This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.
Let’s say we are in a Cold War with with China. In order to defeat the US they begin with their ideal Chinese man but then change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ. These guys crush the US. But then the super humans end ruling China too. And they are so modified they are more different from Han Chinese than European Americans.
You don’t really need War for this timeline as simply doing it in peace time would end up creating humanoids completely different to current humans and basically a mass extinction even or at a minimum making human existence void of any meaning a second tier species watched over by their better.
Same thing of course applies to AI.
Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?
That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.
With no ethics, and a big budget you could go very fast.
Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.
In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)
No, I don't think so. We can already clone Von Neumann, and we can't actually engineer smarter people than that in the way we engineer airplanes or computers because we don't know how either intelligence or neurology work at that level.
We can certainly do iterated embryo selection on top of Von Neumann ... but I don't think that's going to work that well, you're running into non-additive effects there.
You don't need to know how intelligence works, you just need to sequence enough people in genome wide association studies, build a polygenic score and then run it
Right, that doesn't get you to 250 IQ or above existing variation I think.
250 IQ is 10 standard deviations from mean IQ 100, SD=15
If we have 1000 offspring per generation via egg harvesting embryos, taking the top 1% (10) they should be 2.33 SD from the mean
With 80% heritability, response to selection per generation is 1.86 SD
Thus it will take 5.36 (6) generations of selective breeding to get 250IQ with 1000 offspring per generation
Or 6 * 20 weeks = 2.3 years
If egg/sperm are from +3 SD donors, it's 3.76 (4) generations, or 1.53 years
Please consider donating towards my volcano lair lab on Kickstarter
Right, I'm suggesting that the mathematical model stops applying. Like, imagine humans are now cars. You can make a faster car than you did last time by copying the techniques of all the best car factories (this is sorta what embryo selection does). Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that, though I think non-additive effects will prevent that. But you can't make a car that goes at 1000 mph by picking out the best techniques from existing car factories. You'd need to do more technical design work than that, or have a LOT of new mutations and natural selection on them.
You can't take half the components of a Ferarri and half the components of a Ford pickup, mix them together and have a working car. The piston of one wouldn't fit in the cylinder of the other.
But you can mix the genomes of males and females of the same species.
Cars have very few components so the variation is eg swapping out this brand of muffler for another one - they must all fit together. Genetic variation is extremely small (modifying less than a billionth of the system) - and mostly independent of other variation.
Imagine a car with 10,000 tunable components, that can vary without breaking the machine (life is robust to variation)
There are 8 billion cars, almost completely stock. Some have a few parts well tuned, and are fast, some have a few parts detuned and are slow
The fastest cars have 500 components perfectly tuned and are 4 or 5 standard deviations faster
What I'm saying is we look at millions of cars tuning matched to speed. We use this to work out what the best tuning is, then we select for that, making a car that uses existing components, but the combination has never existed before naturally.
We KNOW we can rapidly selectively breed animals that vary enormously from the natural stock. Look at racehorses, dogs, milk production in cows, the giant extremely fast growing chickens we eat today that lay eggs at phenomenal rates etc etc
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link