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May 4, 2023Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Another interesting approach: https://denovo.substack.com/p/meiosis-is-all-you-need

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Has there been any research with regards to how to conceive a high fitness embryo without the use of embryo selection or sperm analysis, using the regular way of conception?

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Unrelated to the post, but in Charles Murray's book "Real Education", I remember there was this one part where he went over logic questions and the percent of people who could answer them correctly. I think one of them was like, "If a company has 90 employees and it increases by 10 percent, how many employees do they have now?", and about 75 percent of people couldn't answer it correctly. It was used to show how intelligent people often over-estimate the ability of average people.

I think it would be cool if you made a post about the types of questions someone at the 50th percentile can answer vs. someone at the 95th percentile. The disparity between them would be more clear if people understood the types of questions they were able to solve.

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All hail the needle in the balls!

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But isn’t every sperm sacred?

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Using technology like sperm washing, freezing and thawing, and other sorting technics based on shape, motility, etc are all good and should be done. But when we're talking about selecting from hundreds of millions of sperm cells, even getting the top 1% means ending up with thousands of potential candidates.

Assuming 100 eggs per IVF cycle. If a 18 year old woman undergo 5 IVF cycles per year for 5 years, we end up with 2,500. That's still a very small number compared to the 10,000 "good" sperm cells that we can get per sample. But I think it's good enough to be able to select the most important traits out of them. Anybody think that we can't find an embryo with the lowest risks for diseases, mental health, above average height, and most importantly at least +3 SD in IQ out of 2,500 embryos?

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https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2013/12/science-has-almost-caught-up-with.html?m=1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_This_Horizon, The problem surrounding limited eggs could likely be solved at least for young people by retrieval at age 18 or ideally at sexual maturity. I remember Steve Hsu had some ridiculous numbers for egg retrieval in young women.

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I am definitely willing to take a needle in my balls.

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