Note: I think it's logical to treat this as meaning "three couples", otherwise the design doesn't make sense. Ie we're looking for "three instances of families doing this, no repeats for mom and dad, no whole family repeats count"

Culling is a form of selection therefore aborting Down syndrome fetuses counts as selection for IQ. Resolve this and pay up.

Deleted mistaken comment

I don't consider that to be specific enough to IQ. Also that's been going on for years so predates the claim creation

Reee

(sorry, ignore)

What is specific enough to IQ?

Take Down syndrome. Yes, it’s a syndrome, but the defining feature for most people is mental retardation.

Maybe the IQ-boosting gene therapy tweaks a pleiotropic region and affects multiple traits: you’re smarter, hotter, and live longer. Is this IQ selection?

In effect nearly any filter will also select for IQ as a side effect. I think nearly every positive physical trait is associated with it. i.e. the scottish 12 year old IQ test study inadvertently predicting positive results for cancer, accidental death, divorce, crime etc. That showed IQ is predictive of lots of unexpected things (in addition to predicting higher death rate from war (due to higher chance of dying in a bomber over europe)). So I'd also expect the opposite - that selecting against predisposition to nearly any bad thing would raise IQ, if you could measure finely enough, at least. But I wouldn't count those to be "selecting for IQ [itself]."

To count for me would be selecting on a trait such as "years of schooling" or some other attempt at a more related IQ proxy. I know years of schooling has issues, but it's a more common data type to have than direct IQ, which is rare (and which we know is also not a perfect measure of this aspect). So I think a reasonable minimum is that from the point of view of the parent, they intentionally made a choice to prioritize IQ or similar intelligence related proxy, either at a tradeoff against some other non-IQ metric, or at least, with a nonzero weight for their direct value.

Just prioritizing "mental health/avoiding schizophrenia/depression/bipolar/BPD/etc" doesn't count for the purpose of this market.

It's unlikely that we will ever get full details on what happened, but if they for example use a service which is later revealed to be one which always presents users with IQ as a primary method of selection, then that could count, if we had reason to believe they did use that option.

Has anyone done that or declared such intention, yet?

@wadimiusz people aren't saying but at some point news will break

@Ernie I am >50% that Musk has done it.

I'd do it if it was less than 10k. Coming from someone with two "natural" children

I think it's more than that. I still think it's worth it. How much would you pay for a pill that raised your IQ or your child's IQ by 5 points? Way more than 10K, come on. If it only lasted one year you would still pay more than $100 or $200. At least I would.

Anyway, I also expect the price to decrease in the future. It's always more expensive at the start.

It's the sort of think Musk would do, agreed.