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Comment by socialist_coder | Hacker News Reader

I would be more than happy to raise a child that was not genetically related to me if it's genes were "better".

You also have to define "better". Here we are only talking about super intelligence. But what about creativity in music, film, writing, etc. Those things enrich our lives. Who is going to make the films and animes that I love?

What if the person does not fit your definition of a super intelligent person with a high IQ but instead is a genius in music. Also, how do we know that by focusing only on super intelligent people we won't be killing off the other traits that make life worthwhile, the arts, music, film. There are multiple perspectives that make a person a genius, high IQ is just one of them among many.

As somebody else mentioned, just like breeding dogs, you may be able to select for one trait at the expense of the others.

Frankly high IQ is overrated. It is probably biased anyway. i.e. Children that grow up in high income families have better IQ results than children living in poverty. It could simply mean that the differentiator is good education at an early age.

> [...] Children that grow up in high income families have better IQ results than children living in poverty.

Yes, because high IQ parents tend to make more money and tend to get high IQ children (even if those children got adopted away or orphaned early on). On the other hand, if high income families adopt children of low IQ parents those children end up with an IQ resembling that of their low IQ biological parents.

The research has been done.

>>even if those children got adopted away or orphaned early on

Was race accounted for. i.e. Where there minorities and white kids in the group. If only white kids then that tells me that the problem is more systemic. i.e. racism.

By the way, I don't know if you have heard about these two papers before. They might interest you (or not).

Hopkins, Russell, Schaeffer, "Chimpanzee Intelligence is Heritable", Current Biology, 2014.

<way too many coauthors to list but the main guy seems to be P.M. Visscher>, "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic", Molecular Psychiatry, 2011.

The latter paper reports on a study (with N=3511) on unrelated people to see whether their genotype and their phenotype regarding intelligence had anything to do with each other. People were tested with DNA chip for SNPs and had their IQ measured. The interesting result was that people who had more similar DNA also had more similar IQs (and vice versa, of course).

Drop me an email @gmail.com for copies.

If it holds for white kids in white countries (i.e. before mass immigration) then you agree that it is not about racism?

(Which it does, btw.)

"Creativity" is correlated with higher IQ.

I understand the urge to resist reducing humans to a single numerical measurement, but the fact is that "IQ" or "g" or general "cognitive ability" or whatever you want to call it is strongly positively correlated with almost every trait and life outcome that people value.

This child may even come to understand the difference between "it's" and "its".

Thanks to Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.

Is the corollary that one should not raise less "better" children? If this what we come to practice as a species, I would definitely hope that a superior one wipes us out soon.

If this is what we come to practice as a species, we are in fact replacing ourselves with something superior. And unless you hope for your children to never be as successful as you were, that's a good thing.

For whose definition of "better" and "superior"?

The parents of each individual child, obviously.

I sincerely hope you see the contradiction in your comment.

The corollary is that you would not go out of your way to conceive more less "better" children.

Once you are responsible for a child, you stay responsible.

Don't make this weird.

I notice your use of scare quotes. Is the state of the art advanced enough to make a judgement on whether or not a person is better at the genetic level than another person? I'm not just talking about some specific category or skill, but also as a well-rounded person. Because these people will have to live their own lives, and would be subject to whatever other traits that might arise when you try to optimize humans for some kind of skill. I at least don't think that the state of the art is so advanced that they can predict that optimizing for some specific trait might have some unforeseen consequences when it comes other, perhaps seemingly unrelated traits.

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