Original title ‘What we talk about when we talk about risk’. article explains medical risk and why the polygenic embryo selection people think about it the wrong way. Includes a mention of one of our Scotts (you know the one). Non archived link: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about
One of the comments really annoyed me:
The “genetics is meaningless at the individual level” argument has always struck me as a bit of an ivory-tower oversimplification.
No, its pushing back at eugenicist with completely fallacious ideas. See for example Genesmith’s posts on Lesswrong. They are like concentrated Genetics Dunning-Kruger and the lesswrongers eat them up.
No one is promising perfect prediction.
Yes they are, see Kelsey Piper’s comments about superbabies, or Eliezer worldbuilding about dath Ilan’s eugenics, or Genesmith’s totally wacko ideas.
You know how leftwingers have now realized that teaching the right about concepts like gaslighting was a mistake because they keep misusing them? So instead of a ‘do not do this/be aware of people doing this’ they turn it into a rethorical weapon. The motte and bailey.
Embryo selection may just be the eugenicist’s equivalent of greenwashing.
Eugenicists doing IVF is kind of funny, since it is a procedure that circumvents natural selection quite a bit, especially for the guys. It’s what, something like billion to one for the sperm?
If they’re doing IVF, being into eugenics, they need someone to tell them that they aren’t “worsening the species”, and the embryo selection provides just that.
edit: The worse part would be if people who don’t need IVF start doing IVF with embryo selection, expecting some sort of benefit for the offspring. With American tendency to sell people unnecessary treatments and procedures, I can totally see that happening.
old timey eugenicists were all about preventing “unsuitable” people from having kids, thereby circumventing natural selection. It’s not as if they didn’t purposefully misunderstand the phrase “survival of the fittest”
Possibly my favorite kind of article. “The numbers that get thrown about don’t mean what the people throwing them around think them to mean, here is what they actually mean”. It’s like someone telling you about the defcon numbers and that smaller is more serious, or that if they say 50% chance of rain, they don’t mean it is a coin flip on it raining, they mean that in 50% of the area they are talking about, it will definitely rain. Except this one is: “numbers used in polygenic embryo selection aren’t like base stats in a videogame menu, you turds”
The numbers that get thrown about don’t mean what the people throwing them around think them to mean
That describes a common rationalist failure mode. They reach for a false sense of quantification by throwing lots of numbers at things, but the numbers are already approximations of much more nuanced, complex, and/or continuous things, so by overemphasizing the numbers, they actually get further from properly understanding. See for example… fixation on IQ; slapping probabilities everywhere; extrapolating trend lines (METR task length); and prediction markets.
