“Statistical Challenges with Making Super IQ babies” by Jan Christian Refsgaard

This is a critique of How to Make Superbabies on LessWrong.

Disclaimer: I am not a geneticist[1], and I've tried to use as little jargon as possible. so I used the word mutation as a stand in for SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism, a common type of genetic variation).

Background

The Superbabies article has 3 sections, where they show:

• Why: We should do this, because the effects of editing will be big
• How: Explain how embryo editing could work, if academia was not mind killed (hampered by institutional constraints)
• Other: like legal stuff and technical details. 

Here is a quick summary of the "why" part of the original article articles arguments, the rest is not relevant to understand my critique.

1. we can already make (slightly) superbabies selecting embryos with "good" mutations, but this does not scale as there are diminishing returns and almost no gain past "best [...]

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Outline:

(00:25) Background

(02:25) My Position

(04:03) Correlation vs. Causation

(06:33) The Additive Effect of Genetics

(10:36) Regression towards the null part 1

(12:55) Optional: Regression towards the null part 2

(16:11) Final Note

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 2nd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DbT4awLGyBRFbWugh/statistical-challenges-with-making-super-iq-babies

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.