Well this certainly opens a window I hadn’t really thought about before. Very intriguing stuff (have only had time to read over the “Concrete Advice” section, but it was a great overview). Not sure I would totally utilize this at the moment (the cost being a major factor), but I have no doubt this kind of thing will get more prevalent and less expensive as time goes on.
I’m wondering if others are having a bit of cognitive dissonance like myself with the taint of eugenics lingering in the air? This quote
“This is an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that there aren’t enough non-Europeans in the large biobanks on which these predictors are trained.”
definitely reminded me of some of the complications of this kind of thing in practice...
Yes, I agree that cost and disparities in predictor strength between genetic ancestry groups are probably the biggest issues with polygenic screening at the moment. I didn’t mention this in the post, but the issue with disease predictor disparity should improve significantly in the next year or two. There are two large biobanks coming online with significant numbers of non-European participants; The Taiwan Biobank and the “All of Us” biobank in the USA. These should at least reduce the disparity in disease predictor strength, though it remains to be seen whether either one will actually collect data on cognitive phenotypes.
I’m wondering if others are having a bit of cognitive dissonance like myself with the taint of eugenics lingering in the air
I think we need a new term to describe “genetic improvement” that includes embryo selection and people choosing who to reproduce with but not state-sponsored sterilizations or genocide. The fact we use one word to describe both of those is crazy. It’s like using “stuff” to refer to both food and excrement.
“Oh yeah the stuff I got at the restaurant was good, but stuff isn’t always good so eating there made me a bit nervous”
Aella girl has suggested the term “epilogenics”. “epilogi” is the greek word for “choice”, so we can use that instead of “eu” which means “good”. I quite like this term and will be using it from now on.
So yes, I strongly oppose many types of eugenics but I am strongly in favor of epilogenics.
Yeah I tried to invoke the notion I had that there was this almost ephemeral, tenuous connection between this “stuff” and eugenics. Not trying to imply a direct line of similarity by any means. And I agree that new terminology is needed to distinguish and make useful which aspects society is willing and able to allow vs. not.
I’m glad more biobanks are coming online! I could imagine this increasing by an OOM over the next 5-10 years?
Well this certainly opens a window I hadn’t really thought about before. Very intriguing stuff (have only had time to read over the “Concrete Advice” section, but it was a great overview). Not sure I would totally utilize this at the moment (the cost being a major factor), but I have no doubt this kind of thing will get more prevalent and less expensive as time goes on.
I’m wondering if others are having a bit of cognitive dissonance like myself with the taint of eugenics lingering in the air? This quote
definitely reminded me of some of the complications of this kind of thing in practice...
Yes, I agree that cost and disparities in predictor strength between genetic ancestry groups are probably the biggest issues with polygenic screening at the moment. I didn’t mention this in the post, but the issue with disease predictor disparity should improve significantly in the next year or two. There are two large biobanks coming online with significant numbers of non-European participants; The Taiwan Biobank and the “All of Us” biobank in the USA. These should at least reduce the disparity in disease predictor strength, though it remains to be seen whether either one will actually collect data on cognitive phenotypes.
I think we need a new term to describe “genetic improvement” that includes embryo selection and people choosing who to reproduce with but not state-sponsored sterilizations or genocide. The fact we use one word to describe both of those is crazy. It’s like using “stuff” to refer to both food and excrement.
“Oh yeah the stuff I got at the restaurant was good, but stuff isn’t always good so eating there made me a bit nervous”
Aella girl has suggested the term “epilogenics”. “epilogi” is the greek word for “choice”, so we can use that instead of “eu” which means “good”. I quite like this term and will be using it from now on.
So yes, I strongly oppose many types of eugenics but I am strongly in favor of epilogenics.
Yeah I tried to invoke the notion I had that there was this almost ephemeral, tenuous connection between this “stuff” and eugenics. Not trying to imply a direct line of similarity by any means. And I agree that new terminology is needed to distinguish and make useful which aspects society is willing and able to allow vs. not.
I’m glad more biobanks are coming online! I could imagine this increasing by an OOM over the next 5-10 years?