TsviBT

Karma: 6,740

TsviBT Mar 30, 2025, 12:00 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

I am the Law, the Night Watchman State, the protector of innocents who cannot protect themselves. Your children cannot prevent you from editing their genes in a way that harms them, but the law can and should.

I do think this is in interesting and important consideration here; possibly the crux is quite simply trust in the state, but maybe that’s not a crux for me, not sure.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 11:54 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

if we had a highly competent government that could be trusted to reasonably interpret the rules,

Yeah, if this is the sort of thing you’re imagining, we’re just making a big different background assumption here.

I don’t think we have enough evidence to determine that removing the emotion of fear is “unambiguous net harm”, but it would be prohibited under your “no removing a core aspect of humanity” exception.

Yeah, on a methodological level, you’re trying to do a ~~naive~~ straightforward utilitarian consequentialist thing, maybe? And I’m like, this isn’t how justice and autonomy and the law work, it’s not how politics and public policy works, it’s not how society and cosmopolitanism work. (In this particular case, my justification about human dignity maybe doesn’t immediately make sense to you, but I think that not understanding the justification is a failure on your part—the justification might ultimately be wrong, I’m not at all confident, but it’s a real justification. See for example “What’s really wrong with genetice nhancement: a second look at our posthuman future”.)

Therefore, you seem to agree that going from “chronic severe depression” to “typical happiness set point” is an unambiguous good change. (Correct me if I am wrong here.)

No, this is going too far. The exception there would be for a medium / high likelihood of really bad depression, like “I can’t bring myself to work on anything for any sustained time, even stuff that’s purely for fun, I think about killing myself all the time for years and years, I am suffering greatly every day, I take no joy in anything and have no hope”, that kind of thing. Going from “once in a while gets pretty down for a few weeks, has to take a bit of time off work and be sad in bed” is probably fine, and probably has good aspects, even if it is net-bad / net-dispreferable for most people and is somewhat below typical happiness set-point. Mild high-functioning bipolar might be viewed by some people with that condition as important to who they are, and a source of strength and creativity. Or something, I don’t know. Decreasing their rates of depressive episodes by getting rid of bipolar is not an unambiguous good by any stretch.

I think a lot of people who say they anti-value intelligence are coping (I am dumb therefore dumbness is a virtue) or being tribalistic (I hate nerdy people who wear glasses, they remind me of the outgroup). If they perceived their ingroup and themselves as being intelligent, I think they would change their tune.

That’s all well and fine, but you’re still doing that thing where you say “X is unambiguously good” and I’m like “But a bunch of people say that X is bad” and you’re like “ha, well, you see, their opinion is bullshit, betcha didn’t think of that” and I’m like, we’re talking past each other lol.

Anyway thanks for engaging, I appreciate the contention and I found it helpful even though you’re so RAWNG.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 11:32 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston
I’m genuinely unsure whether or not they would. Would be interesting to know.

One example, from “ASAN Statement on Genetic Research and Autism” https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/genetic-statement-recommendations.pdf :

ASAN opposes germline gene editing in all cases. Germline gene editing is editing a person’s genes that they pass down to their children. We do not think scientists should be able to make gene edits that can be passed down to a person’s children. The practice could prevent future generations of people with any gene-related disability from being born. This is eugenics and a form of ableism.

ASAN opposes non-heritable gene editing for autism. This is when scientists edit a person’s genes in a way that can’t be passed down to their children. ASAN is against ever using this kind of gene editing for autism. We think it would be used to treat or “cure” autism. We do not want “cures” for autism. We want to continue being autistic. We want there to be rules saying people can’t use genetic research to find a “cure” for autism. We are setting this standard for autism and the autistic community because it is what most of our community members believe.

Not directly comparable, but related. (I disagree with their reasoning and conclusions, I think.)

Interestingly, they make the same suggestion I mentioned above:

Some disability communities might want non-heritable gene editing. For example, some people with epilepsy are okay with non-heritable gene editing for the genes that cause their seizures. We think it should be up to each disability community to decide if they are okay with nonheritable gene editing for their disability. Researchers and policymakers should listen to each disability community about how that community feels about non-heritable gene editing.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 11:17 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

Yes, blind people are the experts here. If 95% of blind people wish they weren’t blind, then (unless there is good reason to believe that a specific child will be in the 5%) gene editing for blindness should be illegal.

This is absolutely not what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting (something in the genre of) the possibility of having that if 95% of blind people decide that gene editing for blindness should be illegal, then gene editing for blindness should be illegal. It’s their autonomy that’s at issue here.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 8:49 PM
5 points
3
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston
Oh, I guess, why haven’t I said this already: If you would, consider some trait that:
1. you have, and
2. is a mixed blessing, and
3. that many / most people would consider a detriment, and
4. that is uncommon.
I’l go first:

In my case, besides being Jewish lol, I’m maybe a little schizoid, meaning I have trouble forming connections / I tend to not maintain friendships / I tend to keep people at a distance, in a systematic / intentional way, somewhat to my detriment. (If this is right, it’s sort of mild or doesn’t fully fit the wiki page, but still.) So let’s say I’m a little schizoid.

This is a substantively mixed blessing: I have few lasting relationships and feel lonely / disconnected / malnourished, and am sort of conflicted about that because a lot of my intuitions say this is better than any available alternative; but on the other hand, I am a free thinker, I can see things most others can’t see, I can pursue good things that most others won’t pursue.

Now, if someone reads the wiki page, they will most likely come away saying “hell no!”, and would want to nudge their child’s genome away from being like that. Fair enough. I wouldn’t argue against that. I might even do the same, I’m not sure; on the other hand, I do think I have a way of thinking that’s fairly uncommon and interesting and useful and in some ways more right than the default. Either way, there’s no fucking way that I want the state to be telling me which personality traits I can and can’t pass on to my child.

Ok now you:

E.g. do you have a neuroatypicality such as autism, ADHD, bipolar, dyslexia? Some sort of dysphoria or mental illness? A non-heterosexual orientation? Etc. (I’m curious, but obviously not expecting you to share; just asking you to think of it.)

If so, consider the prospect of the state saying that you can’t pass this trait on.

If not, well nevermind lol. There’s a bit more theory here, just in case it helps; specifically:

Beyond that, any phenotype at all will correspond to some kind of consciousness. Someone with insomnia, even if they acknowledge that having insomnia is almost entirely worse than not having insomnia, might still wish to have other people with insomnia to be friends with, simply because an insomniac has a somewhat different experience and way of being than a somniac and can therefore understand and relate specially to insomniacs. So removing any type of person is to some extent changing who humanity is.

Finally, a given type of person (so to speak) might view themselves as part of a “cross-sectional coalition”. In other words, even though a deaf person is not only a deaf person, and views zerself as part of the whole human collective, ze might also view zerself as being part of a narrower collective—deaf people—which has its own being, rights, authority, autonomy, instrumental value, and destiny.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 8:32 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

I think “edited children will wish the edits had not been made” should be added to the list of exceptions.

So to be clear, your proposal is for people who aren’t blind to decide what hypothetical future blind children will think of their parents’s decisions, and that judgement should override the judgement of the blind parents themselves? This seems wild to me.

… Ok possibly I could see some sort of scheme where all the blind people get to decide whether to regulate genomic choice to make blind children? Haven’t thought about this, but it seems pretty messy and weird. But maybe.

My position is “ban genomic edits that cause traits that all reasonable cost-benefit analysis agree are bad”, where “reasonable” is defined in terms of near-universal human values.

But it kinda sounds like your notion of “near-universal” ends up just being whatever your CBA said? I guess I’m not sure what would sway you. Suppose for example the following made-up hypothetical: there’s a child alive today whose blind parents intentionally selected an embryo that would be blind. Suppose that child says “Actually, I’m happy my parents made that choice. I feel close to them, part of a special community, where we share a special way of experiencing the world; we sense different things than other people, and consequently we have different tastes, and this gives us a bit of a different consciousness. Yes there are difficulties, but I love my life, and I wouldn’t want to have been sighted.”. In this case, do you update?

Maybe we’re at an impasse here. At some point I hope to set up convenient streaming / podcasting; if I’d already done so I’d invite you on to chat, which might go better.
What links here?
- TsviBT's comment on The principle of genomic liberty by TsviBT (Apr 2, 2025, 3:13 AM; 2 points)

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 8:23 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

I would prefer a “do no harm” principle

I’m still unclear how much we’re talking past each other. In this part, are you suggesting this as law enforced by the state? Note that this is NOT the same as

For instance, humans near-universally value intelligence, happiness, and health. If an intervention decreases these, without corresponding benefits to other things humans value, then the intervention is unambiguously bad.

because you could have an intervention that does result in less happiness on average, but also has some other real benefit; but isn’t this doing some harm? Does it fall under “do no harm”?

And as always, the question here is, “Who decides what harm is?”.

(There may be some cases where “children are happy about the changes on net after the fact” is not restrictive enough. For instance, suppose a cult genetically engineers its children to be extremely religious and extremely obedient, and then tells them that disobedience will result in eternal torment in the afterlife. These children will be very happy that they were edited to be obedient.)

Yes, I agree, and in fact specifically brought up (half of) this case in the exclusion for permanent silencing. Quoting:

For example, it could be acceptable to ban genomic choices that would make a future child supranormally obedient, to the point where they are very literally incapable of communicating something they have not been told to communicate. [...]

You write:

Down syndrome removes ~50 IQ points. The principle of genomic liberty would give a Down syndrome parent with an IQ of 90 the right to give a 140 IQ embryo Down syndrome, reducing the embryo’s IQ to 90 (this is allowed because 90 IQ is not sufficient to render someone non compos mentis).

In practice, my guess is that this would pose a quite significant risk of making the child non compos mentis, and therefore unable to sufficiently communicate their wellbeing; so it would be excluded from protection. But in theory, yes, we have a disagreement here. If the parent is compos mentis, then who the hell are you to say they can’t have a child like themselves?

For instance, humans near-universally value intelligence,

How many people have you talked to about this topic? Lots of people I talk to value intelligence and would want to give their future kid intelligence; lots of people value it but say they wouldn’t want to influence; some people say they don’t value; and some even say they anti-value it (e.g. preferring their kid to be more normal).

I’m not sure how to communicate across a gap here… There’s a thing that it seems like you don’t understand, that you should understand, about law, the state, freedom, coercion, etc. There’s a big injustice in imposing your will on others, and you don’t seem to mind this. This principle of injustice is far from absolute; I endorse lots of impositions, e.g. no gouging out your child’s eyes. But you seem to just not mind about being like “ok, hm, which ways of living are good, ok, this is good and this is good, this is bad and this is bad, OK GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT, you may do X and you may not do Y, that is the law, I have spoken”. Maybe I’m missing you, but that’s what it sounds like. And I just don’t think this is how the law is supposed to work.

There is totally a genuine tough issue here, where the law should have some interest in protecting everyone, including young children from their parents, and yes to some extent even future children. But I feel our communication is dancing around this, where maybe you just don’t agree that the law should be very reluctant to impose?

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 6:17 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

To you, “the principle of genomic liberty” is the best policy

No! Happy to hear alternatives. But I do think it’s better than “prospectively ban genomic choices for traits that our cost-benefit analysis said are bad”. I think that’s genuinely unjust, partly because you shouldn’t be the judge of whether another person’s way of being should exist.

I think the future opinion of the gene-edited children is important. Suppose 99% of genetically deafened children are happy about being deaf as adults, but only 8% of genetically blinded children are happy about being blind. In that case, I would probably make the former legal and the latter illegal.

Right, so if you read my post on genomic liberty, you’ll see that I do put stock in what these children will say. But that’s strictly the responsibility of the next generation.

But I don’t see a difference between “immediately after birth, have the doctor feed your child a chemical that painlessly causes blindness” and gene editing.

Right, so fewer differences apply, but some do. An already-born child gets some legal protections that a 10-day fetus, or that an unfertilized egg, do not get. As a political matter, they are treated differently, and for good reason. (Maybe not for eternal reasons, like maybe a transhuman society would work out how to make things more continuous, but that’s not very practically relevant.)

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 5:26 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

I would be happy to accept “the principle of genomic liberty” over status-quo, since it is reasonably likely that lawmakers will create far worse laws than that.

Ok. Then I’m not sure we even disagree, though we might. If we do, it would be about “ideal policies”. My post about Thurston (which was about as successful as I expected at making the point, which is to say, medium at best) is trying to strike some doubt in your heart about the ideal policy, because you don’t know what it’s like to be other people and you don’t know what sort of weird ways they might be thinking that you couldn’t anticipate. It’s a pretty abstract way of making the case; a more direct way would have been to find some blind/deaf/autistic/dwarf/trans/etc. people talking about valuing the special aspects of how they are, etc.

Mainly I want to strike a bit of doubt in your heart about the idea policy because I want you to not be committed to making that part of the practical policy about genomic engineering, but it sounds like we don’t necessarily have a conflict there.

Is your position that at least one parent must be blind/deaf/dwarf in order to edit the child to be the same? If so, that is definitely an improvement over what I thought your position was.

Sort of, though I’m not totally sure. To fall under the propagative liberty tentpole protection, yeah, at least one would have to be blind. (Well, if I’m changing propagative liberty to only apply to phenotypes.)

Two sighted parents wanting to make their child blind seems like a pretty weird case; who would do that?? (Ok fine maybe someone would do that.) The principle of genomic liberty leaves that in a sort of gray area. It’s neither protected under any of the tentpole principles, nor does it fall under any of the explicitly recognized exceptions to GL protection. So the weaker GL, which relies more on the tentpole principles, would say “ok, the state can make laws prohibiting this”. The strongest GL principle that fits my proposal would fight any case that doesn’t fall under the explicit exceptions, in order to make society consider the case carefully, including this case.

However, the non-intervention tentpole protection would allow parents to decline to use available technology to prevent their future child from being blind.

I’m not sure what the difference is supposed to be between “blinding your children via editing their genes as an embryo” and “painlessly blinding your children with a chemical immediately after birth”. The outcome is exactly the same.

Did you read the linked comment? It has political differences. The narrow causal outcome being the same isn’t the totality of the relevant considerations. Another difference would be that it’s more damaging to the parents’s souls to do the chemicals thing, as much as you want to wave your hands about how the philosophy proves it should be the same.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 5:11 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

So it seems your argument is “even if all reasonable cost-benefit analyses agree, things are still ambiguous”. Is that really your position?

Yeah. Well, we’re being vague about “reasonable”.

If by “reasonable” you mean “in practice, no one could, given a whole month of discussion, argue me into thinking otherwise”, then I think it’s still ambiguous even if all reasonable CBAs agree.

If by “reasonable” you mean “anyone of sound mind doing a CBA would come to this conclusion”, then no, it wouldn’t be ambiguous. But I also wouldn’t say that it should be protected. Basically by assumption, what we’re protecting is genomic liberty of parents; we’re discussing the case where a blind parent of sound mind, having been well-informed by their clinic of the consequences and perhaps given an enforced period of reflection, and hopefully having consulting with their peers, has decided to make their child blind.

If there’s no parent of sound mind making such a decision, then there’s no question of policy that we have to resolve. If there is, then I’m saying in most cases (with some recognized exceptions) it’s ambiguous.

TsviBT Mar 29, 2025, 4:44 PM
6 points
2
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

Down syndrome, or Tay-Sachs disease

I’d have to learn more, but many forms of these conditions (and therefore the condition simpliciter, prospectively) would probably prevent the child from expressing their state of wellbeing, through death or unsound mind. Therefore these would fall under the recognized permanent silencing exception to the principle of genomic liberty, and wouldn’t be protected forms of propagation. Further, my impression is that living to adulthood with Tay-Sachs is quite rare; most people with Tay-Sachs variants wouldn’t be passing on a phenotype. (I did say “right to propagate their own genes and their own traits”, but I debated including genes internally, and I could be suaded that the propagative liberty tentpole principle, specifically, should only apply to phenotypes.) Finally, if the parents in question are severely non compos mentis, their genomic liberty is also not necessarily protected by the principle.

Regarding blind/deaf/dwarf: I wonder if, in real life, talking to such a person who is describing their experience and values, you would then be able to bring yourself in good conscience to say “yes, the state should by force prevent your way of life”.

It is already illegal to blind your children after they are born, and this is a good thing imo.

Already living people are clearly different. You could argue the difference shouldn’t matter, but it would take more argument. Elaboration here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty?commentId=qnafba5dx6gwoFX4a

I am quite certain that, even after thinking about it for years, I would still be against feeding children lead or genetically altering them to be less intelligent.

I think you might still be 100% percent missing my point. I’m not arguing for it being moral to do these things. I think it’s immoral. I’m trying to construct a political coalition, and I’m arguing that you shouldn’t be so confident in your judgements that you impose them on others, in this case. Elaboration here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty?commentId=PnBH5HHszc7G5FK5s

“You cannot blind your children, unless you do it through gene editing, then it’s totally fine”

FYI, you’re strawmanning my position, in case you care about understanding it.

TsviBT Mar 28, 2025, 9:13 PM
5 points
3
in reply to: River’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty

But really my objection is why the fuck would you think causality works like that?

Not sure why you’re saying “causality” here, but I’ll try to answer: I’m trying to construct an agreement between several parties. If the agreement is bad, then it doesn’t and shouldn’t go through, and we don’t get germline engineering (or get a clumsy, rich-person-only version, or something).

Many parties have worries that route through game-theory-ish things like slippery slopes, e.g. around eugenics. If the agreement involves a bunch of groups having their reproduction managed by the state, this breaks down simple barriers against eugenics. I suppose you might dismiss such worries, but I think you’re probably wrong to do so—there is actually significant overlap between your apparent stances and the stances of eugenicists, though arguably there’s a relevant distinction where you’re thinking of harming children rather than social burdens, not sure. The overlap is that you think the state should make a bunch of decisions about individuals’s reproduction according to what the state thinks is good, even if the individuals would strongly object and the children would have been fine.

So, first of all, I’m just not sufficiently sure that it’s wrong to make your future child blind. I think it’s wrong, but that’s not a good enough reason to impose my will on others. Maybe in the future we could learn more such that we decide it is wrong, but I don’t think that’s happened yet. But if we’re talking about forcibly erasing a type of person, it’s not remotely enough to be like “yeah I did the EV calculation, being my way is better”. For reference, certainly the state should prevent a parent from blinding their 5 year old; but the 5 year old is now a person. I acknowledge that the distinction is murky, but I think it’s silly to ignore the distinction. Being already alive does matter.

Second of all, it’s not just blind people. It’s all the categories I listed and more. Are you going to tell gay people that they can’t make their future child gay? Yeah? No? What about high-functioning autists? ADHD? Highly creative, high-functioning mild bipolar? How are you deciding? What criterion? Do you trust the state with this criterion? Should other people?
What links here?
- TsviBT's comment on The vision of Bill Thurston by TsviBT (Mar 29, 2025, 4:44 PM; 6 points)

TsviBT Mar 28, 2025, 5:45 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: River’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty

Why? A human body without a meaningful nervous system inside of it isn’t a morally relevant entity, and it could be used to save people who are morally relevant.

Isn’t that what I just said? Not sure whether or not we disagree. I’m saying that if you just stunt the growth of the prefrontal cortex, maybe you can argue that this makes the person much less conscious or something, but that’s not remotely enough for this to not be abhorrent with a nonnegligible probability; but if you prevent almost all of the CNS from growing in the first place, maybe this is preferable to xenochimeric organs.

If I imagine myself growing up blind, and then I learned that my parents had engineered my genome that way, I would absolutely see that as a boundary violation and a betrayal of bedrock civility.

Fair enough, I think I would too. As I argued in the article, this is one mechanism by which the long-term results of genomic liberty are supposed to be good: children whose parents made genomic choices that weren’t prohibited but maybe should have been, can speak out, both to convince other people to not make those choices, and to get new laws made.

But if you mean something stronger, “would turn down sight if it were offered for free”, it seems obvious to me that any blind person expressing that view has something seriously wrong in their head in addition to the blindness,

Ok. And does this opinion of yours cause you to believe that if given the chance, you ought to use state power to, say, involuntarily sterilize such a person?

We don’t let adults abuse children in any other way, even if the adult was subject to the same sort of abuse as a child and says they approve of it.

We do let adults coerce their children in all sorts of ways. It’s considered bad to not force your child to attend school, which causes very many children significant trauma, including myself. Corporal punishment of children is legal in the US. I think it’s probably quite bad for parents to do that, but we don’t prohibit it.

We may have uncertainty about whether a particular person we can conceptualize will actually come to exist in the future, but if they do come to exist in the future, then they aren’t hypothetical even now.

I agree with this morally, but not as strongly in ethical terms, which is why I listed it under ethics (maybe politically/legally would have been more to the point though).

So it absolutely does make sense to have laws to protect future people just as much as current people.

Not just as much, no, I don’t think so. Laws aren’t about making things better in full generality; they’re about just resolution of conflict, solving egregious collective action problems, protecting liberty from large groups—stuff like that.

Blind people don’t strike me as a “type of person” in the relevant sense. A blind person is just a person who is damaged in a particular way, but otherwise they are the same person they would be with sight.

That’s nice. I bet we could find lots of examples of people with some condition that you would argue should be prohibited from propagating in this way, and who you’d describe as “just a person who is damaged in a particular way”, and who would object to the state imposing itself on their procreative liberty. Are you disagreeing with this statement? Or are you saying that the state should impose itself anyway?

Such people are monsters. They are the enemy. Depriving them of the power to effectuate their goals is a moral crusade worth making enormous sacrifices for.

Ok. So to check, you’re saying that a world with far fewer total blind / deaf / dwarf people, and with far greater total health and capability for nearly literally everyone including the blind / deaf / dwarfs, is not worth there being a generation of a few blind kids whose parents chose for them to be blind? That could be your stance, but I want to check that I understand that that’s what you’re saying. If so, could you expand? Would you also endorse forcibly sterilizing currently living people with high-heritability blindness, who intend to have children anyway?

If you are concerned the politics of advancing genetic engineering, suggesting that it might be ok seems like a blunder

Not sure what you mean by “ok” here. I would strongly encourage parents to not make this decision, I’d advocate for clinics to discourage parents from making this decision, I wouldn’t object to professional SROs telling clinicians to not offer this sort of service, and possibly I’d advocate for them to do so. I don’t think it’s a good decision to make. I also think it should not be prohibited by law.

TsviBT Mar 28, 2025, 3:45 PM
6 points
4
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: The vision of Bill Thurston

I predict any reasonable cost-benefit analysis will find that intelligence and health and high happiness-set-point are good, and blindness and dwarfism are bad.

This is irrelevant to what I’m trying to communicate. I’m saying that you should doubt your valuations of other people’s ways of being—NOT so much that you don’t make choices for your own children based on your judgements about what would be good for them and for the world, or advocate for others to do similarly, but YES so much that you hesitate quite a lot (like years, or “I’d have to deeply investigate this from several angles”) before deciding that we (the state) ought to use state force to impose our (some political coalition’s) judgements about costs and benefits of traits on other people’s reproduction.

I think good arguments for “protection of genomic liberty for all” exist, but I don’t think “there are no unambiguous good directions for genomes to go” is one of them.

I think it is a good argument. Since it’s ambiguous, and it’s not an interpersonal conflict, and there are (at least potentially) people with a strong interest in both directions for their own children, the state should be involved as little as is reasonable. This is a policy about which I think it would be more truthful to say “a world following this policy ought to be desirable, or at least not terribly objectionable, to the great majority of citizens”.

If you don’t protect people’s propagative liberty, some people will have good reason to strongly object to that world.

If you do protect people’s propagative liberty, some other people might believe they have good reason to strongly object. I discuss at least one acknowledged exception to the proposed protection here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty#Propagative_liberty

But I’m arguing to those people that their objection should not be so strong that they ought to fight to prohibit, by law, this sort of propagative liberty.

TsviBT Mar 28, 2025, 12:58 PM
5 points
0
on: What Uniparental Disomy Tells Us About Improper Imprinting in Humans
Excellent! Thank you for researching and writing up this article.

A few notes, from my discussion with Morpheus:
- A single UPD has 1/23rd incorrect imprinting, so to speak. It’s plausible that a fairly benign UPD has some small effect that’s barely noticeable—but then if you have a zygote with many incorrect imprints, say ¹⁄₂ or ¹⁄₄ incorrect imprinting, that these effects would add up a lot and be quite detrimental, producing an epigenomic near-miss.
- Indeed, we might sort of suspect this by default. On the model that says “Paternal/Maternal imprints make you grow More/Less”, having lots of missing imprints could make you grow way too much or way too little, whereas a few imprints might have only a small overall effect on growth.
- It’s kinda curious that there’s these large effects from single regions being misimprinted. Is it the case that the large effects are always caused by the version of imprinting that makes there be zero or near zero expression? This would make some sense; you’re basically deleting a gene. But if not, what’s going on with the large deleterious effects? (It’s not crazy to think that ~2x overexpression would have deleterious effects; e.g. maybe that’s what’s happening with some/many trisomy disorders.)
- It would be nice to understand weaker deleterious effects from less-bad UPDs. But since there are very few UPD cases, they might be hard to detect.
- One approach could be analogous to the situation with the worst UPD disorders. There we can compare with genetic mutations that knockout (or upregulate) the gene in a way that corresponds to the UPD disorder. We could do the same by looking at people with genetic mutations in other regions believed to be sex-linked imprinting regions. There should be much larger cohorts of such cases compared to UPD cases. So we could maybe detect subtler health problems.

TsviBT Mar 28, 2025, 12:01 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: River’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
Thanks.

If one is going to create an organ donor, removing consciousness and self-awareness seems essential.

If you can’t do it without removing almost all of the nervous system, I think it would be bad!

These are all worth doing if we can figure out how.

Possibly. I think all your examples are quite alarming in part because they remove a core aspect. Possibly we could rightly decide to do some of them, but that would require much more knowledge and deliberation. More to the point: I’m not making a strong statement like “prohibit these uses”. I’m a weaker statement: “Genomic liberty doesn’t really protect these uses, in the way it does protect propagation, beneficence, etc.”. In other words, I’m just saying that those uses aren’t in the territory that the principle of genomic liberty is trying to secure as its purview, as I’m proposing it.

On the negative externalities question, I actually strongly disagree with the counterexample of a blind couple choosing to blind their child. That’s child abuse! It’s no different than gouging your child’s eyes out! Don’t allow that!

I agree that it’s a tough case, like several others of that type. I think there’s both moral and ethical/political differences with harming a living child though. Some moral differences:
- Gouging the child’s eyes out is much more of a boundary violation and betrayal of bedrock civility. They’d then have very good reason to treat whoever did that as abjectly hostile.
- You’re causing a switch from one type of body to another; the growing consciousness was growing fitly for the first type, and you took that away, leaving that consciousness somewhat hanging.
- It could very well be that a sighted person approves of their life by their own lights and doesn’t wish to be blind, and a blind person approves of their life by their own lights and doesn’t wish to be sighted, but a sighted person who is blinded doesn’t approve of that happening and wishes it weren’t so.
- Diversity of capabilities is good. Blind people may think differently, and, as it were, see things you don’t naturally see. Ditto for many other phenotypes. I think you get less of this benefit if you maim a child vs. through germline engineering (where the adaptation is from birth). (You can of course argue that this isn’t enough of a benefit to genomically do it, and I’d certainly agree with this as a guess and wouldn’t do that with my own child and wouldn’t recommend others do it, but it’s still a benefit.)
- See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JFWiM7GAKfPaaLkwT/the-vision-of-bill-thurston
An ethical difference:
- It makes sense to have laws that protect existing people; a right to not be killed or maimed is a very basic right for a state to enforce. This doesn’t apply as much to a hypothetical future child, in terms of what it makes sense to have laws about.
A political difference:
- As I suggested, I think we ought to set the world up in such a way that the great majority of people don’t have good reason to oppose the creation of germline engineering technology. If you start going “well, surely we have to stamp out this type of person” you’re pretty quickly eroding / betraying that coalition. Hence propagative liberty as a tentpole principle.
A moral philosopher might also argue that it’s less “person harming” to make an alteration before the child has begun growing, though I’m not sure what that’s intended to mean.
What links here?
- TsviBT's comment on The vision of Bill Thurston by TsviBT (Mar 29, 2025, 4:44 PM; 6 points)
- TsviBT's comment on The principle of genomic liberty by TsviBT (Apr 2, 2025, 3:13 AM; 2 points)

The vision of Bill Thurston

TsviBTMar 28, 2025, 11:45 AM

50 points

34 comments4 min readLW link

TsviBT Mar 27, 2025, 8:38 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: DaemonicSigil’s comment on: Methods for strong human germline engineering
(BTW I think you asking about entanglement sequencing caused me to a few days later realize that for chromosome selection, you can do at least index sensing by taking 1 chromosome randomly from a cell, and then sequencing/staining the remaining 22 (or 45), and seeing which index is missing. So thanks :) )

TsviBT Mar 27, 2025, 11:06 AM
28 points
17
in reply to: henry’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
IMO a not yet fully understood but important aspect of this situation is that what someone writes is in part testimony—they’re asserting something that others may or may not be able to verify themselves easy, or even at all. This is how communication usually works, and it has goods (you get independent information) and bads (people can lie/distort/troll/mislead). If a person is posting AIgen stuff, it’s much less so testimony from that person. It’s more correlated with other stuff that’s already in the water, and it’s not revealing as much about the person’s internal state—in particular, their models. I’m supposed to be able to read text under the presumption that a person with a life is testifying to the effect of what’s written. Even if you go through and nod along with what the gippity wrote, it’s not the same. I want you to generate it yourself from your models so I can see those models, I want to be able to ask you followup questions, and I want you to stake something of the value of your word on what you publish. To the extent that you might later say “ah, well, I guess I hadn’t thought XYZ through really, so don’t hold me to account for having apparently testified to such; I just got a gippity to write my notions up quickly”, then I care less about the words (and they become spammier).

TsviBT Mar 26, 2025, 7:53 AM
25 points
6
on: TsviBT’s Shortform
If there are some skilled/smart/motivated/curious ML people seeing this, who want to work on something really cool and/or that could massively help the world, I hope you’ll consider reaching out to Tabula.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SsLkxCxmkbBudLHQr/

TsviBT

The vi­sion of Bill Thurston

The vision of Bill Thurston