Steve Hsu: preference

Transcript context

…I'm hoping it's ready by the time I'm ready to have kids—which is still a while away. Another possibility that Gwern discusses is iterated embryo selection, which you can just keep…I'll let you describe how it works. But what do you think about this possibility? Yeah, so you make a bunch of embryos, and then you decide which ones you want. Before you actually make it into a person so that then that person grows up and reproduces, you reproduce just using iterations of embryos. That's also plausible, too. All of these molecular technologies have a chance of working. I don't know anybody who's spending all their time working on that. But yeah, that could work as well. Well, I still want to say that I made these jokes about the wokists, and progressives and people who hate us, and I feel it's wrongheaded of them. I consider myself a progressive, I don't consider myself woke. But the goals of having healthy beautiful people who live to be 200 years old—who’s against that? I'm also against inequality in society. Consistent with growth and advancement in science and technology, we should try to have a fairly egalitarian society. I'm for all those things. So if you're a wokeist watching this interview to just hate Steve Hsu or something, think why you're angry at me. I'm actually exploring how the world is. Don't you want to know how the world actually is if we have an inequality problem because some people don't do well in school, don't you want to give those families these resources so they can fix it for the next generation? Isn't that the ultimate goal of what you want? 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.…

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