Gene Editing and Intelligence: A Bad
Channel: vlogbrothers
Date: 2021-04-16

There was so much more I wanted to talk about here...it's a hard subject for 4 minutes. Obviously the bad thing being glossed over in the beginning is "Well, so we're going to create a race of smart people to 'help' everyone else? Yeah that sounds like it will go fine! DEFINITELY NOT DYSTOPIAN AT ALL"

But that's so obvious on its face that I wanted to take look at it from the deeper perspective of what the heck we think intelligence even is. If you want to hear more good thoughts, this episode of the Ezra Klein Show with Tressie McMillan Cottom is amazing: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-transcript.html

Another thing is that it seems likely that identifying traits that result in them being smart, is much more about what traits result in the the ability to acquire the mental tools and systems that we call "intelligence", rather than /having/ intelligence. Because I don't think intelligence is a thing on its own, I think it's a skill.

Which leads me to the last thing, which is that we might have really good systems for helping people with certain traits acquire intelligence. That's not the same thing as the traits being "intelligence." If there were different systems, different traits would lead to the acquisition of intelligence. 

And ALSO humans are just not as individual as we like to imagine...we build systems out of people, and our focus on the power of individuals is much more about cognitive bias than it is about reality. 

And, of course, we know so little about any of this that everyone talking about it is bound to be wrong, including me, about the eventual impacts of gene editing, especially with regards to intelligence. 

----
Subscribe to our newsletter! https://nerdfighteria.com/nerdfighteria-newsletter
And join the community at http://nerdfighteria.com  
Help transcribe videos - http://nerdfighteria.info
Learn more about our project to help Partners in Health radically reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone: https://www.pih.org/hankandjohn
If you're able to donate $2,000 or more to this effort, please join our matching fund: https://pih.org/hankandjohnmatch
John's twitter - http://twitter.com/johngreen
Hank's twitter - http://twitter.com/hankgreen
Hank's tumblr - http://edwardspoonhands.tumblr.com
Book club: http://www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com/