I clicked on the "web" link under the title and opened it in a private tab, which loaded Google search results, then I clicked on the NYT link and it worked.
Edit: the site reloaded to cut the article then say I'm in Private mode and to log in. I just went back, opened the NYT result again, and stoped loading the page once the text appeared.
Editors’ note: This is the first installment in a new series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write op-eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years in the future. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.
Last week, The Times published an article about the long-term results of the Gene Equality Project, the philanthropic effort to bring genetic cognitive enhancements to low-income communities. The results were largely disappointing: While most of the children born of the project have now graduated from a four-year college, few attended elite universities and even fewer have found jobs with good salaries or opportunities for advancement. With the results in hand, it is time for us to re-examine the efficacy and desirability of genetic engineering.
The intentions behind the Gene Equality Project were good. Therapeutic genetic interventions, such as correcting the genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease, have been covered by Medicare ever since their approval by the Food and Drug Administration, making them available to the children of low-income parents. However, augmentations like cognitive enhancements have never been covered — not even by private insurance — and were available only to affluent parents. Amid fears that we were witnessing the creation of a caste system based on genetic differences, the Gene Equality Project was begun 25 years ago, enabling 500 pairs of low-income parents to increase the intelligence of their children.
The project offered a common cognitive-enhancement protocol involving modifications to 80 genes associated with intelligence. Each individual modification had only a small effect on intelligence, but in combination they typically gave a child an I.Q. of 130, putting the child in the top 5 percent of the population. This protocol has become one of the most popular enhancements purchased by affluent parents, and it is often referenced in media profiles of the “New Elite,” the genetically engineered young people who are increasingly prevalent in management positions of corporate America today. Yet the 500 subjects of the Gene Equality Project are not enjoying career success that is remotely comparable to the success of the New Elite, despite having received the same protocol.
A range of explanations has been offered for the project’s results. White supremacist groups have claimed that its failure shows that certain races are incapable of being improved, given that many — although by no means all — of the beneficiaries of the project were people of color. Conspiracy theorists have accused the participating geneticists of malfeasance, claiming that they pursued a secret agenda to withhold genetic enhancements from the lower classes. But these explanations are unnecessary when one realizes the fundamental mistake underlying the Gene Equality Project: Cognitive enhancements are useful only when you live in a society that rewards ability, and the United States isn’t one.
It has long been known that a person’s ZIP code is an excellent predictor of lifetime income, educational success and health. Yet we continue to ignore this because it runs counter to one of the founding myths of this nation: that anyone who is smart and hardworking can get ahead. Our lack of hereditary titles has made it easy for people to dismiss the importance of family wealth and claim that everyone who is successful has earned it. The fact that affluent parents believe that genetic enhancements will improve their children’s prospects is a sign of this: They believe that ability will lead to success because they assume that their own success was a result of their ability.
For those who assume that the New Elite are ascending the corporate ladder purely on the basis of merit, consider that many of them ar...
>Yet we continue to ignore this because it runs counter to one of the founding myths of this nation: that anyone who is smart and hardworking can get ahead. Our lack of hereditary titles has made it easy for people to dismiss the importance of family wealth and claim that everyone who is successful has earned it.
Who your parents are has always mattered. Parents being able to give their children an advantage in the world is, in general, a good thing. Even the preamble to the Constitution of the United States talks about securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
It is human nature to want to work hard to better your offspring. It is one of the main motivating factors for many people. Any attempt to remove this advantage is bound to fail.
We need to stop looking at individual opportunity as much as look at the bigger generational picture. As many have pointed out rags to riches in a single generation is very rare. However, rags to riches in 2 or 3 generations is not uncommon (see especially the experience with Asian immigrants). We need it so that anyone who is smart and hard working can end up better off than their parents, and ensure a better starting position for their own kids who if they are also smart and hard working end up even better.
Any Procrustean policy of trying to make it irrelevant who your parents are is always going to end in frustration.
One change I'd like to see is in the opposite direction: We (U.S. society) should stop assuming that someone who has wealth is automatically more meritorious than someone without. We've taken the concept that "someone who is smart and hard working CAN improve their situation" and flipped it to be "someone in an improved situation MUST be smart and hard working".
We should also watch out for what we consider "smart". Someone that is a complete manipulative and exploitative jerk can leverage that to become quite wealthy. They will defend it as "smart", and perhaps it is, but if don't consider that behavior valuable, we should stop pretending the wealthy cases are exceptions.
And of course, to agree with some of your points, we shouldn't toss the baby with the bathwater, nor paint with too wide of a brush. That said, the American narrative and American reality are somewhat dramatically out of sync right now, so some adjustment seems prudent. When the U.S., champion of socio-economic mobility, is ranked rather poorly at the same compared to other developed nations, we become delusional hypocrites, not champions.
Unless the rich are going to start building domed cities for themselves, they might be better off making their designer children smaller, vegan, and tolerant of lower levels of oxygen.
The pliocene era had thriving primate populations, in addition to many other species. Eocene is much older but there was thriving life then, too. The idea that people would need to live in domes is preposterous, if it even occurs so rapidly, which is extremely unlikely.
Did you watch _any_ of the visualization videos? The ecosystems shift from today's climate to Eocene (+15deg) over 100 years decimating most of the world.
At that time, the Pliocene (+5deg) areas are quite small and sparse. If there are thriving human populations left, they're going to be in those pockets. They're going to be doing agriculture in domes - greenhouses, because evaporation will be a major impediment to growing food in the open air.
Germination is highly sensitive to temperature - we need to focus genetics research on high-temperature stress-resistant crops, not designer babies for the well-to-do. Primate populations weren't dependent on rice, but it provides 1/5th of the calories consumed by humans.
"No food required" is quite nice. Technology for full robots may require quite some time, but before that it is probably possible to create artificial stomach that can replace your stomach and gut, and instead of eating 3 times a day and going to toilet you simply could replace a bottle once a week.
Are you discounting an increase in the proportion of methane in the air from melting permafrost and drying of the air from increased temperatures along with increased proportions of C02 in your analysis that breathing 115deg air is non-impactful?
Let's take a step back, here. Climate change is real and I'm sure it will make West Texas slightly more uninhabitable, but that's not what you originally said: you said that they should genetically modify their kids to breath less oxygen, which is almost completely useless against climate change.
I corrected you because one of the biggest weapons in the arsenal of climate change deniers is taking an incorrect but tangential argument and tearing it to shreds, and then pretending they tore the entirety of climate science to shreds. Bad arguments on our side are a massive liability.
I watched a very interesting TED talk related to this the other day. The premise is the question "Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?". The answer won't surprise you if I tell you the answer will surprise you.
He says Scandinavia and uses number of wealthy per capita and social mobility rankings. He then comes up with a narrative supporting his theory in a pat me on the back tone.
This article isn't too surprising. Modern studies only find a small positive connection between IQ and lifetime success (0.25 correlation). Even so, there is no single element predictor that can better measure success compared to IQ. I would hope that by 2059, social scientists can find an accurate way to determine how being rich contributes to "winning".
Do they? My experience reading them doesn't indicate that at all, IQ is enormously important in determining lifetime success it's just there are different plateaus.
Once you achieve a certain IQ threshold (be it 115, 130, 145, whatever) then other factors play a bigger role but before you hit that threshold your outcomes statistically will be much worse than even the lowest performers who do make the cutoff.
> In a society increasingly obsessed with credentials, being genetically engineered is like having an Ivy-League M.B.A.: It is a marker of status that makes a candidate a safe bet for hiring, rather than an indicator of actual competence.
Not specific to fancy MBA programs, but sometimes credentials means more than a safe bet, but also a fraternity or cabal.
Imagine that, by default, there's a level playing field for everyone, but a subgroup of people collude to trade favors amongst themselves. That group will have an advantage over everyone outside the group who are playing by the egalitarian rules.
Imagine that, by default, there's a level playing field for everyone, but a subgroup of people share some common background and therefore they can form trusted connections amongst themselves at lower cost vs the overhead to establish such connections between any two parties who don't know each other from Adam. I claim this not nefarious situation is indistinguishable from your sinister finger pointing.
1. Trust that the person is capable at particular things. (This you might get from credentials, which perhaps also defines a group, and accomplishments.)
2. Trust that the person is truthful with you, and will honor agreements with you. (This you might get from their reputation within your network/group.)
3. Trust that the person will give preferential treatment to you/group, and that they do this because there is mutual advantage to a subgroup doing that, separate from trust in ability and honesty. (Maybe sometimes this is called loyalty to the group, though you might say you trust in their loyalty. Or maybe it's merely understood.)
I'm pretty sure I've seen #3 happen in business/opportunities, read about it in news, and heard people talk firsthand about it, in ways not always covered by #1 and #2.
This assumes that applying edits is hard and expensive while finding what to edit is easy and can be done without multiyear tests. But the reality is exactly the opposite.
More likely outcome is that genetic editing companies will be paying poor people to be able to test effectiveness of therapies on their children, and instead of direct payments will use long term contracts taking percentage from the child's future income.
And if you think this business model is immoral and horrible, notice that this is the business model governments are meant to perform with taxes and social payments, they just fail miserably because of their monopoly.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] threadEdit: the site reloaded to cut the article then say I'm in Private mode and to log in. I just went back, opened the NYT result again, and stoped loading the page once the text appeared.
Editors’ note: This is the first installment in a new series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write op-eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years in the future. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.
Last week, The Times published an article about the long-term results of the Gene Equality Project, the philanthropic effort to bring genetic cognitive enhancements to low-income communities. The results were largely disappointing: While most of the children born of the project have now graduated from a four-year college, few attended elite universities and even fewer have found jobs with good salaries or opportunities for advancement. With the results in hand, it is time for us to re-examine the efficacy and desirability of genetic engineering.
The intentions behind the Gene Equality Project were good. Therapeutic genetic interventions, such as correcting the genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease, have been covered by Medicare ever since their approval by the Food and Drug Administration, making them available to the children of low-income parents. However, augmentations like cognitive enhancements have never been covered — not even by private insurance — and were available only to affluent parents. Amid fears that we were witnessing the creation of a caste system based on genetic differences, the Gene Equality Project was begun 25 years ago, enabling 500 pairs of low-income parents to increase the intelligence of their children.
The project offered a common cognitive-enhancement protocol involving modifications to 80 genes associated with intelligence. Each individual modification had only a small effect on intelligence, but in combination they typically gave a child an I.Q. of 130, putting the child in the top 5 percent of the population. This protocol has become one of the most popular enhancements purchased by affluent parents, and it is often referenced in media profiles of the “New Elite,” the genetically engineered young people who are increasingly prevalent in management positions of corporate America today. Yet the 500 subjects of the Gene Equality Project are not enjoying career success that is remotely comparable to the success of the New Elite, despite having received the same protocol.
A range of explanations has been offered for the project’s results. White supremacist groups have claimed that its failure shows that certain races are incapable of being improved, given that many — although by no means all — of the beneficiaries of the project were people of color. Conspiracy theorists have accused the participating geneticists of malfeasance, claiming that they pursued a secret agenda to withhold genetic enhancements from the lower classes. But these explanations are unnecessary when one realizes the fundamental mistake underlying the Gene Equality Project: Cognitive enhancements are useful only when you live in a society that rewards ability, and the United States isn’t one.
It has long been known that a person’s ZIP code is an excellent predictor of lifetime income, educational success and health. Yet we continue to ignore this because it runs counter to one of the founding myths of this nation: that anyone who is smart and hardworking can get ahead. Our lack of hereditary titles has made it easy for people to dismiss the importance of family wealth and claim that everyone who is successful has earned it. The fact that affluent parents believe that genetic enhancements will improve their children’s prospects is a sign of this: They believe that ability will lead to success because they assume that their own success was a result of their ability.
For those who assume that the New Elite are ascending the corporate ladder purely on the basis of merit, consider that many of them ar...
Who your parents are has always mattered. Parents being able to give their children an advantage in the world is, in general, a good thing. Even the preamble to the Constitution of the United States talks about securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
It is human nature to want to work hard to better your offspring. It is one of the main motivating factors for many people. Any attempt to remove this advantage is bound to fail.
We need to stop looking at individual opportunity as much as look at the bigger generational picture. As many have pointed out rags to riches in a single generation is very rare. However, rags to riches in 2 or 3 generations is not uncommon (see especially the experience with Asian immigrants). We need it so that anyone who is smart and hard working can end up better off than their parents, and ensure a better starting position for their own kids who if they are also smart and hard working end up even better.
Any Procrustean policy of trying to make it irrelevant who your parents are is always going to end in frustration.
We should also watch out for what we consider "smart". Someone that is a complete manipulative and exploitative jerk can leverage that to become quite wealthy. They will defend it as "smart", and perhaps it is, but if don't consider that behavior valuable, we should stop pretending the wealthy cases are exceptions.
And of course, to agree with some of your points, we shouldn't toss the baby with the bathwater, nor paint with too wide of a brush. That said, the American narrative and American reality are somewhat dramatically out of sync right now, so some adjustment seems prudent. When the U.S., champion of socio-economic mobility, is ranked rather poorly at the same compared to other developed nations, we become delusional hypocrites, not champions.
Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates https://www.pnas.org/content/115/52/13288/tab-figures-data
... there's also the science.
At that time, the Pliocene (+5deg) areas are quite small and sparse. If there are thriving human populations left, they're going to be in those pockets. They're going to be doing agriculture in domes - greenhouses, because evaporation will be a major impediment to growing food in the open air.
Germination is highly sensitive to temperature - we need to focus genetics research on high-temperature stress-resistant crops, not designer babies for the well-to-do. Primate populations weren't dependent on rice, but it provides 1/5th of the calories consumed by humans.
High-Temperature Effects on Rice Growth, Yield, and Grain Quality https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012387...
Have you ever been in West Texas during summer?
I corrected you because one of the biggest weapons in the arsenal of climate change deniers is taking an incorrect but tangential argument and tearing it to shreds, and then pretending they tore the entirety of climate science to shreds. Bad arguments on our side are a massive liability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU
Once you achieve a certain IQ threshold (be it 115, 130, 145, whatever) then other factors play a bigger role but before you hit that threshold your outcomes statistically will be much worse than even the lowest performers who do make the cutoff.
Not specific to fancy MBA programs, but sometimes credentials means more than a safe bet, but also a fraternity or cabal.
Imagine that, by default, there's a level playing field for everyone, but a subgroup of people collude to trade favors amongst themselves. That group will have an advantage over everyone outside the group who are playing by the egalitarian rules.
1. Trust that the person is capable at particular things. (This you might get from credentials, which perhaps also defines a group, and accomplishments.)
2. Trust that the person is truthful with you, and will honor agreements with you. (This you might get from their reputation within your network/group.)
3. Trust that the person will give preferential treatment to you/group, and that they do this because there is mutual advantage to a subgroup doing that, separate from trust in ability and honesty. (Maybe sometimes this is called loyalty to the group, though you might say you trust in their loyalty. Or maybe it's merely understood.)
I'm pretty sure I've seen #3 happen in business/opportunities, read about it in news, and heard people talk firsthand about it, in ways not always covered by #1 and #2.
More likely outcome is that genetic editing companies will be paying poor people to be able to test effectiveness of therapies on their children, and instead of direct payments will use long term contracts taking percentage from the child's future income.
And if you think this business model is immoral and horrible, notice that this is the business model governments are meant to perform with taxes and social payments, they just fail miserably because of their monopoly.