YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Hsu

lines on the record: 164
first: 2022-08-23
most recent: 2022-08-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't think it's a trend. So in terms of Guern having a platform, so first of all, he's there, he's thinking really, you can tell, he's thinking, he's reading a lot, he's thinking, and then he's writing very insightful stuff. And he has an audience thanks to the internet, right? So people can read it. That is an amazing positive trend, which I think will continue. So I think we're in a kind of, in a way, we're kind of in a golden age for intellectual exchange. Even this conversation that you and I are having is an example of that. The thing I'm afraid is not going to happen just because science is so specialized now.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right up there with those guys. So I think it's awesome that we live in this internet age that some totally anonymous dude can produce really good thinking about a wide variety of things. And he's not wrong. Most of the stuff he writes about embryo selection is pretty much right. So yeah, I have a very high opinion of Gordon.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mention. I mean, it might not be technically wrong because he used words there that I'm not sure what he means by those words. And I'm not sure he would disagree with the quantitative things I just mentioned to you. So, but I just want to say some positive things about corn because I like to read his stuff. And so in the early days, he was following a lot of this stuff about genomic prediction and embryo selection. And he's written stuff on that. He's written stuff on GPT-3 and alignment risk. He's written lots and lots of insightful things. And I think he's quite impressive, even if you compare him to like the most famous academic scholars, like whether it's a Steve Pinker or somebody who just has written a lot of stuff that people read and has obviously been thinking deeply about a lot of different things during the course of a very serious life, reading and thinking and writing. I think Guernse's super awesome.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gwern is a super smart guy and he You know, I know a lot of scholars and serious scientists and intellectuals in the academy Outside. And I will pay, even though I didn't quite agree with his take that you just”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been mentioned. By the way, it's like 3% to 5% in the US. So it ain't small. Like, if you go to a kindergarten, there are some IVF babies running around in the playground. So it's not small. So I don't know whether the perspective is, is this a big enough market for you to make money in it or is this going to change the future of the human species? You can have different perspectives.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure what he means by that. I mean, Goran, I admire him a lot, but what does he mean by that? It's not very many people are going to adopt it. Does he mean like the percentage adoption within IVF families or the fraction of the population that's already doing IVF? Because those are already big numbers. So I don't know what he means.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's a front for people who just hate it. But what does Guern saying? Is he saying that, well, you know, these 10% of babies born in Denmark, they're already mostly screened for chromosome abnormalities. And if I take that same data and I can generate this other report, are you really not going to look at that report? Are you going to say, well, you know, one of these kids is going to be super high risk for macular degeneration or something. But I'm not going to look at which one. But I'm already screening them for chromosomal abnormalities. Is that really going to happen? I don't think so. I think that 10% of the population that's using IVF is going to look at the report, which can be generated by the at the cost of running some bits through AWS server, right?”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in that sense, why worry? There's always going to be this natural reservoir of the wild type, you know, that have much more genetic diversity, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there's a very, maybe this is like the Goldilocks world, but imagine the Goldilocks world where Know there's plenty of wild type people, and then there's plenty of people using these advanced technologies, and everybody's happy, including our investors.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Denmark is porn this way. Would you like to capture a market that interfaces with one out of 10 families and that's going to grow, of course, right? One out of 10 families in all developed countries, maybe including China. You have the genome of mom and dad and the kid. And maybe you can sell them some health services later on. Maybe you can maybe it's sticky your relationship with these people. Okay, so that's for the venture guys. You know how to get in touch with me. The oh, I'm really worried about human evolution, or when are we going to get another von Neumann? That's a different question. And it may be that it'll never be more than 10 or 20% of the population that's using IVF and then through IVF embryo selection and maybe potentially editing someday.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are two perspectives that you could adopt in looking at this One is a perspective of a venture capitalist where you say, how big is this market? What's it worth to dominate this market? What valuation should I accept from these pirates at GP? The other perspective is hey, I'm really worried that humans are all going to engineer themselves to be blonde and 6'4, and we're going to be suddenly susceptible to all kinds of diseases in one single cold virus will kill all of us. So there's like two different perspectives on what level of penetration this technology will have, right? There are two different perspectives. From the venture guys' perspective, I will just say this one out of ten babies.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm totally with you. I mean, of course, there are multiple reasons for this, but one is that, yeah, maybe I'm outsider, so I'm trying to write it very clearly and conceptually, maybe like a theoretical physicist would write it. But also, it's a slightly selected population, like Scott has an enormously populated blog, and he writes these huge posts all the time. And I have a blog too. So we are a little bit better at expressing ourselves or clarifying ideas than the average scientist who's just trying to get the thing out and get it published in nature.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, like people who criticize this have no idea how sophisticated the work is. They just don't read our papers. If they try to read our papers, But we've done all this stuff. So it's now a guy who comes from a physics background or from an AIML background, if I just start explaining to him, they're like, oh yeah, okay, cool. You guys are doing that. Yeah, that's how it works out. You can absorb it. But a lot of our critics just can't absorb it. It's literally a G thing. They can't absorb it. But they just want to keep criticizing us forever.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the reduction in quality of EA prediction for brothers is quite a bit higher than if you're just trying to predict G. So we have predictors, we built that just predict G. And those have a much smaller reduction in quality when you apply them to brothers of sibs than in unrelated pairs. And so I went through that a little fast so people can go look up the paper. But the point is we can see EA as a very different trait than G from these kinds of results.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we showed that the predictive power fall off if you're trying to do this trick with unrelated pairs of people versus brothers who grew up in the same house or sisters is minor. It's a small fall off in predictive power. So basically we are getting the true genetic stuff, okay? One of the interesting things is when you look at EA. If you ask, I built an EA predictor, does it work better or worse when I try to predict which of the two brothers got more education? Turns out it works much worse because part of what that predictor is capturing is some maybe property of the parents who beat them and made them go to school. Both brothers got beaten and had to”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we were the first to say, you know, this is like three years ago or more. You know, some people don't really understand these polygenic scores and they're very skeptical and they think, oh, we're capturing, we're not really capturing the real stuff, et cetera. Well, you know what? I will just look to see how well we can predict which of the two brothers who experienced the same environment. Going to be taller. How well does my predictor do that? I'm going to predict which of these two brothers has diabetes. Does the diabetes predictor really do that? And you're modding out all the environmental shit because they grew up in the same family, right?”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big five thing, but you could have questions that kind of measure how conformist someone is. And of course, we know how to do a little math so we can diagnose the matrix of correlated measurements of all these different things. So I might be able to remove the chunk within EA, which is due to conformism, remove the chunk, which is due to conscientiousness, and leave behind the chunk, which, oh, wow, and that correlates really highly with my separate IQ predictor, G predictor that I built separately using a different method. These things are very At our level, these are understood. The solutions, these problems are understood. It's just a data problem. I'll tell you an interesting thing. So my group was the first to do, there were 20,000 sibling pairs in the UK Bi”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's the thing in my dream world if I were the CEO of 23andMe or something, what would I do? Oh, warning, they're actually secretly doing this, but you didn't hear that from me. I would have little surveys on the site that's like, oh, can you do a personality survey? And one of the categories will be conscientiousness and one will be extroversion, right? And one will be like, conformity is not a traditional.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See how they make that eventually you're really going to have to trust your friend and neighborhood genetic engineer to advise you. It's going to be like a lot of modeling going on in the background.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who were pretty normal. And maybe they were even good athletes, and maybe they even were good with the ladies. Okay? These people existed. So you have these existence proofs that I can if I need to, if I'm a really good genetic engineer and I can operate in this 10,000 dimensional space, whatever obstacle you put for me, I will just drive around it. And I just need some good data. I need lots of data. I need lots of AI, ML. And I'll do it. And that's the answer, which again, most people don't really get this, but it's true.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, yes, yes. It's a high dimensional space. If I find out this little cluster, okay, you can make someone smart in this little using this stuff in this cluster, but it makes them dull or it makes them autistic or it makes them, they don't have big muscles. I'll just go around. I don't need to use those. I have plenty more. Look over here. Those 500 I don't need to use. I will use these 500. And this is why it's important to look at historical geniuses.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People say, like, oh, if you start screening against schizophrenia, maybe we won't get creative geniuses. So there's all kinds of pleotropic things that are possibly true. But the thing I keep wanting, I want to go back to this is that if it's 10 or 20,000 different genetic variants, locations in your genome that are more or less determining your genetic cognitive potential, I can go around”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can only be speculation at this stage. Now, with the history of the Ashkenazi Jews, they also went through some very narrow population bottlenecks. So there's some special aspects of their genetics. And whether it's related to cognitive function or not, we don't really know for sure, but there are lots of reasons why they have fairly high proportion of inherited diseases and things like that that they're dealing with. This is one of the reasons why Israel is so progressive when it comes to genetic screening and IVF and things like this One thing people talk a lot about is schizophrenia. So they say, like, oh, schizophrenia could be correlated with creativity. So if your brother's schizophrenic, maybe you're more likely to be creative. And he's super creative, but we don't know what he's talking about.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great point. You can easily imagine even in a small country like Singapore or Taiwan has enough data to do this, no problem. Estonia. And they could do it and have this thing working and just not share it with anybody. So it's certainly possible. Now that's a little bit too science fiction-y because the leaders who run these countries are not transhumanist rationalist people who read my blog posts on the internet. They're not.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be trivial and inexpensive to gather this data, and then once we have my prediction from this earlier math that I was talking about, is that when you get to order a million, it could be one million, it could be 2 million well phenotyped people and genomes, we would be able to build a pretty decent IQ predictor that might have a standard error of maybe 10 points or something. So that would be incredibly for science just unlimited interesting stuff in there, but not getting done.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But researchers are afraid because it's also linked to all these controversial social issues. And so the amount, there's just a ginormous amount of genomic data where there's actually no cognitive measurement attached as a field to that data, which would have been very cheap to measure. Again, locusts hate this, but I can measure IQ on like a 12 minute test, no problem, right? I mean, not with perfect accuracy, but I can get a very useful measurement. If I just take, like, the NFL has this thing called the Wonderlick, which every player that's being considered for the draft is asked to take this Wonderlick. You can go back and look at the Wonderlick scores of every NFL player. It's a short test. It's like 12 minutes long or something. And it's pretty highly correlated. It's like probably correlates 0.8 or 0.9.8 maybe with a more fulsome IQ measurement.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing that's frustrating is because of crazy wokeism and fear of crazy wokeists, the most interesting, what I considered the most interesting phenotype of all is lagging because everybody's afraid. Even though there are very good reasons for medical researchers to want to know the cognitive ability of people in their studies, for example, when you want to study aging or decline of cognitive function, memory in older people, you want to have baseline measurements of how good their cognitive function was when they were younger, right? So there are very good reasons for why you want to have all this data.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the most personally frustrating aspect of all of this stuff. Like, if you ask me 10 years ago when I started doing this stuff, what did I think we were going to get? I think everything is gone. Kind of on the optimistic side of what I would have predicted. So everything's good. Didn't turn out to be intractably nonlinear. It didn't turn out to be interactively pleotropic. You know, all these good things, which nobody could have known a priori how they would work, turned out to be good for gene engineers of the 21st century.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, of course, one can't demand that any of these woke guys be intellectually self-consistent or even say the same things from one year to another. But if one could, you know, you wonder what they think about these literally communist Chinese. I mean, these are literally communists. They're recycling huge parts of their GDP to help the poor and do all this other stuff. Medicine is free. Education is free, right? They're literally socialists. They're literally communists. But in Chinese, the Chinese characters for eugenics is a totally positive thing. It's just like healthy production. It means healthy. Well, that's actually what it means in Greek, too, but more or less. But the whole viewpoint on all this stuff is like 180 degrees off in East Asia compared to here. And even in among the literal communists.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very funny because most wokeest people today hate this stuff, but most progressives like Margaret Sanger or anybody who was progressive, the intellectual, well, in some sense forbears of today's locus, in the early 20th century, they were all what... Would call today eugenicis because they were like, oh, shoot, thanks to Darwin, we now know how this all works and we should take steps to keep society healthy and not in a negative way where we kill people we don't like, but we should just help society do healthy things and when they reproduce and have healthy kids. And so now this whole thing has just been flipped over among progressives.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true. I think the main outcry will be if it turns out that there are really big gains to be had. Only the billionaires are getting them. But that might have the consequence of causing countries to make this free part of their national healthcare system. So Denmark, Israel, they pay for IBF for infertile couples. So it's part of their national health care system. And they're pretty aggressive about genetic testing. In Denmark, one in 10 babies born now is born. So it's not clear how it's going to go. But yeah, I mean, we're in for some fun times. There's no doubt about it.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there hasn't been enough evolutionary time for those differences to arise after all. It's not possible that despite what looks to be the case for height over the last 5,000 years in Europe, no other traits could possibly have been differentially selected for over the last 5,000 years. That's the really dangerous thing. So there are few people who understand this field well enough. To understand what you and I just discussed and who are so alarmed by it that they're just trying to suppress everything. There are people like that. But most of them actually don't really follow it at the technical level that you and I are discussing it. So they're just like it kind of instinctively negative about it, but they don't really understand it very well.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But suppose it's true. And then what that would mean is that when we finally get to the bottom of it and we find all the causal loci for height, literally the average value for the Italians is lower than the average value for the people living in Stockholm. And that might be true. People don't get that excited. They get a little bit excited about height, but they would get really excited if this were true for some other trades, right? Suppose like your extroversion, the causal variance affecting your level of extroversion is systematic that the average value of those weighted average of those states is different in Japan versus Sicily. Might freak out over that. I'm supposed to just say that's obviously not true. Obviously, not true. Can't be true. How could it possibly be true?”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A situation we're in now, where you have to do some fancy analysis. If you want to claim Italians literally have lower height potential than Nordics, which is possible. And there's been a ton of research about this because there's signals of selection. It looks like the alleles which are activated in height predictors looks like they've been under some selection between North and South Europe over the last 5,000 years for whatever reason. We don't know the reason, but there are some, but this is a thing which is debated by people who study molecular evolution.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a machine learning problem, so the question is if there's a SNP, which when I use it across multiple ancestor groups is always coming up as very significant, maybe that one's truly causal. As I vary the tagging correlations in the neighborhood of that SNP, I always find that that one is in the intersection, the intersection of all these different sets, that makes me think that one's going to actually be causal. So that's a process we're engaged in now is to try to basically do that. It's basically just a machine learning problem, but we need data. That's the main issue.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's assume that the causal structure is the same for South Asians and for British people. And then it's a matter of improving the tags. And you might say, wait, wait, wait a minute, Steve. How do I know if I don't know which one is causal? What do you mean by improving the tags?”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The resolution will be, again, the nature of reality determines how this is going to go. So, and we don't know the underlying biology. If it's true, and this is the amazing thing, like people argue about like, Human biodiversity and all this stuff, and we don't even know whether the specific mechanisms that say predispose you to being tall or to having heart disease are the same in these different ancestry groups. We assume that it is, but we don't know that. And, you know, like as we get further away, like to Neanderthals or Homo erectus, you might be like, yeah, they have a slightly different architecture there than we do.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tagging quality falls off. So my group, you know, we spend a lot of our time looking at performance of predictor trained in population A on distant population B and doing all the stuff modeling and trying to figure out trying to test hypotheses as to whether it's just the tagging decay which is responsible for most of the fall off. So all of this is an area of very active investigation. I think it'll probably be solved in five years. The first really big biobanks that are non-European are coming online. And so I think we're going to solve it in some number of years.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people believe, or many people believe, that what happens is that there's a certain correlational structure in each population where if I know the state of this SNP, I can predict the state of these neighboring SNPs. And that is a product of the mating patterns and the ancestry of that group. And sometimes the predictor, which is just using statistical power to figure things out, will grab one of these SNPs as a tag for the truly causal SNP that's in there. It doesn't really know which one is truly causal. It's just grabbing a tag. But the tagging quality falls off if you then go to another population. Like this was a very good tag for the truly causal SNP in the British population, but it's not so good a tag in the South Asian population for the truly causal SNP, which we hypothesize is the same. It's the same underlying genetic architecture in these different ancestry groups. We don't know. That's a hypothesis. But even so that”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge problem right now because most of the data is from Europeans. And what happens is that as you, if you train a predictor in this ancestry group and you go to a more distant ancestry group, there's a fall off in the quality of prediction. And this is, again, this is like frontier questions, so we don't.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four people raised in a certain very favorable environment may be the genes are a cap on what can be achieved, and we can estimate, you know, we can predict that. In fact, in our data, actually, we have, like, I have data from Asia where, yeah, you can see there clearly are much bigger environmental effects, age effects, actually, just older people for fixed polygenic score on the trait are much shorter than younger people.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another great observation so the correct, the real correct scientific statement is. We can predict height for people who are born and raised in a favorable environment. So, in other words, if you live close to a McDonald's and you're not, you can afford all the food you want, then the height prediction becomes superheritable because the environmental variation now doesn't matter very much. But you and I both know, if we go back to where our ancestors came from, people are a lot smaller. And also if you look at how much food, how many calories, and how much protein and calcium they eat, it's totally different than what I ate and what you ate growing up. We're not saying we're never saying the environmental effects are zero. We're saying”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that's technically feasible, and I think actually it's true that one of the earliest patent applications, they'll all deny it now, what's her name? Gosh, I can't remember her name, the CEO of 23andMe, Wajitsky. She'll deny it now, but I think if you look in the patent database, one of their very earliest patents that 23andMe filed when they were like still a small startup was about exactly this, is like advising parents about mating and how their kids would turn out and stuff like this. So, you know, we don't even go that far in GP. We don't even talk about stuff like that. But they were thinking about it when they founded 23and”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the regions where you have your plus stuff. So we could model that and said, like your kids, just because of that, you know, the complementarity of the structure of your genome in the regions that affect intelligence, you're very likely to have some super smart kids way above the mean of you and your girlfriend's values. So you could actually say things like, yeah, it's better for you to marry that girl than that girl. If you're going to go as long as you're going to go through embryo selection, we can throw out the bad outliers.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Would prevent like really gross distortions. Like someone claims they're 6'2 and they're actually 5'9". Probably the DNA could say that's unlikely, actually. But no, the application to what you were discussing is more like... Let's suppose that we're selecting on intelligence or something. And let's suppose that the regions where your girlfriend has all the plus stuff is complementary.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll tell you something related to that, which is quite amusing. So I had conversations with some pretty senior people at the company that owns. All the dating apps, so you can look up, you can figure out what company this is, but they own Tinder and Match and stuff like this. And they're kind of interested in wow, what if we have a special feature where instead of tinder gold or platinum, you upload your genome? And you match, we talk about how well you match the other person based on your genome. Actually, one person told me something which was really shocking, is that apparently guys lie about their height on these apps. And if you could have a verifier.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's hard to discuss the asymptotic limit of what's going to happen here. I'm not very confident about making predictions like that. It could be that we'll get to the point where everybody is, well, everybody who's rich or who's been through this stuff for a while, especially if we get the editing working, is super low risk for all the top 20 killers. Did the diseases which have most life expectancy impact? And yeah, maybe those people live to be 300 years old, naturally. I don't think that's excluded at all. So I think that's within the realm of possibility. But it's going to happen for a few lucky Elon Musk-like people before it happens for schlubs like you and me. There's going to be very angry inequality protesters about the Trump grandchildren who models predict will live to be 200 years old.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that would be very definitive. I don't think we'll reach that point where you could say, yeah, Putin definitely has cancer because of his DNA, which I could have known when he was an embryo. I don't think it's going to reach that level, but we could say, yeah, he is high risk for this kind of cancer. Could say that.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next time Pelosi goes, she's going to be in a spacesuit If she cares. Or the other thing is they're just going to give in. They're just going to be like, yeah, my DNA is everywhere. If I'm a public figure, my DNA, I can't track it. It's all over.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, and also, this is a little bit back to old school Gattica, but you don't even need the face. You can just say, like, I'm going to take a few molecules of skin cells from you. I mean, I'm going to take a few skin cells. Of you and just unotype view. I know exactly who you are. So I've had conversations with the spooky Intel folks about, you know, they're very interested in like, oh, if some Russian diplomat comes in and we think he's actually a spy, but he's with the embassy over there and he has a coffee with me and I save the cup and send it to my buddy at Langley. We figure out who this guy is and that he has a daughter who's going to chote can do all that now.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're going to get to a point soon where I can do the inverse problem where I have your DNA and I predict each of those parameters in the face recognition algorithm. And then from that, I reconstruct the face. So I say like this embryo when she's 16, this is what she's going to look like. When she's 32, this is what she's going to look like. I'll be able to do that for sure. It's just a data, you know, it's just an AIML problem right now. But the basic biology is clearly going to work. So then you're going to be able to say, oh, look, here's a report. Embryo 4 is so cute. We don't do that, but it's going to be possible.”
2022-08-23 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source