It's a concern. Several related issues are mentioned here: https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Potential_perils_of_germline_genomic_engineering.html E.g. search "personality" and "values", and see:

Antagonistic pleiotropy with unmeasured traits. Some crucial traits, such as what is called Wisdom and what is called Kindness, might not be feasibly measurable with a PGS and therefore can’t be used as a component in a weighted mixture of PGSes used for genomic engineering. If there is antagonistic pleiotropy between those traits and traits selected for by GE, they’ll be decreased.

A related issue is that intelligence itself could affect personality:

Even if a trait is accurately measured by a PGS and successfully increased by GE, the trait may have unmapped consequences, and thus may be undesirable to the parents and/or to the child. For example, enhancing altruistic traits might set the child up to be exploited by unscrupulous people.

An example with intelligence is that very intelligent people might tend to be isolated, or might tend to be overconfident (because of not being corrected enough).

One practical consideration is that sometimes PGSes are constructed by taking related phenotypes and just using those because they correlate. The big one for IQ is Educational Attainment, because EA is easier to measure than IQ (you just ask about years of schooling or whatever). If you do this in the most straightforward way, you're just selecting for EA, which would probably select for several personality traits, some maybe undesirable.

I think in practice these effects will probably be pretty small and not very concerning, though we couldn't know for sure without trying and seeing. A few lines of reasoning:

• Correlations between IQ and known personality traits are either very small or pretty small. You could look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_personality . The numbers there are usually less than .3 or even .2, in absolute value. If a correlation is .25, that means 4 SDs of IQ translates to 1 SD on that trait (a priori). That means a 1 in 20,000 exceptionally smart kid is 1 in 6 exceptional on that trait. You could notice, but I think it would be mild. Of course, this could be different for unknown personality traits; but scientists IIUC do try to find general factors in tests, so it would have to be something that doesn't show up there.
• Most trait correlations in general seem to be quite small. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64rrRPtCa8&t=1620s Of course this is determined by what traits we're talking about, and as we see above, the traits are correlated. But what this says to me is that even highly polygenic traits that are vaguely related (e.g. varous health things; or, intelligence vs. mental illness) can easily be mostly disjoint--in fact by default they usually are. In other words, if there's a significant correlation between two traits, I would guess that it's not so much "really due to pleiotropy", but rather due to the traits being somehow actually overlapping. I think that would suggest you get roughly the same sort of distribution as you see empirically today; in other words, there wouldn't be surprise genetic pleiotropy. (I'm not sure this argument makes sense, I haven't thought about it much.)
• There's a huge amount of genetic variation in IQ to select from. See https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-power-of-selection.html#7-the-limits-of-selection . This means that there's actually a huge range of ways to add 50 IQ points by making genetic tweaks. Just to illustrate the point with fake numbers, suppose that IQ is the sum of 10,000 fair coin flips (some genetic, some environmental); a standard deviation is then 50. And suppose we know 1000 of them. That's already 1000 / 50 = 20 SDs! There's a lot of ways to pick 150 from 1000, and there's still a lot of ways if you enforce some substantial disoverlap between all pairs of subsets.

From the subjective perspective of an unmodified human, these changes are likely to be "for the worse."

Glancing at the correlations given in the wiki page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_personality ) I don't especially feel that way.

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'm not sure I follow. I mean I vaguely get it, but I don't non-vaguely get it.

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 don't think this is right. If we're talking about selection (rather than editing), the child has a genome that is entirely natural, except that it's selected according to your PGS to be exceptional on that PGS. This should be basically exactly the same as selecting someone who is exceptional on your PGS from the population of living people. So you could just look at the tails of your PGS in the population and see what they're like. (This does become hard with traits that are rare / hard / expensive to measure, and it's hard if you're interested in far tails, like >3 SDs say.) (In general, tail studies seem underattended; see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i4CZ57JyqqpPryoxg/some-reprogenetics-related-projects-you-could-help-with , though also see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12176956/ which might be some version of this (for other traits).)

:map H 6h

:map J 5j

:map K 5k

:map L 6l

I suggest tracking a hypothesis piece like "a lot of people are fairly deeply intuitively tuned to something called power and power-seeking". I don't feel that I know what those things are well enough to test, judge, or communicate about it, but it seems like a salient hypothesis in this area. I mean something like taking a stance in line with presuming something like:

Whatever positive-sum / man vs. nature games are going on, those are other people's job. I will instead focus on positioning myself to get as much as I can in [the zero-sum negotiation/scuffle that will inevitably occur over [whatever surplus or remainders there may end up being from [the man vs. nature struggle that's going on in the area that I'm somehow important in]]].

In particular I'd suggest that we (someone) figure out how that works.

I am assuming the first step is to count the chromosomes, and isolate that you have exactly a collection of full sets, which came from the same cells, so that the property, (there are k of each exactly) holds. I would need to look in literature to see the sucess rate of isolating all chromosomes, not just (at least one)

Right, for isolating-ensembling methods, that's an important and nontrivial step. I think with light microscopy it shouldn't be too hard to tell when you've succeeded. I think there are standard tools for processing many cells in parallel in microwells, so that aspect should be ok. Assuming most of your cells are euploid in the first place, it shouldn't be too hard to at least collect a euploid set of DNA. The chromosomes might be prone to breaking, depending on a bunch of factors. However, it's fine if some chromosomes break, as long as you still have all the DNA and your identification method (e.g. standard sequencing) can deal with broken DNA. The complementation still works.

It seems for this method you must get 22 sucessful sequences in a row, which is hard if sequencing fails even sometimes, or you lose a chromosome even sometimes.

I'm not sure I follow. It's true that you need all confident calls for isolating-ensembling methods; see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Chromosome_identification_methods.html#isolating-ensembling-methods-require-high-confidence-number-identification .

Assuming you have plenty of source cells, you can independently and in parallel get a known chromosome 1, a known chromosome 2, etc. It's fine if the identification protocol fails sometimes. The only unacceptable failure is if it says "yep we definitely got chromosome 4!" but it's often wrong (say, more than 1% or 2%).

How important is it that cell and nucleus remain intact for your application?

There's a dichotomy in chromosome selection methods, where either you're manipulating chromosomes a bunch while they're still in cells, or else you're extracting them and manipulating them individually. See https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Chromosome_identification_methods.html#cell-culturing-vs.-isolating-ensembling-methods . For reasons mentioned there, I'm inclined towards isolating-ensembling methods.

For cell-culturing methods, we want the cell intact and alive. In this context, identification is less of a problem, because you can always do selection after the fact. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcell-mediated_chromosome_transfer ; it's fine if many of your microcells contain the wrong chromosome and then you transmit the wrong chromosome, because you can select in your cell culture after doing the trasmission. See e.g. Petris, Gianluca, Simona Grazioli, Linda van Bijsterveldt, et al. ‘High-Fidelity Human Chromosome Transfer and Elimination’. Science 390, no. 6777 (2025): 1038–43. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv9797

Can other chromosomes be genetically engineered?

Not sure what you mean. You're asking, do we create chromosomes, e.g. via CRISPR editing? We could, but that's not necessary. You could get quite a lot of mileage just selecting from easily-obtainable ordinary cells. See https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html#method-chromosome-selection

Do you need to be able to identify chromosomes during M phase, or is interphase OK?

For isolating-ensembling methods, we're presumably destroying the cell and nuclear membrane, and dissociating the nucleus. Since we're handling naked chromosomes, we want them to be M-phase or otherwise compact (e.g. sperm chromatin). Interphase is probably too spread out and too vulnerable; the chromosomes would likely literally break.. Though I'm not 100% sure of that.

How many chromosomes do you need to identify and extract?

If it's a cell-culture method, you could do any number. The more you can do, the better, because that means more selection power (i.e. more ability to vector traits of the resulting kid).

If it's an isolating-ensembling method, then you must produce either a full euploid haploid or a full euploid diploid genome, depending on context (e.g. are you making a paternal genome or a zygote genome). So you have to do 23 or 46 chromosomes. (You don't necessarily have to do them each individually, as singletons; see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Chromosome_identification_methods.html#setwise-identification )

Proposed name: Butterfly Conservatory (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/imnfJ9Ris7GgjkZbT/the-bughouse-effect-1#My_stag_is_best_stag)

2 feels meaningfully stronger/[less likely] than 1 to me

Well I agree it's different and depending on the interpretation logically strictly stronger. But I think it's still quite likely, because you should go back on your commitments to Baby-Eaters. Probably.

aren't basically all your commitments a lot like this though...

I would keep commitments to humans, generally. But it's not absolute, and I don't think it's because of much fancy decision theory (not sure). In the past decade, on one major occassion, I have gone back on one significant blob of commitment, after consideration. I think this was correct to do, even at the cost of being the sort of guy who has ever done that. I felt that--with the revisions I made to my understanding of commitment, what it's for, what humans are, what cooperation is, etc.--[the people who I would want to cooperate with / commit to things] would, given enough info, still be open to such things with me.

even if 2 is true, the plan might be fine, because you might not need to become that smart to ban AI.

I think this could be cruxy for me, and I could be convinced it's not totally implausible, but then we're putting even much more pressure on getting human-level AI. I didn't bring this up before, but yeah, I think getting specifically human-level AI is far from easy, perhaps extremely difficult. Cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-strong-mind-continues-its-trajectory.html

I think one would like to broadcast to the broader world "when you come to me with an offer, I will be honorable to you even if you can't mindread/predict me", so that others make offers to you even when they can't mindread/predict you. I think there are reasons to not broadcast this falsely, e.g. because doing this would hurt your ability to think and plan together with others (for example, if the two of us weren't honest about our own policies, it would make the present discussion cursed). If one accepts these two points, then one wants to be the sort of guy who can truthfully broadcast "when you come to me with an offer, I will be honorable to you even if you can't mindread/predict me", and so one wants to be the sort of guy who in fact would be honorable even to someone who can't mindread/predict them that comes to them with an offer.

Yeah I suspect I'm not following and/or not agreeing with your background assumptions here. E.g. is the AI supposed to be wanting to "think and plan together with others (humans)"? Isn't it substantively super-humanly smart? My weak guess is that you're conflating [a bunch of stuff that humans do, which breaks down into general very-bounded-agent stuff and human-values stuff] with [general open-source game theory for mildly-bounded agents]. Not sure. Cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/w/agent-simulates-predictor If you're a mildly-bounded agent in an OSGT context, you do want to be transparent so you can make deals, but that's a different thing.

Now we've turned parfit's hitchhiker into something really close to our situations with humans and aliens appearing in simulated big evolutions, right?

I feel I'm not tracking some assumptions you're making or disagreements between our background assumptions.... E.g. the getting smarter thing. What I'm saying is that it's quite plausibly correct for me to

1. be honorable locally, in the human sense
2. continue honoring human commitments--but that's because of values, not DT
3. if there are dumb aliens watching, act like I'm somehow super committed to being super honorable in great generality
4. when I get smarter, check if I should actually uphold those alien commitments, and go back on some of them.

E.g. because I really want to minimize the amount of baby-eating that happens.

[I feel like I may have a basic misunderstanding of what you're saying.]

I haven't thought deeply enough about it, but one guess: The version of honorability/honesty that humans do is only [kinda natural for very bounded minds].

There's a more complex boundary where you're honest with minds who can tell if you're being honest, and not honest with those who can't. This is a more natural boundary to use because it's more advantageous.

You mention wanting to see someone's essays about Parfit's hitchhiker... But that situation requires Eckman to be very good at telling what you'll do. We're not very good at telling what an alien will do.

I think there are humans who, even for weird aliens, would make this promise and stick to it, with this going basically well for the aliens.

Would you guess I have this property? At a quick check, I'm not sure I do. Which is to say, I'm not sure I should. If a Baby-Eater is trying to get a promise like this from me, AND it would totally work to trick them, shouldn't I trick them?

What you say makes perfect sense; yet, somehow something still feels bad about "AI 2027". I'm not sure what, so I'm not sure if my sense is good/true/fair. Maybe my sense is about the piece rather than the title. At a vague guess, it's something about "hype". Like, "AI 2027" is somehow in accordance with hype--using it, or adding to it, or something. But maybe the crux is just that I think the timelines are overconfident, or that it's just bad to describe stuff like this in detail (because it's pumping in narrativium without adding enough info), or something. I'm not sure.

(IMU[ninformed]O, "What superintelligence looks like" is a significantly less epistemically toxic title for that piece than "AI 2027".)