gwern comments on SRG 4: Biological Cognition, BCIs, Organizations - Less Wrong
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On the other hand, we could point to Down syndrome eugenics: while it's true that Down's has fallen a lot in America thanks to selective abortion, it's also true that Down's has not disappeared and the details make me pessimistic about any widespread use in America of embryo selection for relatively modest gains.
An interesting paper: "Decision Making Following a Prenatal Diagnosis of Down Syndrome: An Integrative Review", Choi et al 2012 (excerpts). To summarize:
the people who do abort tend to be motivated to do so out of fear: fear that a Down's child will be too demanding and wreck their life.
Not out of concern for the child's reduced quality of life, because Down's syndrome is extremely expensive to society, because sufferers go senile in their 40s, because they're depriving a healthy child of the chance to live etc - but personal selfishness.
Add onto this:
most people see and endorse a strong asymmetry between 'healing the sick' and 'improving the healthy'
You can see this in the citation in Shulman & Bostrom 2014, to Kalfoglou et al., 2004 - the questions about preventing disease get far more positive responses than for enhancement - and you can see in the quotes that the grounds for this asymmetry is not one of simple analysis or cost-benefit calculations, but one of values & politics and so is intractable
Down's is the easy case, and many people still refuse it. To engage in IVF for embryo selection for some relatively subtle gains... I can't say I see it happening on a mass scale. At best, it might be tacked onto existing IVF procedures but the political/religious/moral concerns might block a lot of that. (Of course, a lot of people would want some level of selection if they were forced into IVF over reproductive problems but - homo hypocritus - they don't want to admit to wanting a 'designer baby', want to be seen acting towards getting one, or be known to have one; so a lot will depend on how well fertility services can spin selection as a normal thing or for preventing problems. Perhaps they could sell it as 'neurological defect prevention' or simply select without asking and count on people to quietly spread the word the same way that people spread the word about how best to signal one's way into the Ivy Leagues or where the best schools are.)
For mass appeal, it needs to be dramatic and undeniable: a genius factory.
An interesting datapoint, thanks.
One big difference in favor of selection for intelligence relative to testing for Down syndrome is that at the point where people don't get a Down syndrome test, they have a fairly low probability of their child having the disease (something like 1/1000 while they are youngish), whereas selection for intelligence is likely to increase intelligence.