SneerClub

Working in the [field] is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research

depending on field, it might be crackpottery or straight up criminal. but if you post shit like this on linkedin, then it's suddenly "inspiring" and "thought-provoking"

Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies

and from that point on it's all counterfactual

Am i misunderstanding the data? No it is all the scientists who are wrong. (He is also ignoring the "scientists" who do agree with him, who all seem to have a special room for ww2 paraphernalia)

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience

How the fuck would you know that, mate? You don't even have a degree in your field, which, let me remind you, is (allegedly) computer science. Has Yud ever been near an actual genetics professor?

As we know, the critical age for a boy genius is somewhere from 11 (Harry Potter) to 15 (Paul Atreides), so the gene-enhanced baby ought to have a fair shot after a few months or so.

I got caught on that quote too...

Superbabies is a backup plan; focus the energy of humanity’s collective genetic endowment into a single generation, and have THAT generation to solve problems like “figure out how to control digital superintelligence”.

Science-fiction solutions for science-fiction problems!

Let's see what the comments say!

Considering current human distributions and a lack of 160+ IQ people having written off sub-100 IQ populations as morally useless [...]

Dude are you aware where you are posting.

Just hope it never happens, like nuke wars?

Yeah that's what ran the Cold War, hopes and dreams. JFC I keep forgetting these are kids born long after 1989.

Could you do all the research on a boat in the ocean? Excuse the naive question.

No, please keep asking the naive questions, it's what provides fodder for comments like this .

(regarding humans having "[F]ixed skull size" and can therefore a priori not compete with AI):

Artificial wombs may remove this bottleneck.

This points to another implied SF solution. It's already postulated by these people that humans are not having enough babies, or rather the right kind of humans aren't (wink wink). If we assume that they don't adhere to the Platonic ideal that women are simply wombs and all traits are inherited from males, then to breed superbabies you need buy-in from the moms. Considering how hard it is for these people to have a normal conversation with the fairer sex, them both managing to convince a partner to have a baby and let some quack from El Salvador mess with its genes seems insurmountable. Artificial wombs will resolve this nicely. Just do a quick test at around puberty to determine the God-given IQ level of a female, then harvest her eggs and implant them into artificial wombs. The less intelligent ones can provide eggs for the "Beta" and "Gamma" models...

But you don't go from a 160 IQ person with a lot of disagreeability and ambition, who ends up being a big commercial player or whatnot, to 195 IQ and suddenly get someone who just sits in their room for a decade and then speaks gibberish into a youtube livestream and everyone dies, or whatever.

These people are insane.

You are right, but the Wronger chuds are way too far up their own buttholes to figure this out

I feel coding people like they’re software

Jesus christ can you imagine segfaulting someone's kidney

Also LWers: https://youtu.be/AFj3tuNukTs

One comment refuses to leave me: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies?commentId=C7MvCZHbFmeLdxyAk

The commenter makes and extended tortured analogy to machine learning... in order to say that maybe genes with correlations to IQ won't add to IQ linearly. It's an encapsulation of many lesswrong issues: veneration of machine learning, overgeneralizing of comp sci into unrelated fields, a need to use paragraphs to say what a single sentence could, and a failure to actually state firm direct objections to blatantly stupid ideas.

My understanding is that it is possible to reliably (given the reliability required for lab animals) insert genes for individual proteins. I.e. if you want a transgenetic mouse line that has neurons that will fluoresce under laser light when they are firing, you can insert a gene sequence for GCaMP without too much hassle. You can even get the inserted gene to be under the control of certain promoters so that it will only activate in certain types of neurons and not others. Some really ambitious work has inserted multiple sequences for different colors of optogenetic indicators into a single mouse line.

If you want something more complicated that isn't just a sequence for a single protein or at most a few protein, never mind something nebulous on the conceptual level like "intelligence" then yeah, the technology or even basic scientific understanding is lacking.

Also, the gene insertion techniques that are reliable enough for experimenting on mice and rats aren't nearly reliable enough to use on humans (not that they even know what genes to insert in the first place for anything but the most straightforward of genetic disorders).

there's been some (what appears to me to be) remarkable progress in the field, in that I know that it's possible to create intentional structures. it's very much not my field so I can't speak to it in detail, I think the best way I could describe where I understand it to be is that it's like people building with lego, if that makes sense?

but yeah it's still a damn far way off from what we'd call "gene programming" as we have "computer programming"

Heh. For a while there I had a phone love wallpaper that did the SamaritanOS You_Are_Being_Watched thing. Good times. Shame about Caviezel though.

I don’t remember seeing Lesswrongers play with these sorts of ideas

the all-defector in rajaniemi's books probably sits pretty close?

(I still can't tell if rajaniemi's actually really into all this shit, or just found it all to be a highly convenient backstory for some entertainingly detailed scifi)

The gratuitous hate for washing machines in this is so funny. Dudes rock.