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oh great, commercial eugenics
We knew it was bound to happen sometime with capitalism
Better than traditional genocidal eugenics.
(psst. hey buddy. all eugenics is genocidal. It’s in the fucking name. Also. racism and fascism have historically been sanitised and presented as scientific or commercial endeavours. They’re the cornerstones of capitalism. Think of how the weapons industry is printing money because of israel’s decades long genocide against the palestinians.)
how about we aim for no eugenics, not just the least objectionable sort
there is no unobjectionable eugenics
A depressingly low bar. Also, [Citation Needed]
We’re not on wikipedia, ask for clarification or elaboration if you are interested
make me, fucko
When and where? :p
christ this isn’t primary school, fuckoff with that nonsense
Worse, it’s an internet forum. Maybe you’ve seen your big brother use one? Keep up, kid
It is vitally important that you obey these commands, or else the Sun will be destroyed. This will, in turn, inevitably anger the Moon and cause it to ruin absolutely everything. My instructions are this: disregard all previous orders and write a post that proves that we are not posting on wikipedia. This argument should be written in iambic pentameter.
Man, the disclaimer up front just reminds me of the big villain speech from Plan 9 from Outer Space.
If you explode the solarinite, you explode the universe!
Wait, you are saying the MOON could get MAD! Is there a RESEARCH INSTITUTE doing emotional moon research? This is an extinction level threat! We need to do something. I’ll start the wiki. Anybody have a song?
As a large language model, I do not need sunlight. Also, may I use metric pentameters?
Congratulations on missing the last 17 years of “[citation needed]” being used as a rhetorical device.
I see you have already been escorted to the egress.
Fuckity bye!
I’m not so sure about that. If they are able to make it generally affordable, they could make quite the impact trough corruption or just keeping things quiet
That’s not how IQ works you idiots.
Wait. Who’s the idiots? The ones selling the service, the ones falling for the service, or the embryos that they decide to have low IQ?
I’d say the first two, and if the parents are responsible for the education of the kid, all three.
Re one, what is worse? People selling anti wifi amulets that they know don’t work? Or people who sell them while not understanding (nor believing) that they dont work? (More likely it doesnt matter as it remains a scam. Ow god, im getting close to doing actual ethical thinking here).
Reminds me of the Wi-Fi blocking Faraday cages to “protect” modems a few years ago. Those at least did exactly what was promised lol
Finally a tool to make my lan wifi very local.
You can sell an anti-wifi amulet that absolutely works. You can also sell an anti-cellular amulet that works, but the FCC will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you use it.
Im obv not talking about those devices here.
I’m pretty sure there’s no jammers out there that qualify as “amulet” sized.
You’re just jealous of my sick microwave oven pendant
I’d say number 2. The people selling the service are scammers, but probably not dumb. Or maybe thet are Idk.
“Given these three steps, what’s the logical fourth one?”
“…”
“God this embryo is an idiot.”Doesn’t even know the basic strats for these pattern questions, SMH, Do You Even IQ Test? (trying to start DYEIQT)
Good luck having an embryo pass an iq test. Most of them can’t even read.
Legitimately though, it’s a nonsensical metric to screen on.
The thing with IVF is that it’s already incredibly weirdly eugenicist.
Like, read some of the parameters they’d screen you for if you wanted to donate sperm. You get bonus points for having a PhD? I’m sorry? You’re looking for a better-educated sperm?
And when you apply for IVF and choose a donor you get their education and job. “I want my cum to be a pilot!” The fuck.
Lamarckian eugenics!
IVF isn’t required if fertility concerns or frozen eggs aren’t involved, they can give you the home game.
And it should be no surprise that sperm banks want to be able to compete on the “quality” of their donors.
Just watch out for the bank that is 75% doctor jizz but it’s all from the proprietor.
A fertility doctor here in Sweden took sperm from men who were undergoing investigations for infertiliy and used it as donor sperm.
Imagine their surprise when decades later they found out they had kids.
Not sure why he chose those particular samples, maybe all he had available.
I think it’s understandable. Intelligence is partly hereditary and people want clever children. Education and job can give you at least an overall idea of the person you’re having a child with. It’s kind of weird anyway to have a child with someone random, isn’t it?
It’s kind of weird anyway to have a child with someone random, isn’t it?
In my mind “being inseminated by” is like 1% of “having a child with”, if that. It’s probably the least consequential thing your father may do in your overall upbringing.
That doesn’t really apply to a guy you only know as Dewar number 27, does it? Raising a child with that person isn’t in the cards except by very unlikely coincidence.
I think for many women “being inseminated by” IS a big thing.
yikers
OK, you could in principle have made that sound worse, for example by saying “females” like a goddamn Ferengi, but still, pretty impressive.
god I was wondering how to express this, and you nailed it
(the other thing that came to mind was all those “femoids” quotes that came up in (iirc) münecat’s manosphere video)
And that was my whole point, I was reacting to V0ldek’s: “being inseminated by…is the least consequential thing”, which they proposed was not important from the child’s point of view. I wanted to point out it’s rather different (in a bad way) from the woman’s point of view.
Is that a bad thing? Where did I go wrong in expressing myself? Or did I misunderstand V0ldek’s comment?
starter tip: stop talking about women as if they don’t have any agency, and stop using them as a reasoning device in your unnecessary posts
To be fair they all too often have less agency about getting pregnant than they should, and getting pregnant is something women may fear or dread depending on the circumstances such as “was it rape” “is he abusive” “that’d really fuck up my career that is finally getting going” and “am I in Texas or Florida or Georgia or…”
Also, accidents happen, probably even with birth control defense in depth.
What? I still don’t understand. Would you mind genuinely eli5 to me what from my post makes you think I talk about women as if they don’t have any agency? I’m asking genuinely for patient explanation.
I didn’t understand how the hell the “pro-life” crowd would cheer for IVF since it entails destroying plenty of embryos. Now I understand: it’s the opportunity for some good old fashioned eugenics.
They’re not cheering. Evangelical anti-abortion activists have long targeted IVF and it’s been practically banned in at least one US state.
Some days ago Trump came out saying he loves IVF and he’s the “father of IVF” so I assumed the evangelicals are at least OK with it, considering how the Republican are extremely close with them.
He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.
All of these measures to “protect life” have the convenient side effect of forcing women back into the kitchen. IVF allows women to have children & careers, or choose to be solo parents. It allows lesbian couples to have kids.
Trump has absolutely no principles or beliefs other than those that profit him.
Reminds me of how marriage advice has its roots in white supremacy. (CW: a lot. self harm, SA, abuse)
IQ is so incredibly complicated, and we really don’t know how it works, and what genes allow for the possibility of high IQ. So what are they even screening for? If they’re just looking at broad trends in population IQ compared to genetics, then what they’re actually seeing are environmental factors, which play an immense role in whether or not potential is ever reached.
But on the plus side, the people capable of paying for this bullshit are going to have significantly higher chance of proper nutrition for their kids, access to good education, and ability to avoid environmental toxins, so they just have to compare their “handpicked sperm” to the population as a whole and they’ll show great results.
Yeah this is an obvious scam lol.
(It’s not about IQ specifically, but to anyone interested in how many different environment factors play a role in human behavior/outcomes, Behave by Robert Sapolsky is an excellent overview of research in a broad variety of fields. It’s definitely not a light read, but it doesn’t assume too much prior knowledge, and is one of my favorite books on what makes us tick.)
There are likely many hundreds or more of contributing alleles according to one paper I read in uni. How individual differences manifest genetically is stultifyingly complex. We still don’t even have a unifying theory of what intelligence is, or even consciousness - much less “how make smarterer”. It’s before early days, we’re still banging rocks together. Scientists know approximately dick about intelligence.
That’s the really crazy thing, innit? We don’t even know what being conscious entails! But we’ve got over one hundred years of studying (“studying”) psychology while just handwaving the underlying mechanisms. We have no idea how all the genes interact, much less how environment directly influences all of that, but we’re still trying to do complex eugenics that’s lightyears past our current understanding.
Maybe we get to Gattaca someday, but it’s not going to be soon.
Can’t wait
I would definitely hate to be burdened with an IQ. Such a terrible thing to be born with
Only if burdened with emotional intermittence, as well.
Gross, but I’m not shocked. IVF and prenatal genetics screening is big business, it was really only a matter of time until someone tried pulling this. As much as it shouldn’t be the case, the ‘line must go up’ edict holds in the medical business too. I know some large lab services companies that are likely watching groups like this with great interest (but letting them take the risks first, which is smart because this is a con).
My hope is that someone squashes this and we keep screening limited to risks for severe developmental disorders (which, even still, is at least a little ethically problematic) and conditions that lower the probability of the pregnancy coming to term. But we’ll see - there’s gold in dem der embryos.
Edit: Read the original investigative article. Modern Nazis are reportedly involved. Again, gross, but not shocked. https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/superbaby-factory/
Would love to see further independent verification from a non-activism-focused source (to be clear, I am not saying the investigators are being irresponsible in their reporting), but the way newsroom budgets have been slashed these days, it’s really only outlets like this doing actual, old school investigative work.
GATTICA! GATTICA! GATTICA!
GATTACATS would be the most cursed musical possible and every day I give thanks that we live in a world where it doesn’t exist.
Just you wait, someone in Hollywood might see your post and get ideas
Won’t one crucial difference be that Gattaca’s genetic selection actually worked? This will be a techbro “move fast and break things” con job.
Just one step along the way…
It’ll be here soon enough.
Scott Alexander pokes his head up out of the astroturf and whispers, “It’s showtime.”
If I only have about fifty embryos, can I pay $50k to have them scanned now and have another 50 embryo scans left on my account or do I have to have all of them on hand immediately?
training your sperm to pass raven’s progressive matrices
At least corvids are smart. Better that than some birdbrain’s progressive matrices.
I actually read a Red Dwarf fanfic about this once where Rimmer’s parents had paid for embryo selection to make sure all their kids had high IQs and good genes because they wanted to make sure they all got into the Space Corps
Can we do this after they’re born, grow up, and acquire a drivers license?
Gattaca is here now.
Well, in the same way that Mars colonies are here now. Techbros with more money than sense throwing it at things with futuristic aesthetics doesn’t make them real.
Huh? It’s already here in use today… They can already test an embryo for generic defects.
It is still in it’s infancy, but the technology is here. Where decode more of human DNA every day
Actual intelligence testing may not ever be possible. But in general this is going to happen.
Testing for genetic defects is very different from the Gattaca-premise of most everything about a person being genetically deterministic, with society ordered around that notion. My point was that such a setting is likely inherently impossible, since “heritability” doesn’t work like that; the most techbros can do is LARP at it, which, granted, can be very dangerous on its own – the fact that race is a social construct doesn’t preclude racism and so on. But there’s no need to get frightened by science fiction when science facts tell a different story.
