"I killed many of my children to slightly alter the odds of one of...

84 views Apr 04, 2025 ~7 min read

"I killed many of my children to slightly alter the odds of one of my children getting a disability. Praise me."

Look, there’s no ifs or buts. This is just pure evil. End of civilization

Noor Siddiqui@noor_siddiqui_

When I was in elementary school, my mom started going blind. Retinitis pigmentosa. No family history. No treatments. No cure.

I got lucky. She didn’t. It led me to build @OrchidInc so my baby —and everyone else's—gets to win the genetic lottery—avoid blindness— and hundreds of severe genetic diseases.

Today, the New York Times covered the tech we’ve spent years building:
Whole genome embryo screening for *hundreds* of diseases.
Not in theory. Not in mice. In humans. In IVF centers. Right now.

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Agamemnon sacrificed just one child and his family and nation were cursed over several generations. 

We deserve every punishment

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"Imagine a world without disability (because we killed all the disabled people)."

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Putting this aside, Goodhart’s Law ensures that if embryo selection becomes common the human race will be destroyed. 

Want kids who do good on SATs? → Entire generation of grinders with no imagination or creativity. SELECTED OUT OF THE GENE POOL. 

It literally takes all of 90 seconds of actual reflection to see how this can ONLY go horribly wrong.

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Not to mention that once all kids are good on the SATs colleges will use something else to select applicants anyway

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Everything about this is so profoundly and obviously retarded that the only explanations for ostensibly high IQ people entertaining it are unfathomably dark.

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The best reason to reject genetic selection is that anyone who would want to engage in it is the kind of person who should never be allowed to engage in it

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This "person" wants to make jerking off into a box the default for how children are conceived. I can’t think of anything grimmer. 

If her vision succeeds, parents who happen to conceive naturally will be stigmatized. And when their children get ill or (God forbid! The horror!) have a disability it will be seen as the parents’ fault and they will be denied insurance & medical care.

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I just want to point out that reproductive sex is perhaps the most profound experience available to a human. Removing it from the norm is an act of civilizational and human arson analogous to turning all Renaissance art into paperclips.

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Meanwhile parents of embryo selected children will expect their children to be perfect and resent them for any failure. Having purchased them as a consumer item they will view any failing as an anomaly. Ultimately parents will routinely despise and resent their children.

We selected German shepherds to have sloped backs for no other reason than we thought it looked nicer (which isn’t even true), and as a result one of the greatest dog breeds now has horrible issues with debilitating spine and hip conditions.

Iacobus Novus@SeamusNua

@pegobry_en The entire human rights framework of law, and its predecessor the imago Dei of Christian dogma, depend entirely on the birth lottery and the lack of human control over individual character and traits.

We are not prepared for what the retardation of the American consumer will do, here

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry@pegobry_en

Another obvious thing parents will select for is height. Although of course the motivation there isn’t for your son to be able to reach high shelves. You don’t want him to be "tall"; you want him to be *taller than his peers*. Where do you think that leads?

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Another obvious learning from selective dog breeding is that selecting for intelligence tends to also select for insanity: border collies, malinois. This is obviously also true in humans. The *majority* of ≥160 IQ people I know destroyed their lives, almost live on the streets…

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Anyway I could give endless examples but the fundamental point is this: what we learned from breeding animals is that breeding for a certain trait necessarily involves *tradeoffs*. 

Most traits—certainly most interesting traits—are polygenic which means selecting for one trait will *necessarily* mean also selecting for and against OTHER traits. In ways that, as a matter of actual fact, we mostly don’t understand. 

Which means you won’t get "Bob, but taller" or "Bob, but smarter", but you will get *a different person*. One who will be different in *unpredictable* ways. Possibly in weird ways. 

Possibly, in time, in…inhuman ways.

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That’s the biology. As said before, socially, people will now completely view children as consumer products. Parents will either love their children with fanatical toxic attachment or despise and treat them with casual cruelty when they dysfunction.

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And politically, as noted, the entire Western/Christian framework of human rights and human dignity rests on the genetic lottery. This will be a society intolerant of human failure to an extent probably impossible for us to imagine. A society of no grace and casual malice.

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PS A lot of you in the replies wouldn’t have made it past genetic screening

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Also: for some reason there seems to be overlap between SV natalists and SV embryo selectors which is obviously retarded. What do you think adding $20K to the cost of conception will do to the birth rate. 

There’s also a more general problem with IVF as a solution. It just encourages people to just keep putting it off. And then they realize they’re too old and tired to take care of a toddler.

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Can't overemphasize this point: if you're selectively breeding, you're selectively breeding *for* traits; this *necessarily* implies *tradeoffs* on other traits (most/all of which you do cannot control or anticipate). Everything we know about selective breeding in animals tells us this. 

There are moral implications but also practical ones: what has made humans so unique in evolutionary history is precisely their adaptability which is a product of their "roundedness."

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Last night my wife had to weak up in the middle of the night  because our Labrador got diarrhea. Nobody set out to selectively breed Labs to give them (famously) the most finicky digestive system of all time, but it's pretty obvious that the selective breeding to give Labs the traits that make them such awesome creatures *also*, through the incredibly complex working of genetics, gave them this trait. And that if we now tried to breed Labs with stronger digestive systems, we would probably also breed their wonderful "Labrador-ness" out of the breed.

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Labs are very eager to please, and easy to train in large part because they're very food-motivated; easy to see how breeding for such traits could have an impact on the digestive system. Labs are also very neotenous, which also participates of their eagerness to please, natural agreeableness, and sense of childlike joy; children also have immature digestive systems and more prone to disruption. 

These things are obviously all related, in very complex ways that we only understand, and even then dimly, IN RETROSPECT.

Anyway, since we’re on the topic of IVF, you should absolutely read this outstanding @EPPCdc report/compilation on RRM, which is apparently an ethical *and* more effective alternative to IVF, and the dark side of the IVF industry. Outstanding research

eppc.org/publication/tr…

Here's another thought: in breeding, there's consumer demand for *maladaptive* traits because there's clearly a certain kind of woman whose motherhood fantasies include caring for (controlling absolutely, feeling superior to) disabled, broken, or ugly creatures.

You may even get MORE disability from consumer embryo selection. We may end up ENGINEERING ever more freakish forms of disability.

Disabled, deformed, dare I say grotesque, children, may become a fashion statement and a way to signal virtue. We're basically already there with trans.

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All it takes is a MINUTE's thought on the potential horrors. Psychopaths.

I also encourage you to read this essay by David Bentley Hart on the post-war eugenics movement. Even if you don't share Hart's worldview, it is still a very instructive bit of history. It's just a recurring theme that people who for whatever reason care about such ideas also turn out to have very malevolent thoughts and comicbook villain-tier megalomaniacal power fantasies. I'm sorry, you can't convince me that wanting these things isn't ipso facto evidence of a twisted psyche. thenewatlantis.com/publications/t…

If this strikes you as an attractive vision for the future of society, I honestly don't know what to tell you, other than that you should be removed from the gene pool as a measure of public hygiene.

1. You’re not preventing your child having a disease; you’re rejecting your child with a disease on the grounds of being a defective product and purchasing a different child

2. In actual reality, no group is more exemplary than Christian families in welcoming children with disabilities of the kind that are an in utero death sentence in the contemporary West; so this sort of moral preening, on top of being disgusting, is divorced from reality

Noor Siddiqui@noor_siddiqui_

It’s easy to critique from the sidelines.
Harder to tell a parent: “Sorry, your baby was born with a disease we could’ve prevented… but chose not to.”

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This is "pregnant men"-tier inversion of reality.

No disease or disability is "prevented." What is prevented is the parents having to DEAL with the fact of the disease or disability.

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"We must weed out the unfit," he said, his hand moving furiously inside his trousers. 

Sorry, this type of talk will never not be intrinsically ridiculous

"I killed many of my children to slightly alter the odds of one of...

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