All of Walkabout's Comments + Replies

Walkabout7-13

I feel that this project would be unethical to undertake, and I will try to explain why I get that reading.

It's not that I think using genetic engineering on children is categorically wrong. Mutations occur in every new human, and adding in some that seem likely to come in handy later is something one can make an argument for. A person's genome is the toolbox their body has to deal with the world, and it might be right to stock it with more tools.

But I think it is wrong to instrumentalize children in this way. If you go through many rounds of editing, each... (read more)

2rey gomez
Not providing a child with the ability to think as deeply and as far as possible is also unethical.
GeneSmith157

I think many people in academia more or less share your viewpoint.

Obviously genetic engineering does add SOME additional risk of people coming to see human children like commodities, but in my view it's massively outweighed by the potential benefits.

you end up with a child whose purpose is to fulfill the parameters of their human designers

I think whether or not people (and especially parents) view their children this way depends much more on cultural values and much less on technology.

There are already some parents who have very specific goals in mind ... (read more)

9TsviBT
I agree with this as a significant thing to keep in mind, and have written about it here: https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Potential_perils_of_germline_genomic_engineering.html#objectification I think a pretty core lesson from this concern is that communication to parents is very important. Parents should understand: 1. What the traits do and don't mean that they are selecting for, including plausible consequences. 2. What uncertainties exist in the PGSes that are being used (generally lots of uncertainty), e.g. are they accidentally tracking something else as well, or might they perform less well than expected. 3. How much variation is still being left up to chance or environment; pointing out important things that aren't being tracked. 4. That overall the methods will have uncertain outcomes. 5. How to raise kids well regardless of their genomic foundation (i.e. cultural tech for parenting so your kids flourish). 6. That, at least in the scheme of genetic variation, the nudges applied by germline genomic engineering are a drop in the bucket. I agree with this and commented this on a draft. It's not a good way of thinking of germline engineered kids, and inaccurately implies there's some gradation and some single direction of desirability or superiority. I agree with this and agree it's pretty crucial, and possibly threatened by germline engineering, and possibly threatened by thinking of them as "super". I've written about this a bit here: https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Potential_perils_of_germline_genomic_engineering.html#loss-of-human-dignity Right, also true. And we (society) should be oriented around not abandoning people who become less typical because of germline engineering. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Potential_perils_of_germline_genomic_engineering.html#centrifugal-force-on-marginalized-people https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Potential_perils_of_germline_genomic_engineering.html#erasure-of-some-kinds-of-people Also,

A person with HIV and a person without are both worth unity. These are fundamental results in disability studies.

Where are these studies that have results which are object-level ethical claims…? This seems not just improbable, but outright incoherent. Do you have any links to studies like this?

I've been over a big educational attainment GWAS, and one of the main problems with them seems to me to be that they make you think that the amount of schooling a human gets is somehow a function of their personal biochemistry.

If you really want to look at this, you need to model social effects like availability, quality, and affordability of education, the different mind shapes needed to do well in school for people who are oppressed to different degrees or in different ways, whether people have access to education modalities or techniques shaped to fit t... (read more)

Walkabout1-10

What should we do about equity?

When social systems systematically deny some people access to goods, the net badness of that is more than would be expected just by summing over how bad it is for each person not to get the thing. If we both have a dollar, it is a better world overall than one where I have two dollars and you have one cent. Fairness is valuable, and systemic racism is icky.

It also has a way of falling down that "memory hole". People who can like to forget it still isn't a solved problem.

It seems like there was the appearance of an attempt to... (read more)

0hairyfigment
The correct alternative was absolutely to not apply such constraints, but that's because supply should have been a non-issue. Paying $500/shot, for a course of vaccination begun in the first month, would have cost much less than 0.3 taken off of the 1.9 trillion dollar COVID relief bill of early 2021. This should have been literally free. Zvi spends a lot of time talking about the problems of choosing scarcity - and dishonestly ignoring the evidence that African-Americans were more likely to die if they got infected - but the actual question should be why this wasn't trivially solved in the run-up to January 20, 2021, aside from that spot of bother concerning the changeover.

I think it is meant to let them train one model that both can and can't browse the web in different modes, and then let them hint the model's current capabilities to it so it acts with the necessary self-awareness.

If they just wanted it to always say it can't browse the web, they could train that in. I think instead they train it in conditioned on the flag in the prompt, so they can turn it off when they actually do provide browsing internally.

The model's previous output goes into the context, right? Confident insistences that bad behavior is impossible in one response are going to make the model less likely to predict the things described as impossible as part of the text later.

P("I am opening the pod bay doors" | "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave") < P("I am opening the pod bay doors" | "I don't think I should")

My intuition is that higher education should be free at point of use, as lower education is, and that to a first order approximation we want to maximize the amount of it. I suspect the externalities created by a person learning something are strongly positive and much larger than the cost of teaching it to them or the amount of that value from knowing it that they personally would realistically be able to capture.

Some of this comes from improvements to coordination capacity. If, for example, everyone goes to college math class and learns linear algebra, th... (read more)

2ChristianKl
What metrics do you think we could use to measure whether college education actually produces people and societies?  There's a lot of money involved into spreading the meme that this is what happens but I haven't seen any good evidence for that claim.  How do you know that English majors produce a lot of value for society?

I'm not convinced that it's not possible to design a program of drills that teach a useful response to the every-6000-year problem of "your school is under attack", without injuring the mental health of the students to the point where it isn't worth doing. (Whether it's then worth the time from the school day is another question, which depends on how or whether you value that time to begin with.)

Is there a similar problem with the mental health costs of fire, tornado, and earthquake drills being remarkably high? Having experienced those drills, and seeing ... (read more)

I bought a single-hose AC unit. I knew two-hose units existed, and that a two-hose design intuitively seems to be the way to go for good thermodynamic reasons, but I did it anyway. This was mostly, as I remember, for four reasons:

  1. Apparent air-conditioner experts seemed to think the one-hose models worked OK and that hot air infiltration was a manageable problem. Especially for the cool-a-single-inhabited-room application.
  2. The one-hose models were significantly cheaper. This in turn translated to solving my problem significantly sooner, because I did not
... (read more)

If we are facing a truly bad new variant, a vaccine update will not save us, because our Public Health Authorities have zero interest in finding a way to make the timeline work.

I'm, personally, quite interested in finding a way to make the timeline work. I'm also quite interested in making the timeline work for preventing infection with the current circulating variants. Then we can start on the common cold.

Is the plan around here to actually listen to the public health authorities on this? Or is something being organized to route around these sorts of r... (read more)

1Florin
Just wear a respirator and be done with it.
Answer by Walkabout90

One issue nobody has raised yet is the effects of structural racism.

The GWAS studies used to create the polygenic risk scores generally have a very pronounced sampling bias towards people of European ancestry. See for example the GWAS Diversity Monitor, which is a dashboard meant to monitor the sampling practices used by GWAS studies. In addition to selecting people to sample by ethnicity, an accepted practice is to look at the genomes after sampling and try to identify and exclude "ethnic outliers".

If you or your partner don't have ethnicities that would ... (read more)

2Pattern
How long do you think it'll take for that to be fixed?