"Have your best baby" ad campaign

(mynucleus.com)

16 points | by gregsadetsky 16 hours ago

5 comments

  • nom 4 minutes ago
    Insane that this is legal in the US.
  • dgllghr 4 hours ago
    I’m changing my last name to Singh and naming my “best baby” Khan Noonien
    • ihumanable 2 hours ago
      Waiting for your child to come home from a particularly difficult day of kindergarten

      "He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!"

  • nis0s 14 hours ago
    How do you measure IQ in this context? You can make some guesses based on the known population, but there’s no way you can capture the full range of possibilities. I worry that this type of tailoring might lead to an average of averages, and make human populations more susceptible to pandemics, or other issues due to reduced genetic diversity.
    • moktonar 9 hours ago
      We already choose each other based on genetic diversity. Smell for example is a big factor, did you notice that people you’re not attracted to usually smell worse than those you’re attracted to? And I guess there are many other non-rational ways the body-mind chooses for us. As always we think that science can do better than evolution. We’ll see, but if I had to bet..
    • polski-g 8 hours ago
      Previously PGT only got us to 9% accuracy in detecting predicted intelligence. The latest literature suggests they're now at 40-50%. The "missing heritability" has been solved.
      • nis0s 7 hours ago
        Your 40-50% variance range isn’t supported by recent literature, as far as I can tell.

        Secondly, per my understanding you can only get a sense of embryonic PGS via PGT, and that doesn’t necessarily relate to intelligence.

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8280022/

        • polski-g 6 hours ago
          You shouldn't like papers from 2021 when people are talking about "recent". This stuff is moving very fast.

          https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jfhtu_v1

          • nis0s 5 hours ago
            I can’t put much stock in something that’s not peer-reviewed, nor something that’s not confirmed as reproducible. Herasight, the company, has a deep conflict of interest when publishing a paper like this, don’t you think? It’s like the tobacco industry publishing about the effects of smoking.

            Two other issues: do the cognitive tests control for socioeconomic status? Otherwise you’re just measuring the effect of nurture, not nature.

            Second, the UKB fluid intelligence test isn’t a rigorous or reliable measure to fully capture latent GCA.

  • GuinansEyebrows 1 hour ago
    Oh good, eugenics in 2025.