Steve Hsu: commitment

Transcript context

…To steel-man a little bit, someone might say, “Listen, one of the things that prevents a runaway divergence between families over time in the model of Piketty, or something, is a reversion to the mean. I listened to your interview with Gregory Clark, where he says that this is already the case. But to the extent that it doesn't get magnified over time. The reason is that it's hard to maintain a leech in genetics is because of reversion to the mean. If you can keep that up, and if there's increasing returns to having good genes, because you can then afford these kinds of treatments, then the possibility of society, instead of a normal distribution for society, you can have a bimodal distribution that keeps getting further and further apart. That is a potential possibility. The Morlocks and the Eloy. That is a fair concern that this could lead to grotesque, huge inequality. That is a risk of the technology in it. A lot of that depends on society, too. I mean, when someone confronts me with that, I will acknowledge it as a legitimate concern. But then I'll say that we live in a country—which is the richest, in some sense,—the richest country in the world, and there are plenty of people who don't even have health care. Did you worry about that inequality? We have a lot of inequality, there are a lot of things for you to worry about when it comes to inequality. Actually, maybe this might not be globally beneficial, both for at least this particular debate. It might be beneficial if the case was when I asked you, “Oh, do people who are lower on some trait have greater potential for increasing that trait than somebody who's higher up on it?” If that was the case, you could just say, "Listen, the smart people are just going to ask them taught at some point, whereas the dumb people can just catch up over time, right?”…

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