Does anybody believe IQ/EA PGS companies are a serious thing?

They exist[1] and take themselves seriously even if the rest of the world doesn't.

I met with Hsu before I realized who he was or what he was doing. A choice quote[2]:

> Testing embryos, however, is hugely controversial, because of both the scientific limitations of such polygenic scores and the prospect of designer babies. Undeterred, a company called Genomic Prediction last year began to offer to test cells plucked from an IVF embryo for millions of DNA markers to produce risk scores for some common diseases and for "intellectual disability" or low IQ. Co-founder Stephen Hsu, a physicist at Michigan State University in East Lansing who has branched into genomics, says that for now, the company is not returning genetic scores predicting high IQ because "society is not ready for it."

As for motivation:

> In July 2012, Michigan State University named him vice president for research and graduate studies. At the time, Inside Higher Ed and Lansing State Journal described the appointment as controversial, due to Hsu's comments endorsing research into using genetic modification to increase human intelligence, and his blog posts describing human race categorization as biologically valid.

And Hsu's cofounder[3]:

> Laurent Tellier, the founder of startup Genomic Predictions, used the 1997 movie “Gattaca” as inspiration for a DNA screening method that scores embryos with risk estimates for diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses – and gives a report card on their predicted height and intelligence.

There's also Thiel investments in some people with questionable histories[4] when it comes to IQ PGS.

If you look at who is pushing for this, a lot of them are LessWrong and IDW adjacent, and they're selling to their audiences who believe strongly in things like IQ, genetic determinism and race. They take it very seriously.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/what-is-geno...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/screening-embryos-iq...

[3] https://nypost.com/2019/11/09/genetic-test-aims-to-predict-a...

[4] https://undark.org/2023/10/27/consumer-genetic-testing-scien...

	▲	tptacek 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is all the vibe I get too, but also just: the science isn't there. You can actually end up worse off trying to do PGS screening for intelligence; we may not know enough to do it without also selecting for negative traits, like autism (intelligence and autism aren't as I understand it inextricably linked, but can be confounded in polygenic scores; the notion that you can get any reliably signal at all from PGS for intelligence is itself super shaky). There are embryo selection companies that did intelligence screening that stopped doing it, because it turned out their methodologies were busted.