My book is out! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wyclifs-Dust-Western-cultures-printing/dp/B0B5PPXSQH/
I’m a social scientist in an economics department in Britain. Two of my interests are experimental economics and the social causes of genetic variation. I have a newsletter at https://wyclif.substack.com.
Yup, definitely true that I haven’t considered the effect on non-humans. I think you’d have to be very pessimistic to say that agriculture was a mistake from this perspective. That might be true (1) if agriculture involved so much animal suffering that it outweighed the human good involved. Or (2) if from agriculture on, humans were set on a path that inevitably led to the destruction of life on earth, e.g. by runaway global warming or nuclear war. I think (1) might be true of modern factory farming, but is less likely true of traditional farming. (2) is as yet unknown, but I hope that it will not be so.
I don’t think this argument makes sense. Of course the people who will be born are “imaginary”. If I choose between marrying Jane and Judith, then any future children in either event are at present “imaginary”. That would not be a good excuse for marrying Jane, a psychopath with three previous convictions for child murder. More generally, any choice involves two or more different hypothetical (“imaginary”) outcomes, of which all but one will not happen. Obviously, we have to think “what would happen if I do X”? It would be silly to say that this question is unimportant, because “all the outcomes aren’t even real!” That doesn’t change if the outcomes involve different people coming into existence.
I think the technical term you’re looking for is “imagination”.
As a basis for purely personal morality that may be fine, but as a way of evaluating policy choices or comparing societies it won’t be enough. Consider the question “how much should we reduce global warming”? Any decision involves alternative futures involving billions of people who haven’t been born yet. We have to consider their welfare. Put another way, the word “imaginary” is bearing a lot of weight in your argument: people who are imaginary in one scenario become real in another.
The argument isn’t that simply having more people alive is better. That’s why I spend time arguing that people’s lives are worthwhile.
I mention two intuitions. The intuition that it’s good to be alive is quite widely shared, no? Even people who claim to disagree often act as if they agree. (My uncle repeatedly said he didn’t want to live any more, yet he carefully avoided Covid.)
The intuition that people’s lives have value in themselves, and not in relation to what else is going on, isn’t just a gut feeling. It relates to the idea that what has value is consciousness—feelings of joy or contentment, say—so that if someone experiences a lifetime reasonably worth living, then that life is reasonably worth living whatever else is going on, because the experiences are the same.
You may be right that adding up utilons is crazy, but my claims don’t depend on that. Any moral framework will do, if it positively values the fact of a person leading a reasonably good life.
Lastly, I’m surprised you see any aggression here.
It sounds as if you have a number of political positions you want to get across, but I’m not sure how they relate to my argument, which is about how discursive conflict takes place. If you don’t like my examples, of course you can just replace them in your mind with examples you prefer.
Sure. But the most interesting dependent variable isn’t usually “how many standard deviations of Y will I gain”, it’s e.g. “how many years of education will I gain”. In any case, on either scale, is there a PGS where a 1 s.d. change does something big? You might say the most recent EA is a candidate. In one dataset a 1 s.d. increase causes (i.e. within-siblings) about a 4.5 percentage point increase in the probability of university attendance.
I am not sure that “earlier is better”. It’s true that the biology favours early parenthood. But the sociology goes the other way: it’s better to have children when you’re high-income and worldly-wise. So there might be a trade-off between e.g. health and wealth.
There’s a big literature on this, you could start with e.g. Powell, B., Steelman, L.C. and Carini, R.M., 2006. Advancing age, advantaged youth: Parental age and the transmission of resources to children. Social Forces, 84(3), pp.1359-1390; or for health, Myrskylä, M. and Fenelon, A., 2012. Maternal age and offspring adult health: evidence from the health and retirement study. Demography, 49(4), pp.1231-1257, which finds a U-shaped relationship. Be aware of possible confounds (e.g. educated people have kids later, but you deciding to have kids later won’t make you more educated per se).
Update: at a very quick glance the following looks useful: Mikko Myrskylä, Karri Silventoinen, Per Tynelius, Finn Rasmussen, Is Later Better or Worse? Association of Advanced Parental Age With Offspring Cognitive Ability Among Half a Million Young Swedish Men, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 177, Issue 7, 1 April 2013, Pages 649–655, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kws237
I’m not sure what you mean by selective power. I suppose the natural question is “how many extra (e.g.) IQ points do I get for an extra standard deviation of a PGS?” In other words, you want the regression coefficient, where the dependent variable is on some meaningful scale. I stand by my comment, unless you can show a PGS where a 1 s.d. change currently does something big.
Genetic correlations: maybe, but we haven’t looked at genetic correlations for many things, and indeed we don’t have other polygenic scores to correlate them with for many things, and indeed we haven’t collected questions on big enough samples to create those polygenic scores for many things, so again, we aren’t there yet.
In my opinion, as of 2021, no.
Our polygenic scores are predictive, not causal. That is, we estimate them by maximizing predictive power in a non-causal setting. They do have some causal effects. For example, about half a score for educational attainment’s correlation with EA is causal. The other half is correlated environments, genetic nurture etc.
In future, sibling-based designs may lead to truly causal scores. I don’t know how long that will take.
Scores typically have low predictive power. The R2 of scores for EA is IIRC about 10%. By definition, they will never go above the heritability of EA which is only about 40%. Unless you’re prepared to pump out tons of eggs, test them all, and pick the best, you are probably not going to do much to change the phenotype. Again, with larger sample sizes this will eventually change.
Polygenic scores are, well, polygenic. They sum up many different genes. We don’t know what else they correlate with. You are in effect giving your child a pill with unknown side effects.
Maybe in future that won’t be true. I don’t know how long that will take, but I suspect it will be long because there is a lot we don’t know.
Having children involves risks. Your child might end up with a terrible disease. Even with all the genetic testing in the world, your child might be hit by a bus and end up quadriplegic. Or they may mature into smart, healthy adults… and embrace values that you find deeply wrong.
That’s not to say you should be casual about those risks. It is to say that you have to accept some risk. Delaying childrearing because in future you might be able to avoid some of this risk suggests that you may not have internalized that. (I only say “suggests”. I don’t know you!)
If you do want to delay childrearing so you can screen using reliably causal polygenic scores with high predictive power and no risk of side effects, I think you should be prepared to wait 10 years (and maybe more). If so, consider freezing your/your partner’s eggs.
There are some good general reasons to delay childrearing:
Older parents tend to be richer
Older parents might be wiser
Both those things benefit children (pace Robert Plomin!) The benefits of older parents are visible in the data (within families, so controlling for obvious differences between early- and late-parenting families). But of course that depends how old, wise and rich you and your partner are now.
Re your first paragraph: polygenic scores that directly predict cognitive ability are also being selected against. Polygenic scores designed to predict very high intelligence also turn out to be good at predicting ordinary intelligence, so it doesn’t seem likely that “Einsteins” work in some fundamentally different way [1].
I agree that ironing out “errors” could be risky, especially given the current state of our knowledge. But equally, that does not imply that it’s no big deal if people’s genetics are getting less healthy or smart. There are two risks here.
I agree that we should consider changing phenotypes (e.g. the Flynn effect) as well as changing genes. It could be that speaking loosely, the phenotypic improvement will overwhelm the genotypic decline. But that isn’t certain. Genes and environment could interact in complex ways. It’s not guaranteed that better environments will be a perfect substitute for genetic endowments.
Lastly, I definitely don’t support the deliberate elimination of “less functional people”.
[1] Zabaneh, D., Krapohl, E., Gaspar, H.A., Curtis, C., Lee, S.H., Patel, H., Newhouse, S., Wu, H.M., Simpson, M.A., Putallaz, M. and Lubinski, D., 2018. A genome-wide association study for extremely high intelligence. Molecular psychiatry, 23(5), pp.1226-1232.
I’m not sure I understood all of your points. But overall, yes, we might just get rid of rare mutations, but I wonder if realistically people will stop there. (That is indeed a slippery slope argument.)
I think that’s basically correct. Or maybe put another way: they act as if finding such genetic differences would plausibly legitimize racial discrimination.
That may not be nuts. Suppose there is real racial discrimination (not a big ask). Then if we discover substantively large differences between ethnic groups, it might be easier to “get away with” racial discrimination because someone can just claim “oh well, ethnic groups are different and that’s why we see different outcomes”. Similarly, non-deliberate (e.g. unconscious or “structural”) discrimination might be harder to spot, if everyone just assumes that different outcomes between groups are the result of different genetics.
I should add that I use images to help make my point. The Teach A Man To Fish theory of argumentation: if someone sees something themselves, they understand it better than if you hold their hand through it. I’m guessing that Lesswrong readers can appreciate who Ataturk and Erdogan are and why they’re relevant to the topic. Not sure that justifies Peepshow clips, though....
Thank you for the suggestion.
I did say “ultimately”. I know about the possibility of horizontal cultural transmission, and I discuss it later in the article. I should read TMM, maybe there are great examples of horizontal cultural transmission beating out vertical transmission. In the case we’re discussing here, I doubt it. I think the West’s cultural infectivity will weaken as its economic dominance slips.
I’m not sure Kaufmann does making that mistake. He focuses on extreme sects within each religion, not on Islam as a whole, and mostly on Western countries rather than the Middle East. You could say I’m making the mistake, because I discuss the probability of non-Westerners buying into Western values. Yeah, that could be. But I also would distinguish between secularization (and other kinds of modernization) and Westernization. (Japan did the one but not the other, for example.)
You’re right that marriage and family structure are “deep”. A friend of mine suggested that other “deep” Western exports are also important. For example, Erdogan sits atop a recognizably Weberian bureaucracy. That’s an institution not a market product. However, I’d say that political and cultural values are, if not deep, important. It matters, say, that Turkey is very far from a liberal state—even if Ataturk introduced Western-style state structures, and if Turks are embracing love marriage and fewer children.
I think shared is too broad. You like Coke, I like Coke—we share that. But it’s shared because we both have sugar-loving taste buds. To be cultural, you need something more. Hence the biologists’ emphasis on the transmission mechanism via learning.
Does it matter? My argument is that a lot of what gets called “Western culture” is really just “stuff that is appealing to human taste buds”, in a broad sense. So yes, it is spreading, but no cultural learning is required. Coca Cola sells Coke, people in India like it and buy it; but this doesn’t have implications for things that are actually cultural, such as attitudes to gender, political values, etc.
I think there are two phenomena:
(1) General Westernization. That certainly still takes place, as you point out. The question is how deep that Westernization is—to put it crudely, is it at “Magna Carta” or “Magna Mac” level?
(2) The emergence of “hardened” subcultures which are resistant to Westernization and which have high birth rates. The evidence from Kaufmann is pretty persuasive about (2).
Here’s a nice recent statement of what I take to be the mainstream view.
I don’t know about population sizes either. Maddison (cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population#By_world_region) says that in 1500, Americans were only about 4% of global population, with 20% being in Europe and 68% in Asia.