This is a special post for quick takes by Caleb Biddulph. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
People who want genius superbabies: how worried are you about unintended side effects of genetic interventions on personality?
Even if we assume genetically modified babies will all be very healthy and smart on paper, genes that are correlated with intelligence might affect hard-to-measure but important traits. For example, they might alter aesthetic taste, emotional capacity, or moral/philosophical intuitions. From the subjective perspective of an unmodified human, these changes are likely to be "for the worse."
If you pick your child's genes to maximize their IQ (or any other easily-measurable metric), you might end up with the human equivalent of a benchmaxxed LLM with amazing test scores but terrible vibes.
I'd be hesitant to hand off the future to any successors which are super far off distribution from baseline humans. Once they exist, we obviously can't just take them back. And in the case of superbabies, we'd have to wait decades to find out what they're like once they've grown up.
I expect the sloptimization of the children to happen more or less by default in the superbaby scenario, but less due to antagonistic pleiotropy and more due to explicit and intense selection by most parents against autism/bipolar/schizophrenia/etc.
This is purely anecdotal and experiences may differ (I am not trying to make a quantitative claim): most of the most brilliant and creative people I’ve ever met have a personal or family history of at least one of those illnesses. This kind of selection may leave the average child better off, but (I fear) at the cost of tail effects depriving humanity of a precious corner of mind space.