SneerClub

I don’t think Scott is doing anything nefarious here, it is very intuitive to think about risk in this way and then take the basic intuition and run with it.

Yeah, he's a very non provably non-nefarious well meaning guy who thinks Richard Lynn is on the money, cites Cremieux on the subject and platforms Emil Kirkegaard et al in the comments while giving money to aporia, and who will never shut up about IQ heritability, ever.

And it's not like he outright admits his article that misrepresents the data this way started out as marketing material for one of those companies, or that he picked this company because he liked the cut of Jonathan Anomaly's jib.

Edit: also, not taking your basic intuition and running with it is supposed to be the whole entire point of so-called rationalism, so what the shit?

I guess the traffic he gets from being on good enough terms with Scott to be occasionally cited as the opposing viewpoint must be worth it to him.

One of the comments really annoyed me:

The “genetics is meaningless at the individual level” argument has always struck me as a bit of an ivory-tower oversimplification.

No, its pushing back at eugenicist with completely fallacious ideas. See for example Genesmith's posts on Lesswrong. They are like concentrated Genetics Dunning-Kruger and the lesswrongers eat them up.

No one is promising perfect prediction.

Yes they are, see Kelsey Piper's comments about superbabies, or Eliezer worldbuilding about dath Ilan's eugenics, or Genesmith's totally wacko ideas.

Embryo selection may just be the eugenicist's equivalent of greenwashing.

Eugenicists doing IVF is kind of funny, since it is a procedure that circumvents natural selection quite a bit, especially for the guys. It's what, something like billion to one for the sperm?

If they're doing IVF, being into eugenics, they need someone to tell them that they aren't "worsening the species", and the embryo selection provides just that.

edit: The worse part would be if people who don't need IVF start doing IVF with embryo selection, expecting some sort of benefit for the offspring. With American tendency to sell people unnecessary treatments and procedures, I can totally see that happening.

Possibly my favorite kind of article. “The numbers that get thrown about don’t mean what the people throwing them around think them to mean, here is what they actually mean”. It’s like someone telling you about the defcon numbers and that smaller is more serious, or that if they say 50% chance of rain, they don’t mean it is a coin flip on it raining, they mean that in 50% of the area they are talking about, it will definitely rain. Except this one is: “numbers used in polygenic embryo selection aren’t like base stats in a videogame menu, you turds”