I agree with this, but not a popular opinion. Hence the down votes you are getting. Korea and China don't have the same memetic immune response to such ideas, injecting one's children with growth hormone in hope of increasing future job prospects, for example, is extremely common in Korea. I suspect embryo selection and generic engineering for increased IQ will take off in East Asia first. Then we will be forced to allow it to compete. 50+ more IQ points looks very possible: https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421
However, any significant lag could spell the end of American economic dominance. For this reason, I intend to start investing more in Korean firms in the next few decades.
Nope. Genetic engineering works far, far better. We've already plucked the low hanging fruit of adequate nutrition, early education, salt iodization, and lead reduction. Anyway, those reduce mental retardation, they don't improve the baseline too much. And the Flynn effect looks to be slowing or reversing. 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the world when the average 5th grader is mastering chromodynamics is hard to even contemplate.
People in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean water. Lots of other folks in the world also don't have clean water. Doesn't that seem like an easier thing to fix than trying out experimental therapies?
The gist of it is, in 1970 someone asked a director of NASA why billions of dollars were being spent on exploring space when millions of children were still dying on Earth. The response in part explained that NASA's R&D was paving the way for satellites with better weather forecasting, better communications, and better equipment that was making its way into people's everyday lives. While a bit morbid to say, the advancements made by NASA have arguably saved many more lives in the long run.
It's hard to see the point in investing in experimental technology whose payoff is unknown, especially when we have definite problems with feasible solutions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The possible payoffs - cancer cures, age prolongation, enhanced food production, disease and sickness prevention - that can come from investing in gene therapies are just too great to ignore.
As a side-thought, the technological singularity is thought of as the point at which we create an AI smarter than us, triggering a run-away effect of self-improvement. What if we end up doing it to our own race first through intelligence-improving gene modification? Can you imagine the implications of applying that intelligence to solving the rest of our problems?
And if you're interested in helping people in places that don't have access to these things that salt ionization is almost certainly the thing to work on first.
It's untested in the sense that no genetic engineering has been done in humans, yes. (Unless you count gene therapy to cure disease, which is fairly different.)
However, there are some pretty strong reasons to think it would work, at least if we're just talking about improving within the typical range of human ability. Going to the extremes of existing ability and beyond is probably possible too, but there are more unexpected problems that could exist.
People are talking more about 15 point gains through embryo selection now rather than 50 point gains. The later might be possible at some point but even the former isn't quite within the grasp of current science.
There are tests that don't use a standard deviation of 15. Feynman might have done, for example, the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test[1], which has a standard deviation of 24.
> 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the world when the average 5th grader is mastering chromodynamics is hard to even contemplate.
Not impossible but much, much, much more plausible with embryos. Modifying billions of neurons is a very, very tall order, and would likely be much less effective after the brain is grown. Embryo selection and modification are almost doable now, we just don't know which alleles to select for or edit in. A gift you can give your children but one you are unlikely to be able to get for yourself.
If genetic boosting is actually possible and not fringe bullshit, it's way faster than socioeconomic fixes, which seem to take 10 years per 3 iq points.
Would it not be the same argument as GMOs, that we don't understand the consequences enough and therefore shouldn't be used? N. Taleb has quite a detailed critique of GMOs, I'm wondering if this is the same to that and if the same concerns apply.
Well what happens when people start modifying people not for illness, but for other characteristics. You start having parents paying for their kids to make them faster, stronger, smarter, etc. You are left with two classes of citizens which might already be the case with wealth inequality. What about athletics with gene doping? It might be inevitable, but you have to think about what might end up happening.
So because some people might benefit and not others, we're all supposed to be stuck with these Savannah-adapted bodies forever? That's the ultimate crab bucket mentality.
I would like to see reliable, precise modifications before human germline modifications happen. As I understand it, current techniques involve infecting cells, integrating whole foreign genes (or even genomes) into them, and hoping that a beneficial modification comes along for the ride. If every family starts editing their children's genome like this, we'll end up with a whole lot of random crap in our germlines.
CRISPR is better but not there yet, I believe. Let's get all the way to being able to do the equivalent of sed to our germline cells before we start editing.
However, any significant lag could spell the end of American economic dominance. For this reason, I intend to start investing more in Korean firms in the next few decades.