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Omid comments on Brainstorming for post topics - Less Wrong Discussion
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Proposal: Don't fear GATTACA. A post where I explain why people are afraid of the dystopia featured in GATTACA, and why these fears are unjustified.
Take into account the possible prisoners' dilemma where the technology works out so that to maximize expected IQ you have to expose the genetically engineered babies to a huge risk of nasty genetic conditions and China goes for it and the United States must either accept that in 20 years China will gain a huge advantage or breed these damaged geniuses ourselves.
Why is this a prisoner's dilemma? An arms race is a different kind of a game.
It would be a prisoner's dilemma like game if both sides would prefer to have a binding credible agreement in which no one takes huge chances with the tech, but since you would expect the other side to cheat (and would cheat yourself even if you knew the other side wouldn't) you use the tech.
Is there any evidence for that? Specifically, I don't see why China would want one.
They might not, but then again we might learn how to create super-high IQ people before we learn to genetically engineer high-loyalty people and consequently the super-geniuses would pose a future risk to the Chinese communist party.
I don't see the Chinese Communist Party being worried about that. I suspect that if they embark on an IQ-enhancement program, its goal and likely results will be a small rise in average IQ, not a collection of flawed supergeniuses.
IVF is a difficult, painful, somewhat dangerous process which requires a lot of money, cooperation, and apparatus, while embryo selection doesn't sound like it would cost much more for higher levels of selection; if you're going to do it at all, it makes more sense to maximize bang for your buck by going for geniuses than settling for near-invisible increases in averages. If nothing else, where do you get all the gynecologists from? To do a nationwide program would require hundreds of thousands of specialists (at a minimum; China has 18 million babies a year).
The problem is that no one knows how to go for geniuses. The first step has to be, essentially, large-scale experimentation which, I suspect, will start with just culling out "defects". China likely has the will and the ethics to do this, the West certainly does not.
I don't follow. If you have the sorts of genotype/phenotype databases which let you select for a few variants to increase average intelligence a little bit, then you aren't technologically very far from having the databases to select for a lot of variants to increase average intelligence a lot. I don't see any reason to expect long-term stagnation where interventions can easily increase by a few points but a lot of points is just impossible.