intelligence but that is a long way off from the proof that inserting these genes into someone will make them intelligent. I believe there is evidence that genes can function differently in different circumstances/populations so it's not a trivial X makes Y scenario.
No, I'm not overstating it. Read this post by gwern or this post by genesmith for an overview of why embryo selection for intelligence works. Intelligence isn't caused by a few genes, but by thousands of genes that individually have a minuscule contribution but, when added up, cause >50% of existing variation in intelligence (note: i'm not claiming we understand each individual gene that's part of that, just that we've inferred that). (Note that this is in the modern environment - environmental effects have a much higher impact when malaria and starvation and infections from skin wounds are rampant, but they aren't in the modern US).
When parents have children, the DNA the child inherits from either parent is random. So we can say - okay, can we predict, just from the DNA of children, which child will be smarter? And polygenic scores indeed predict which child will be smarter.
I'm not 100% confident in these estimates, but they seem to be around the right order of magnitude. And ... that's a lot of IQ points. Even if we divide those estimates by ten, it's still well above anything that education reform can do.
I would bet good money that taking a genome, and then editing it until it had every gene which is correlated with higher intelligence, would not get you a baby that was even a single standard deviation above what you would naively predict based on the parents.
Consider a simple toy model, where
If you have this scenario, each gene IQN000...IQN999 will explain about 0.1% of the variance in IQ, and yet using CRISPR to force just 5% more of the IQN genes to the "good" variant will lead to poorer outcomes than just leaving the system alone.
All that being said, you should be able to squeeze some results out of that technique. Just not multiple SD of improvement, at least not by doing the naive linear extrapolation thing.
What do you mean by this bet? Actually waiting for gene edited baby to grow is slow, and illegal, and we're still nowhere near to being able to edit 10,000 genes of future child without breaking unintended genes .
You are entirely correct that linear model has its limits. Arguing that than it would break well before 1 SD, is... just wishful thinking. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit.
Looks like in actual world, the tradeoff was "decreases libido, increases cuckoldry and other non-reproductive activity" rather than "decreases intelligence".
I am not arguing that you can't get a single standard deviation of gain using gene editing, and I am especially not arguing that you can't get there eventually using an iterative approach. I am arguing that you will get less than +1SD of gain (and, in fact, probably a reduction) in intelligence if you follow the specific procedure of
The specific thing I want to call out is that each of the alleles you've measured to be the "better" variant is the better variant in the context of the environment the measurements occurred in. If you change a bunch of them at once, though, you're going to end up in into a completely different region of genome space, where the genotype/phenotype correlations you found in the normal human distribution probably won't hold.
I don't know if you have any experience with training ML models. I imagine not, since most people don't. Still, if you do have such experience, you can read my point as "if you take some policy that has been somewhat optimized by gradient descent for a loss function which is different from, but correlated with, the one you care about, and calculate the local gradient according to the loss function you care about, and then you take a giant step in the direction of the gradient you calculated, you are going to end up with higher loss even according to the loss function you care about, because the loss landscape is not flat". Basically my point is "going far out of distribution probably won't help you, even if you choose the direction that is optimal in-distribution -- you need to iterate".
Yep. And yet, I claim, necessary if you don't want to be limited to fairly small gains.
Note that this is "below 1SD of gains beyond what you would expect from the parents, and in a single iteration". If you were to take e.g. Terry Tao's genome, and then identify 30 places where he has "low intelligence" variants of whatever gene, and then make a clone with only those genes edited, and a second clone with no gene edits, I would expect the CRISPR clone to be a bit smarter than the unaltered clone, and many SD smarter than the average person. And, of course, at the extreme, if you take a zygote from two average-IQ parents, and replace its genome with Tao's genome then the resulting child would probably be more than 1SD smarter than you'd expect based on the IQs of the parents, because in that case you're choosing a known place in genome space to jump to, instead of choosing a direction and jumping really far in that direction from a mediocre place.
Maybe technical arguments don't belong in the CW thread, but people assuming that the loss landscape is basically a single smooth basin is a pet peeve of mine.
I am sorry for using "just wishful thinking", this was bad.
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I don't current state of art, but I think setting all genes to "high IQ allele" would have linear projection for IQ well past 300. So getting 300 IQ would need to avoid setting some alleles.
I have some experience with gradient descent methods, thought, not with ML. I challenge the premise "somewhat optimized", we are currently living in dysgenic age. If we were talking about making Borzoi dogs run faster, I'd have agreed.
Alternatively, we could just skip detection on which alleles have low IQ and just eliminate very rare alleles, which are much more likely to be deleterious (e.g. replace allele with frequency below given threshold with its most similar allele with frequency above threshold) without studying any IQ.
Well, people on this forum don't discuss genetics in detail at all.
It's a basin in some places until we travel to a mountain ridge. Since we are decades away from even trying "set all genes to specific allele" - even for model organisms - very few people discuss it.
In your hypothetical bet, how would result "IQ as intended, but baby brain too large for pregnancy to be delivered naturally" count?
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I don't think that toy model captures important features of the situation - there are people with 4SD higher intelligence, and while it's not clear how much of that is caused by non-additive genetics / idiosyncratic or random environmental contingencies, you could just clone them. I'd expect the children of two people of 3-4SD intelligence to be more than 1SD above average, and an algorithm that just randomly generated a child of two random 4SD intelligence people seems pretty close to a linear extrapolation, intuitively, yet performs above 1 SD.
The intuition for why linear extrapolation might work better than you'd expect in a complex system is that new beneficial alleles have a strong pressure to combine linearly with other alleles to spread throughout a population that'll have many different alleles in its members.
The toy model definitely does not capture the entire situation. It's mainly intended as a warning that the tails come apart. I specifically expect that the linear extrapolation would break down if you tried to use it very far outside the naturally occurring distribution, and proposed a toy mechanism of that.
Yes, I'd expect that would work fine. In fact I'd expect that "clone a very high IQ individual" would work much better than "CRISPR up a baby from two average parents so that it has all of the SNPs that GWAS said were best".
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I was more pointing to the gene editing reference. It seems more intuitive that we could select embryos as all the bits are functionally integrated via evolution.
There's a lot of reading so will tap into later. Do we really know if the causal correlation is from genes to IQ in the % of variation explained. Might they be markers of ethnicity, itself with a cultural link to IQ?
My journey in these waters is first to explore what level of evidence do we have. Aggregate associations between genetics and IQ scores would be low quality in terms of causal inference wouldn't it, in terms of evidence based medicine?
Ah, I meant direct gene editing on the alleles that the PGS identified / DNA sequences that people who are smarter than you have, so just a stronger version of embryo selection and natural reproduction, not the intentional design of entirely novel mechanisms, which I agree is far off.
That's what the sibling natural experiment is for - the ethnicity, culture, and environment for siblings are the same! Yet the sibling with a higher PGS does better in school. (outside of mutually reinforcing interactions between those and genes)
The similarity is also a problem in assigning variance to a single component but it's definitely a kind of experiment so worth taking seriously
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First of all, that's literally the first point in my list of possible explanations for why forced skin in the games fails in my examples.
But also I want to point out an important thing: I'd want a stable legitimately non-working solution. As in, imagine one of the more inconvenient possible worlds where we have implemented my proposal for solving recidivism, everything appears to work as intended, George Soros makes sure that the people he funds really believe in the cause, those people report that they get nothing but enthusiastic cooperation from the prison staff, and they keep trying protocols devised by the best sociologists and they can't get recidivism rate below 70%.
That world is pretty unfortunate, but it has one very good property: whenever someone says "hey I think that you people are doing rehabilitative justice wrong, we should abolish prisons and replace it with mutual support communes, and for starters let all recidivists out on no bail" we tell him that there's currently three pilot mutual support communes, he's free to join any of them as staff and try to do rehabilitative justice right, but no, no way no how we are restarting any of those catch and release programs. If his ideas work, they work, yay, he solved an impossible problem, the criminals don't reoffend and are not affected by our harsh recidivism laws. If not, too bad, but at least the society is safe.
It's important that if the solution doesn't work the society can be reasonably sure that it's because the problem is very hard and not for the lack of trying.
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