Tragedy of Empire / Mostly Sociopaths at the Top

 

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV) The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Turn off the TV and close the browser tabs with mainstream media content produced by middlebrow conformists. Watch this video instead and read the links below. 

If you were surprised by events in Afghanistan over the past weeks, ask yourself why you were so out of touch with a reality that has been clear to careful observers for over a decade. Then ask yourself what other things you are dead wrong about...

Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. Prior to that he served as an infantry/intelligence officer in the 1960s. 

McGovern wrote Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President (addressed to President Obama, about Afghanistan) in 2009. 

See also: The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan (Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press 2015) M. Chris Mason  

Related posts:

Tears before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam (Afghanistan darkness over Kabul edition) 

Resistance fighter negotiates with former torturer (Afghanistan edition) 

Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition (stay tuned for more)

Afghanistan is lost (2012)

Podcast version of the interview at top:

   

More color here from Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, former US Army Major. Sjursen is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and later as an Army captain in Afghanistan in command of 4-4 Cavalry B Troop in Kandahar Province from February 2011 to January 2012.

Added from comments:

At the strategic level it has been clear for 10+ years that our resources were better used elsewhere. It was obvious as well that we were not succeeding in nation building or creating a self-sustaining government there. I could go into more detail but you can get it from the links / interviews in the post. 

At the tactical level it should have been obvious that a quick collapse was very possible, just as in S. Vietnam (see earlier oral history post). Off-topic: same thing could happen in Taiwan in event of an actual invasion, but US strategists are clueless. 

Biden deserves credit for staying the course and not kicking the can down the road, as effectively a generation (slight exaggeration) of military and political leaders have done. 

The distortion of the truth by senior leaders in the military and in politics is clear for all to see. Just read what mid-level commanders (e.g., Sjursen) and intel analysts with real familiarity have to say. This was true for Vietnam and Iraq as well. Don't read media reports or listen to what careerist generals (or even worse, politicos) have to say. 

Execution by Biden team was terrible and I think they really believed the corrupt US-puppet Afghan govt could survive for months or even years (i.e., they are really stupid). Thus their exit planning was deeply flawed and events overtook them. However, even a well-planned exit strategy would likely not have avoided similar (but perhaps smaller in magnitude) tragic events like the ones we are seeing now. 

ISS attack on airport was 100% predictable. I don't think most Americans (even "leaders" and "experts") understood ISS and Taliban are mortal enemies, etc. etc. 

There is more of a late-stage imperial decline feel to Afghanistan and Iraq -- use of mercenaries, war profiteering, etc. -- than in Vietnam. All of these wars were tragic and unnecessary, but there really was a Cold War against an existential rival. The "war on terrorism" should always have been executed as a police / intel activity, not one involving hundreds of thousands of US soldiers. 

All of this is (in part) an unavoidable cost of having intellectually weak leaders struggling with difficult problems, while subject to low-information populist democracy (this applies to both parties and even to "highly educated" coastal elites; the latter are also low-information from my perspective). This situation is only going to get worse with time for the US. 

BTW, I could describe an exactly analogous situation in US higher ed (with which I am quite familiar): leaders are intellectually weak, either do not understand or understand and cynically ignore really serious problems, are mainly concerned with their own careers and not the real mission goals, are subject to volatility from external low-information interest groups, etc.

Resistance fighter negotiates with former torturer (Afghanistan edition)

The Taliban could easily turn Kabul airport into a trap, creating another Dien Bien Phu for the US. However I suspect they are advised by the Russians and Chinese to grant the Americans a peaceful exit from their 20 year disaster. The negotiations are presumably about the ~$9 billion of frozen assets in the Afghanistan treasury, future sanctions against a Taliban-led government, etc.

See also Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition, Afghanistan is lost (2012), etc.

CIA Director William Burns held secret meeting in Kabul with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar (WaPo) 

President Biden dispatched his top spy, a veteran of the Foreign Service and the most decorated diplomat in his Cabinet, amid a frantic effort to evacuate people from Kabul international airport in what Biden has called “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” 

The CIA declined to comment on the Taliban meeting, but the discussions are likely to have involved an impending Aug. 31 deadline for the U.S. military to conclude its airlift of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. The Biden administration is under pressure from some allies to keep U.S. forces in the country beyond the end of the month to assist the evacuation of tens of thousands of citizens of the United States and Western countries as well as Afghan allies desperate to escape Taliban rule. 

Britain, France and other U.S. allies have said more time is needed to evacuate their personnel, but a Taliban spokesman warned that the United States would be crossing a “red line” if it kept troops beyond the 31st, which he said would trigger unspecified “consequences.” 

For Baradar, playing the role of counterpart to a CIA director comes with a tinge of irony 11 years after the spy agency arrested him in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation that put him in prison for eight years. ...

There are many more like Baradar. Taliban leader Gholam Ruhani (circled in the photo at top) enjoyed America's tender embrace for many years at Guantanamo.  

I highly recommend The Battle of Algiers for context, as did the Pentagon in 2003 -- to no avail.

Wikipedia: 

The highly dramatic film is about the organization of a guerrilla movement and the illegal methods, such as torture, used by the colonial power to contain it. Algeria succeeded in gaining independence from the French, which Pontecorvo addresses in the film's epilogue.[3] 

The film has been critically acclaimed. Both insurgent groups and state authorities have considered it to be an important commentary on urban guerrilla warfare. 

2003 Pentagon screening 

During 2003, the press reported that United States Department of Defense (the Pentagon) offered a screening of the movie on August 27. The Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict regarded it as useful for commanders and troops facing similar issues in occupied Iraq.[38] 

A flyer for the screening said: How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.[39] 

According to the Defense Department official in charge of the screening, "Showing the film offers historical insight into the conduct of French operations in Algeria, and was intended to prompt informative discussion of the challenges faced by the French."[39]

Re: Dien Bien Phu, colonial wars, and Iraq / Afghanistan:

General Georges Catroux presided over a commission of inquiry into the defeat. The commission's final report ("Rapport concernant la conduite des opérations en Indochine sous la direction du général Navarre") concluded: 

"... The event itself was in fact, both in terms of public opinion and of the military conduct of the war and operations, merely the end result of a long process of degradation of a faraway enterprise which, not having the assent of the nation, could not receive from the authorities the energetic impulse, and the size and continuity of efforts, required for success. ..."

John Preskill interview by Sean Carroll

 

This is a great interview of John Preskill by Sean Carroll. 

Both are many worlders. At about 20 minutes John says:

I'm an Everettian... 

I'm comfortable with nothing happening in the world besides unitary evolution ... 

Measurement isn't something fundamentally different. ... 

It seems minimal: you know there's nothing happening but the Schrodinger equation and things are evolving, and if we can reconcile that with what we observe about physics ...

In Ten Years of Quantum Coherence and Decoherence I listed a number of prominent theorists who have expressed some degree of belief in many worlds.

Q1. (largely mathematical): Does the phenomenology of pure state evolution in a closed system (e.g., the universe) reproduce Copenhagen for observers in the system? 

This is a question about dynamical evolution: of the system as a whole, and of various interacting subsystems. It's not a philosophical question and, in my opinion, it is what theorists should focus on first. Although complicated, it is still reasonably well-posed from a mathematical perspective, at least as far as foundational physics questions go. 

I believe the evidence is strong that the answer to #1 is Yes, although the issue of the Born rule lingers (too complicated to discuss here, but see various papers I have written on the topic, along with other people like Deutsch, Zurek, etc.). It is clear from Weinberg's writing that he and I agree that the answer is Yes, modulo the Born rule. 

Define this position to be 

Y* := "Yes, possibly modulo Born" 

There are some theorists who do not agree with Y* (see the survey results above), but they are mostly people who have not thought it through carefully, in my opinion. 

I don't know of any explicit arguments for how Y* fails, and our recent results applying the vN QET strengthen my confidence in Y*. 

I believe (based on published remarks or from my personal interactions) that the following theorists have opinions that are Y* or stronger: Schwinger, DeWitt, Wheeler, Deutsch, Hawking, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Zeh, Hartle, Weinberg, Zurek, Guth, Preskill, Page, Cooper (BCS), Coleman, Misner, Arkani-Hamed, etc. 

But there is a generational issue, with many older (some now deceased!) theorists being reticent about expressing Y* even if they believe it. This is shifting over time and, for example, a poll of younger string theorists or quantum cosmologists would likely find a strong majority expressing Y*. 

[ Social conformity and groupthink are among the obstacles preventing broader understanding of Q1. That is, in part, why I have listed specific high profile individuals as having reached the unconventional but correct view! ]

Tears before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam (Afghanistan darkness over Kabul edition)

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV) The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

If you are following events in Afghanistan you know that the tragedy described below will soon be repeated.

The oral histories collected in this volume are heartbreaking and real, but today the events they describe are all but forgotten.

There was never any reckoning for the crimes and stupidity of the Vietnam war, and there won't be any in the wake of our 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Our pathetic leaders and apathetic voters will find plenty of other things to distract them from a serious consideration of what happened. Strike up the band, and salute the flag.

Saigon, US Embassy evacuation, 29 April, 1975:

Kabul, US Embassy evacuation, 15 August, 2021:

From the introduction:

On March 10, 1975, the North Vietnamese Army launched what was to be its final major offensive against South Vietnam, assured that America had lost its will to fight or to finance the independence of South Vietnam. No longer fearful of American intervention, the North Vietnamese were certain that victory and the forceful unification of Vietnam was, after nearly thirty years of conflict, soon to be accomplished. Now the social and military fabric of South Vietnam began to unravel rapidly in many places at the same time. The South suddenly began to lose the war faster than the North could win it. The military forces of the South seemed to be imploding toward Saigon. Cities and provinces were abandoned to the North without a fight. ...Victory for the armies of North Vietnam became, in many strategically important places, a mere matter of marching. 

On March 29, the chaotic and desperate situation was recorded graphically by a CBS news crew that flew aboard a World Airways Boeing 727 to Danang, Vietnam's second largest city, to evacuate refugees. The plane was mobbed by soldiers who shot women and children and each other in a frenzied attempt to scramble aboard the aircraft and escape from the advancing North Vietnamese. As the plane took off with people clinging to the wheels, soldiers on the ground fired at it and a hand grenade blew up under one wing. The plane limped back into Saigon, and that evening a tape of the flight was shown on the CBS Evening News. American television viewers that Easter weekend saw the almost unbelievable horror of an army transformed into murderous rabble and a country thrashing about helplessly in the throes of a violent death. 

... As if to leave no doubt as to America's determination not to intervene again in Vietnam, on the evening of April 23, in a major address at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford announced that the war in Vietnam was "finished as far as America is concerned." The audience of students gave him a standing ovation. 

... On the morning of April 29, Operation Frequent Wind began. The exercise involved the evacuation of American and Vietnamese civilians and military personnel from Tan Son Nhut Airbase and from the American Embassy in Saigon to the Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea. The operation was completed early in the morning of April 30, a few hours before the surrender of the South. When the last Marines were airlifted from the roof of the American Embassy on the morning of April 30, they left behind more than four hundred Vietnamese waiting to be airlifted out of the compound. Throughout the previous day and night those same Vietnamese had been promised again and again that they would never be abandoned by the United States. They watched in silence as the last American helicopter left the roof of the Embassy. Even the final American promise to Vietnam had been broken.

Thomas Polgar was CIA Saigon station chief. This is his last transmission from the embassy before destroying the communications equipment:

“This will be final message from Saigon station,” Mr. Polgar wrote. “It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the United States, does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power. 

“The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it, however, would seem to call for a reassessment... Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson.”

From his oral history:

... we got word to go, and the ambassador was finally told, ... "No, it's going to be from the roof after all." ...

I didn't have a great emotional attachment to Vietnam like some of my colleagues who really fell in love with the country. But in the end, seeing how it ended, I thought that we really did a miserable job for these people and they would have been much better off if we had never gone there in the first place. 

Our reception on the Blue Ridge [ship] showed the American military at its worst. They started out by searching everybody. I think the ambassador was the only one who was not searched. And in normal peacetime I far outranked the admiral commanding the ship. Nobody objected, though. We were tired. We were pretty placid. And we were a defeated army.

From the epigraph:

Maybe if enough people know what happened to Vietnam, then my memories will never be lost. Maybe then they will be like tears before the rain. So listen. This is very important. This is what I remember. This is what happened to me. These are my tears before the rain. --Duong Gang Son

More from Son's oral history:

As we left Saigon, there was an American soldier standing at the back door of the plane, and he was shooting at the ground. He just kept shooting as we pulled away. And people were still crying inside the plane. I watched the soldier shooting and I wondered what he was shooting at. I think he was just trying to show American power one last time. ... But I can only guess. I don't think he knew what was happening, either. We were all confused. 

Anyway, that was my last look at my country. I saw Vietnam as we flew away and at the back door of the plane was a soldier with a gun shooting at it.

 

Tears before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam by Larry Engelmann 

CBS camera-man Mike Marriott was on the last plane to escape from Danang before it fell in the spring of 1975. The scene was pure chaos: thousands of panic-stricken Vietnamese storming the airliner, soldiers shooting women and children to get aboard first, refugees being trampled to death. Marriott remembers standing at the door of the aft stairway, which was gaping open as the plane took off. "There were five Vietnamese below me on the steps. As the nose of the aircraft came up, because of the force and speed of the aircraft, the Vietnamese began to fall off. One guy managed to hang on for a while, but at about 600 feet he let go and just floated off--just like a skydiver.... What was going through my head was, I've got to survive this, and at the same time, I've got to capture this on film. This is the start of the fall of a country. This country is gone. This is history, right here and now." 

In Tears Before the Rain, a stunning oral history of the fall of South Vietnam, Larry Engelmann has gathered together the testimony of seventy eyewitnesses (both American and Vietnamese) who, like Mike Marriott, capture the feel of history "right here and now." We hear the voices of nurses, pilots, television and print media figures, the American Ambassador Graham Martin, the CIA station chief Thomas Polgar, Vietnamese generals, Amerasian children, even Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers. 

Through this extraordinary range of perspectives, we experience first-hand the final weeks before Saigon collapsed, from President Thieu's cataclysmic withdrawal from Pleiku and Kontum, (Colonel Le Khac Ly, put in command of the withdrawal, recalls receiving the order: "I opened my eyes large, large, large. I thought I wasn't hearing clearly") to the last-minute airlift of Americans from the embassy courtyard and roof ("I remember when the bird ascended," says Stuart Herrington, who left on one of the last helicopters, "It banked, and there was the Embassy, the parking lot, the street lights. And the silence"). 

Kabul Update: right on schedule...

Biden, July 8: "There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan....The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely." pic.twitter.com/VO17x0wKi9

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) August 15, 2021

See also Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition (stay tuned for more).

Ten Years of Quantum Coherence and Decoherence

In 2010 I attended a meeting on Quantum Coherence and Decoherence in Benasque, Spain. I've reproduced part of my original blog post on the meeting below.

 

September 13, 2010  

Here are the slides for my talk today at Benasque: On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics.

At the end I took a poll of the workshop participants and found that over half agreed with the following statement. About 20 percent were strongly opposed. Note this is a meeting on quantum coherence and decoherence, so there are a lot of practical types here, including experimentalists.

It is plausible (but of course unproven) that unitary evolution of a pure state in a closed system can reproduce, for semi-classical creatures inside the system, all of the phenomenology of the Copenhagen interpretation.

As one insightful participant pointed out while I was taking the poll, this is really a mathematical question (if not entirely well-posed), not a physics question.

My recent paper with Roman Buniy: Macroscopic Superpositions in Isolated Systems answers the mathematical question about the dynamics of complex isolated systems under Schrodinger evolution. I had forgotten entirely about the poll in the intervening years (I only came across the blog post by accident recently), but the question persisted... Only in 2020 did I realize that von Neumann's Quantum Ergodic Theorem [1] [2] can be used to prove the result.

Video and slides explaining the paper, published in Foundations of Physics, volume 51, 85 (2021).

Some Benasque photos from 2010 :-)

Added from comments: 

There are really multiple issues here. Theorists will differ in their opinions on the following questions: 

 

1. (largely mathematical): Does the phenomenology of pure state evolution in a closed system (e.g., the universe) reproduce Copenhagen for observers in the system? 

This is a question about dynamical evolution: of the system as a whole, and of various interacting subsystems. It's not a philosophical question and, in my opinion, it is what theorists should focus on first. Although complicated, it is still reasonably well-posed from a mathematical perspective, at least as far as foundational physics questions go. 

I believe the evidence is strong that the answer to #1 is Yes, although the issue of the Born rule lingers (too complicated to discuss here, but see various papers I have written on the topic, along with other people like Deutsch, Zurek, etc.). It is clear from Weinberg's writing that he and I agree that the answer is Yes, modulo the Born rule. 

Define this position to be 

Y* := "Yes, possibly modulo Born" 

There are some theorists who do not agree with Y* (see the survey results above), but they are mostly people who have not thought it through carefully, in my opinion. I don't know of any explicit arguments for how Y* fails, and our recent results applying the vN QET strengthen my confidence in Y*. 

I believe (based on published remarks or from my personal interactions) that the following theorists have opinions that are Y* or stronger: Schwinger, DeWitt, Wheeler, Deutsch, Hawking, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Zeh, Hartle, Weinberg, Zurek, Guth, Preskill, Page, Cooper (BCS), Coleman, Misner, Arkani-Hamed, etc. 

But there is a generational issue, with many older (some now deceased!) theorists being reticent about expressing Y* even if they believe it. This is shifting over time and, for example, a poll of younger string theorists or quantum cosmologists would likely find a strong majority expressing Y*. 

[ Social conformity and groupthink are among the obstacles preventing broader understanding of question #1. That is, in part, why I have listed specific high profile individuals as having reached the unconventional but correct view! ]

2. Does this make you confident that the other branches really "exist"? They are "real"? 

Here we get into philosophical questions and you will get a range of answers. 

Many of the Y* theorists (including me) might say:

a. MW is the only logically complete version of QM we have. Copenhagen is not well-defined and inadequate for cosmology (cf density perturbations from inflation and galaxy formation). 

b. I find the existence of the other branches rather extravagant, and I leave open the possibility that there might be some more fundamental modification of QM that changes everything. But I have no idea what that model looks like and there are strong constraints on its properties from Bell, causality, etc. Even a small amount of nonlinearity in the Schrodinger equation leads to lots of causality violation, etc. etc. 

 

c. I believe that any practical experiment that tries to check whether unitary evolution always holds (i.e., the other branches are *in principle accessible*) will always find it to be the case. In particular this means we will realize and manipulate more and more complicated superposition states over time, and this raises the question of why you and I cannot be in a superposition state right now... 

Note it is possible that only one single decoherent branch of the universal wavefunction is actually realized by Nature ("is real"), and that quantum randomness is an illusion. Hartle and Gell-Mann were sort of hedging this way in some of their last papers on this topic. But remember Gell-Mann even hedged about the reality of quarks before they were directly observed in deep inelastic scattering. 

An aspect to this problem that few theorists appreciate is that a quantum theory of gravity is, at the global level, "timeless": it should be a theory of quantum amplitudes describing an entire spacetime geometry and quantum trajectories of other degrees of freedom on that manifold. As such the many branches of the universal wavefunction are realized "all at once" and concepts like observers must be emergent -- they cannot be fundamental aspects of the theory itself. 

Most of the action in quantum gravity (i.e., strings or loop qg) has been "local" in nature: what are the stringy excitations, compactification, local vacua, etc. The global wavefunction of the universe was already considered by Wheeler and DeWitt but there are still lots of unresolved issues.

Strategic Calculus of a Taiwan Invasion

It seems implausible to me that PRC would risk an invasion of Taiwan in the near term, absent a very strong provocation such as an outright declaration of independence. Mastro's recent article in Foreign Affairs: China's Taiwan Temptation made the case for potential near term conflict, and caused quite a stir among analysts.

My guess is that PRC already has the capability to take Taiwan, but not without significant risk. However, as long as they continue to believe that time is on their side an invasion seems unlikely.

Some comments:

1. PRC would have local air and naval superiority at the beginning of the conflict.

2. I am uncertain as to the details of lift/amphibious assault -- discussed by Goldstein on the panel. This is the main failure mode for PLA.

3. I am uncertain as to Taiwan's will to fight. A quick surrender is not excluded, in my opinion. It seems that most US planners do not understand this.

4. Most westerners fail to understand that this is a frozen civil war, with very strong and emotional commitments from the PRC side. The involvement of Japan in this conflict, given their history of aggression in Asia and previous colonial occupation of Taiwan, could easily get them nuked again (this time with much greater megatonnage). It is unclear whether the present leadership of Japan appreciates this sufficiently.

5. The interests of the average person in the US or Japan (or any Asian country) are best served by working very hard to avoid this conflict.

What is happening across the Taiwan Strait? 

In March, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific (INDOPACOM), said in a hearing before Congress that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could take place within six years. His successor, Admiral John Aquilino, agreed that such an attack could occur sooner “than most think.” More recently, however, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, testified that he believes that China has little intention to take Taiwan by force, and that the capability to do so remains a goal rather than a reality. 

On the other hand, the Chinese military has increased pressure on Taiwan in the past year, flying into the island’s air defense identification zone on numerous occasions. During one day in June, China flew 28 military aircraft toward Taiwan, the largest number in a single day, perhaps in response to G7 and NATO statements on China and Taiwan. 

On July 19, 2021, the National Committee hosted a virtual program with Lyle Goldstein and Oriana Skylar Mastro to discuss China/Taiwan/U.S. military relations. NCUSCR President Stephen Orlins moderated and NCUSCR Director Admiral Dennis Blair offered commentary. 

Lyle J. Goldstein is a research professor in the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the Naval War College (NWC) and an affiliate of its new Russia Maritime Studies Institute. Founding director of CMSI and author of dozens of articles on Chinese security policy, he focuses on Chinese undersea warfare. On the broader subject of U.S.-China relations, Dr. Goldstein published Meeting China Halfway in 2015. Over the last several years, he has focused on the North Korea crisis. 

Dr. Goldstein received his bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard, his master’s degree in strategic studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and his doctoral degree in politics from Princeton. He speaks Russian as well as Chinese. 

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy; a senior non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; an inaugural Wilson Center China fellow; and a fellow in the National Committee’s Public Intellectuals Program. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security. Her 2019 book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member. 

Dr. Mastro holds a B.A. in East Asian studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

Added from comments:

Russia is discussed by the panelists. My guess is that if PRC launched a surprise invasion of TW they would just sit it out. The panelists go so far as to speculate that Russia might collaborate with PRC in the planning of an invasion, and could even provide some geopolitical distraction in support of it. I'm not sure I believe that -- the risk of losing surprise due to information leakage from the Russian side would be a big negative against coordination. 

There would be huge repercussions from nuking Japan (PRC actually has a no first use policy), but the emotional effect of, e.g., seeing a large PLAN ship sunk by a Japanese missile would be very strong. Remember, to PRC it looks like a (very much still disliked) foreign power intervening in an internal Chinese dispute. Sort of like Britain helping the confederacy during our civil war, but much worse. At the beginning of a TW invasion PRC might issue some kind of very strong ultimatum of non-interference to all parties (US, Japan, etc.) and then feel justified if the ultimatum is not obeyed. 

Please don't confuse descriptive analysis with normative analysis. It's important to understand how this looks from the other side, in order to predict their behavior. 

PRC faced down the US on the Korean peninsula when they had NO nuclear deterrent. (The historical record is clear that the US seriously considered using nukes against PRC over Korea and over TW in the past.) This would be a fight over (in their minds) actual Chinese territory, not Korea, and today they have a very credible MAD deterrent.

Re: item #3 above, I would like to see a detailed analysis of Taiwan's senior military leadership and their political leanings. I suspect that among them are many descendants of KMT military officers (like my father and grandfather), who largely still support the KMT political party and not the pro-independence DPP. These officers might lead a military coup in the event of a PRC invasion -- especially if it is a reaction to a DPP proclamation of independence, or other US-backed provocation.

 

This interview with Professor Alexander Huang of Tamkang University (Taiwan) Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies addresses the possibility of direct participation by the US and Japan in defense of Taiwan. In my opinion, Huang is realistic and well-calibrated.  

This is a clear explanation of the status quo, with opinion poll results:

Glenn Diesen on Geostrategy and Greater Eurasia

 

This is a good discussion of Eurasian geopolitics, Russia-China relations, decline of US empire, multipolarity, etc. 

Note Diesen, originally from Norway and now a professor there, was previously professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. I find his writing on Russia and Eurasian geostrategy much more realistic than what is produced by most US or European academics and analysts. His latest book:

Europe as the Western Peninsula of Greater Eurasia Geoeconomic Regions in a Multipolar World 

GLENN DIESEN 

Will the increased economic connectivity across the Eurasian supercontinent transform Europe into the western peninsula of Greater Eurasia? The unipolar era entailed the US organising the two other major economic regions of the world, Europe and Asia, under US leadership. The rise of “the rest”, primarily Asia with China at the centre, has ended the unipolar era and even 500-years of Western dominance. China and Russia are leading efforts to integrate Europe and Asia into one large region. The Greater Eurasian region is constructed with three categories of economic connectivity – strategic industries built on new and disruptive technologies; physical connectivity with bimodal transportation corridors; and financial connectivity with new development banks, trading currencies and payments systems. China strives for geoeconomic leadership by replacing the US leadership position, while Russia endeavours to reposition itself from the dual periphery of Europe and Asia to the centre of a grand Eurasian geoeconomic constellation. Europe, positioned between the trans-Atlantic region and Greater Eurasia, has to adapt to the new international distribution of power to preserve its strategic autonomy.

See also Remarks on the Decline of American Empire.

Bonus: A good discussion of hypersonic missile technology and its strategic implications. See also LEO SAR, hypersonics, and the death of the naval surface ship. Effective ranges of hypersonic weapons that can be launched from land-based mobile TEL, submarine, small naval surface combatant, fighter jet, etc. are now in the thousands of kilometers. Combined with ubiquitous satellite imaging, we have a revolution in military affairs...

Farewell, Big Steve

Steven Weinberg, a giant of theoretical physics, passed on July 23, 2021 -- he was 88 years old. His best known work, for which he received the Nobel prize, proposed the unification of electromagnetic and weak forces, and formed a key component of the Standard Model of particle physics. But his lifetime of work ranged from cosmology to gravitation to quantum field theory to foundations of quantum mechanics. A brief autobiography.

Wikipedia: It is a story widely told that Steven Weinberg, who inherited Schwinger's paneled office in Lyman Laboratory (Harvard Physics department), there found a pair of old shoes, with the implied message, "think you can fill these?"

Indeed, it is true that almost no one on the planet could have filled Schwinger's shoes. But Big Steve did, and more.

 

Below I've reproduced a post from 2017, Steven Weinberg: What's the matter with quantum mechanics? 

The video of Weinberg's talk is from 2016, when he would have been 83 or so.

In this public lecture Weinberg explains the problems with the two predominant interpretations of quantum mechanics, which he refers to as Instrumentalist (e.g., Copenhagen) and Realist (e.g., Many Worlds). The term "interpretation" may be misleading because what is ultimately at stake is the nature of physical reality. Both interpretations have serious problems, but the problem with Realism (in Weinberg's view, and my own) is not the quantum multiverse, but rather the origin of probability within deterministic Schrodinger evolution. Instrumentalism is, of course, ill-defined nutty mysticism 8-)

Physicists will probably want to watch this at 1.5x or 2x speed. The essential discussion is at roughly 22-40min, so it's only a 10 minute investment of your time. These slides explain in pictures.

See also Weinberg on Quantum Foundations, where I wrote:

It is a shame that very few working physicists, even theoreticians, have thought carefully and deeply about quantum foundations. Perhaps Weinberg's fine summary will stimulate greater awareness of this greatest of all unresolved problems in science.

and quoted Weinberg:

... today there is no interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not have serious flaws. 

Posts on this blog related to the Born Rule, etc., and two of my papers:

The measure problem in many worlds quantum mechanics

On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics

Dynamical theories of wavefunction collapse are necessarily non-linear generalizations of Schrodinger evolution, which lead to problems with locality.

Among those who take the Realist position seriously: Feynman and Gell-Mann, Schwinger, Hawking, and many more.

Embryo Screening for Polygenic Disease Risk: Recent Advances and Ethical Considerations (Genes 2021 Special Issue)

It is a great honor to co-author a paper with Simon Fishel, the last surviving member of the team that produced the first IVF baby (Louise Brown) in 1978. His mentors and collaborators were Robert Edwards (Nobel Prize 2010) and Patrick Steptoe (passed before 2010). In the photo above, of the very first scientific conference on In Vitro Fertilization (1981), Fishel (far right), Steptoe, and Edwards are in the first row. More on Simon and his experiences as a medical pioneer below. 

This article appears in a Special Issue: Application of Genomic Technology in Disease Outcome Prediction.

Embryo Screening for Polygenic Disease Risk: Recent Advances and Ethical Considerations 

L. Tellier, J. Eccles, L. Lello, N. Treff, S. Fishel, S. Hsu 

Genes 2021, 12(8), 1105 

https://doi.org/10.3390/genes12081105 

Machine learning methods applied to large genomic datasets (such as those used in GWAS) have led to the creation of polygenic risk scores (PRSs) that can be used identify individuals who are at highly elevated risk for important disease conditions, such as coronary artery disease (CAD), diabetes, hypertension, breast cancer, and many more. PRSs have been validated in large population groups across multiple continents and are under evaluation for widespread clinical use in adult health. It has been shown that PRSs can be used to identify which of two individuals is at a lower disease risk, even when these two individuals are siblings from a shared family environment. The relative risk reduction (RRR) from choosing an embryo with a lower PRS (with respect to one chosen at random) can be quantified by using these sibling results. New technology for precise embryo genotyping allows more sophisticated preimplantation ranking with better results than the current method of selection that is based on morphology. We review the advances described above and discuss related ethical considerations.

I excerpt from the paper below. 

Some related links: 

First Baby Born from a Polygenically Screened Embryo (video panel) 

Polygenic Embryo Screening: comments on Carmi et al. and Visscher et al.

Dalton Conley (Princeton) and collaborators find that 68% of surveyed Americans had positive attitudes concerning polygenic screening of embryos.

Introduction:

Over a million babies are born each year via IVF [1,2]. It is not uncommon for IVF parents to have more than one viable embryo from which to choose, as typical IVF cycles can produce four or five. The embryo that is transferred may become their child, while the others might not be used at all. We refer to this selection problem as the “embryo choice problem”. In the past, selections were made based on criteria such as morphology (i.e., rate of development, symmetry, general appearance) and chromosomal normality as determined by aneuploidy testing. 

Recently, large datasets of human genomes together with health and disease histories have become available to researchers in computational genomics [3]. Statistical methods from machine learning have allowed researchers to build risk predictors (e.g., for specific disease conditions or related quantitative traits, such as height or longevity) that use the genotype alone as input information. Combined with the precision genotyping of embryos, these advances provide significantly more information that can be used for embryo selection to IVF parents. 

In this brief article, we provide an overview of the advances in genotyping and computational genomics that have been applied to embryo selection. We also discuss related ethical issues, although a full discussion of these would require a much longer paper. ...

 Ethical considerations:

For further clarification, we explore a specific scenario involving breast cancer. It is well known that monogenic BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants predispose women to breast cancer, but this population is small—perhaps a few per thousand in the general population. The subset of women who do not carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 risk variant but are at high polygenic risk is about ten times as large as the BRCA1/2 group. Thus, the majority of breast cancer can be traced to polygenic causes in comparison with commonly tested monogenic variants. 

For BRCA carrier families, preimplantation screening against BRCA is a standard (and largely uncontroversial) recommendation [39]. The new technologies discussed here allow a similar course of action for the much larger set of families with breast cancer history who are not carriers of BRCA1 or BRCA2. They can screen their embryos in favor of a daughter whose breast cancer PRS is in the normal range, avoiding a potentially much higher absolute risk of the condition. 

The main difference between monogenic BRCA screening and the new PRS screening against breast cancer is that the latter technology can help an order of magnitude more families. From an ethical perspective, it would be unconscionable to deny PRS screening to BRCA1/2-negative families with a history of breast cancer. ...

 

On Simon Fishel's experiences as an IVF pioneer (see here):

Today millions of babies are produced through IVF. In most developed countries roughly 3-5 percent of all births are through IVF, and in Denmark the fraction is about 10 percent! But when the technology was first introduced with the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the pioneering scientists had to overcome significant resistance. There may be an alternate universe in which IVF was not allowed to develop, and those millions of children were never born. 

Wikipedia: ...During these controversial early years of IVF, Fishel and his colleagues received extensive opposition from critics both outside of and within the medical and scientific communities, including a civil writ for murder.[16] Fishel has since stated that "the whole establishment was outraged" by their early work and that people thought that he was "potentially a mad scientist".[17] 

I predict that within 5 years the use of polygenic risk scores will become common in some health systems (i.e., for adults) and in IVF. Reasonable people will wonder why the technology was ever controversial at all, just as in the case of IVF.

Figure below from our paper. EHS = Embryo Health Score. 

The History of the Planck Length and the Madness of Crowds

I had forgotten about the 2005-06 email correspondence reproduced below, but my collaborator Xavier Calmet reminded me of it today and I was able to find these messages.

The idea of a minimal length of order the Planck length, arising due to quantum gravity (i.e., quantum fluctuations in the structure of spacetime), is now widely accepted by theoretical physicists. But as Professor Mead (University of Minnesota, now retired) elaborates, based on his own experience, it was considered preposterous for a long time. 

Large groups of people can be wrong for long periods of time -- in financial markets, academia, even theoretical physics. 

Our paper, referred to by Mead, is 

Minimum Length from Quantum Mechanics and Classical General Relativity 

X. Calmet, M. Graesser, and S. Hsu  

https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0405033  

Phys Rev Letters Vol. 93, 21101 (2004)

The related idea, first formulated by R. Buniy, A. Zee, and myself, that the structure of Hilbert Space itself is likely discrete (or "granular") at some fundamental level, is currently considered preposterous, but time will tell. 

More here. 

At bottom I include a relevant excerpt from correspondence with Freeman Dyson in 2005.

Dear Drs. Calmet, Graesser, Hsu,

I read with interest your article in Phys Rev Letters Vol. 93, 21101 (2004), and was pleasantly surprised to see my 1964 paper cited (second citation of your ref. 1).  Not many people have cited this paper, and I think it was pretty much forgotten the day it was published, & has remained so ever since.  To me, your paper shows again that, no matter how one looks at it, one runs into problems trying to measure a distance (or synchronize clocks) with greater accuracy than the Planck length (or time).

I feel rather gratified that the physics community, which back then considered the idea of the Planck length as a fundamental limitation to be quite preposterous, has since come around to (more or less) my opinion.  Obviously, I deserve ZERO credit for this, since I'm sure that the people who finally reached this conclusion, whoever they were, were unaware of my work.  To me, this is better than if they had been influenced by me, since it's good to know that the principles of physics lead to this conclusion, rather than the influence of an individual.  I hope that makes sense. ...

You might be amused by one story about how I finally got the (first) paper published after 5 years of referee problems.  A whole series of referees had claimed that my eq. (1), which is related to your eq. (1), could not be true.  I suspect that they just didn't want to read any further.  Nothing I could say would convince them, though I'm sure you would agree that the result is transparently obvious.  So I submitted another paper which consisted of nothing but a lengthy detailed proof of eq. (1), without mentioning the connection with the gravitation paper.  The referees of THAT paper rejected it on the grounds that the result was trivially obvious!!  When I pointed out this discrepancy to the editors, I got the gravitation paper reconsidered and eventually published.

But back then no one considered the Planck length to be a candidate as a fundamental limitation.  Well, almost no one.  I did receive support from Henry Primakoff, David Bohm, and Roger Penrose.  As far as I can recall, these were the only theoretical physicists of note who were willing to take this idea seriously (and I talked to many, in addition to reading the reports of all the referees).

Well anyway, I greet you, thank you for your paper and for the citation, and hope you haven't found this e-mail too boring.

Yours Sincerely,

C.  Alden  Mead

Dear Dr. Mead,

Thank you very much for your email message. It is fascinating to learn the history behind your work. We found your paper to be clearly written and useful.

Amusingly, we state at the beginning of our paper something like "it is widely believed..." that there is a fundamental Planck-length limit. I am sure your paper made a contribution to this change in attitude. The paper is not obscure as we were able to find it without much digging.

Your story about the vicissitudes of publishing rings true to me. I find such stories reassuring given the annoying obstacles we all face in trying to make our little contributions to science.

Finally, we intend to have a look at your second paper. Perhaps we will find another interesting application of your ideas.

Warm regards,

Stephen Hsu

Xavier Calmet

Michael Graesser

 

Dear Steve,

Many thanks for your kind reply.  I find the information quite interesting, though as you say it leaves some historical questions unanswered.  I think that Planck himself arrived at his length by purely dimensional considerations, and he supposedly considered this very important.

As you point out, it's physically very reasonable, perhaps more so in view of more recent developments.  It seemed physically reasonable to me back in 1959, but not to most of the mainstream theorists of the time.

I think that physical considerations (such as yours and mine) and mathematical ones should support and complement each other.  The Heisenberg-Bohr thought experiments tell us what a correct mathematical formalism should provide, and the formal quantum mechanics does this and, of course, much more.  Same with the principle of equivalence and general relativity.  Now, the physical ideas regarding the Planck length & time may serve as a guide in constructing a satisfactory formalism.  Perhaps string theory will prove to be the answer, but I must admit that I'm ignorant of all details of that theory.

Anyway, I'm delighted to correspond with all of you as much as you wish, but I emphasize that I don't want to be intrusive or become a nuisance.

As my wife has written you (her idea, not mine), your e-mail was a nice birthday present.

Kindest Regards, Alden

See also this letter from Mead which appeared in Physics Today.  

The following is from Freeman Dyson:

 ... to me the most interesting is the discrete Hilbert Space paper, especially your reference [2] proving that lengths cannot be measured with error smaller than the Planck length. I was unaware of this reference but I had reached the same conclusion independently.

 

Peter Shor on Quantum Factorization and Error Correction

 

This talk by Peter Shor describes the discovery of his quantum algorithm for prime factorization, and the discovery of quantum error correcting codes. The talk commemorates the first conference (Endicott House meeting) on the physics of computation in 1981. See 40 Years of Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.

Shor did not attend the 1981 meeting, where Feynman gave the keynote address Simulating Physics With Computers -- he was in his senior year at Caltech. But he recalls a talk that Feynman gave around the same time, on the possibility that negative probabilities might illuminate the EPR experiment and the Bell inequalities. 

Coincidentally, in my senior year (1986) I got Feynman to give a talk to the Society of Physics Students on this very topic! (I think I was president of SPS at the time.)

Winner Take All in Global E-Commerce? Alibaba vs Amazon

 

Alibaba and Amazon are set to fight it out for global e-commerce dominance. Both are building out distribution networks all over the world. It might not be winner take all, but there are huge returns to scale so there may be only a few winners that dominate in the future.

Alibaba has some big advantages: lower cost structure (PRC salaries) and better direct contacts with the factories in China that produce the goods. 

In fact, a major trend underway is disintermediation between manufacturers and consumers. See, e.g., Shein, with 100M+ downloads (fast fashion).

All of these companies form the C2M (consumer to manufacturer) layer that provides the following functions.

1. Fulfillment and inventory management

2. Product and price discovery 

3. Product evaluation, trust and consumer confidence

Item #1 has both physical and information infrastructure components, and is the most expensive to build. Items #2 and #3 can be built entirely virtually with much lower barrier to entry.

Just for fun I checked on AliExpress and I could find many of the same products as on Amazon, but at much lower prices. Not surprising, as it's all made in China these days.

At the moment Amazon delivery to US customers is much faster, but the situation varies by country and is changing rapidly.

Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition (stay tuned for more)

There are photos and video to remind us of the ignominious US withdrawal from S. Vietnam after twenty years of conflict and millions of deaths.

Over the July 4th weekend, the US military abandoned Bagram airforce base in Afghanistan, without even informing the Afghan commander and his troops. 

Conveniently for our warmongering neocon "nation-building" interventionist elites, there are (as yet) no photos of this pullout.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. 

Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America. The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August. 

“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said. ...

I wrote the following (2017) in Remarks on the Decline of American Empire:

1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on Middle Eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. This defeat is still not acknowledged among most of the media or what passes for intelligentsia in academia and policy circles, but defeat it is. Iran now exerts significant control over Iraq and a swath of land running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. None of the goals of our costly intervention have been achieved. We are exhausted morally, financially, and militarily, and still have not fully extricated ourselves from a useless morass. George W. Bush should go down in history as the worst US President of the modern era. 

2. We are fortunate that the fracking revolution may lead to US independence from Middle Eastern energy. But policy elites have to fully recognize this possibility and pivot our strategy to reflect the decreased importance of the region. The fracking revolution is a consequence of basic research from decades ago (including investment from the Department of Energy) and the work of private sector innovators and risk-takers. 

3. US budget deficits are a ticking time bomb, which cripple investment in basic infrastructure and also in research that creates strategically important new technologies like AI. US research spending has been roughly flat in inflation adjusted dollars over the last 20 years, declining as a fraction of GDP. 

4. Divisive identity politics and demographic trends in the US will continue to undermine political cohesion and overall effectiveness of our institutions. ("Civilizational decline," as one leading theoretical physicist observed to me recently, remarking on our current inability to take on big science projects.) 

5. The Chinese have almost entirely closed the technology gap with the West, and dominate important areas of manufacturing. It seems very likely that their economy will eventually become significantly larger than the US economy. This is the world that strategists have to prepare for. Wars involving religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us from a possible future conflict with a peer competitor that threatens to match or exceed our economic, technological, and even military capability.

If you are young and naive and still believe that we can mostly trust our media and government, watch these videos for a dose of reality.

[ The video embedded above was a documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks on the DW channel, which I had queued to show the Collateral Murder video. It included an interview with the US soldier who saved one of the children in the rescue van that was hit with 30mm Apache fire. Inexplicably, DW has now removed the video from their channel. Click through to YouTube below for the content. ]

Some things never change. Recall the personal sacrifices made by people like Daniel Ellsberg to reveal the truth about the Vietnam war. Today it is Julian Assange...

Note Added: While it was easy to predict this outcome in 2017, it wasn't much harder to call it in 2011. See this piece from The Onion:

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—In what officials said was the "only way" to move on from what has become a "sad and unpleasant" situation, all 100,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel crept out of their barracks in the dead of night Sunday and quietly slipped out of Afghanistan. 

U.S. commanders explained their sudden pullout in a short, handwritten note left behind at Bagram Airfield, their largest base of operations in the country. 

"By the time you read this, we will be gone," the note to the nation of Afghanistan read in part. "We regret any pain this may cause you, but this was something we needed to do. We couldn't go on like this forever." 

"We still care about you very much, but, in the end, we feel this is for the best," the note continued. "Please, just know that we are truly sorry and that we wish you all the greatest of happiness in the future." 

... After reportedly taking a "long look in the mirror" last week, senior defense officials came to the conclusion that they had "wasted a decade of [their] lives" with Afghanistan ...

Polygenic Embryo Screening: comments on Carmi et al. and Visscher et al.

In this post I discuss some recent papers on disease risk reduction from polygenic screening of embryos in IVF (PGT-P). I will focus on the science but at the end will include some remarks about practical and ethical issues. 

The two papers are 

Carmi et al. 

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.05.370478v3 

Visscher et al. 

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr2105065

Both papers study risk reduction in the following scenario: you have N embryos to choose from, and polygenic risk scores (PRS) for each which have been computed from SNP genotype. Both papers use simulated data -- they build synthetic child (embryo) genotypes in order to calculate expected risk reduction. 

I am very happy to see serious researchers like Carmi et al. and Visscher et al. working on this important topic. 

Here are some example results from the papers: 

Carmi et al. find a ~50% risk reduction for schizophrenia from selecting the lowest risk embryo from a set of 5. For a selection among 2 embryos the risk reduction is ~30%. (We obtain a very similar result using empirical data: real adult siblings with known phenotype.)

Visscher et al. find the following results, see Table 1 and Figure 2 in their paper. To their credit they compute results for a range of ancestries (European, E. Asian, African). We have performed similar calculations using siblings but have not yet published the results for all ancestries.

Relative Risk Reduction (RRR): 

Hypertension: 9-18% (ranges depend on specific ancestry) 

Type 2 Diabetes: 7-16% 

Coronary Artery Disease: 8-17% 

Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR): 

Hypertension: 4-8.5% (ranges depend on specific ancestry) 

Type 2 Diabetes: 2.6-5.5% 

Coronary Artery Disease: 0.55-1.1%

Note, families with a history of the disease would benefit much more than this. For example, parents with a family history of breast cancer or heart disease or schizophrenia will often produce some embryos with very high PRS and others in the normal range. Their absolute risk reduction from selection is many times larger than the population average results shown above. 

My research group has already published work in this area using data from actual siblings: tens of thousands of individuals who are late in life (e.g., 50-70 years old), for whom we have health records and genotypes. 

See Sibling Validation of Polygenic Risk Scores and Complex Trait Prediction (blog post) and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69927-7 (paper).

We have shown that polygenic risk predictors can identify, using genotype alone, which sibling in a pair has a specific disease condition: the sib with high PRS is much more likely to have the condition than the sib with normal range PRS. In those papers we also computed Relative Risk Reduction (RRR), which is directly relevant to embryo selection. Needless to say I think real sib data provides better validation of PRS than simulated genotypes. The adult sibs have typically experienced a shared family environment and also exhibit negligible population stratification relative to each other. Using real sib data reduces significantly some important confounds in PRS validation. 

See also these papers: Treff et al. [1] [2] [3]

Here are example results from our work on absolute and relative risk reduction. (Selection from 2 embryos.)

Regarding pleiotropy (discussed in the NEJM article), the Treff et al. results linked above show that selection using a Genomic Index, which is an aggregate of several polygenic risk scores, simultaneously reduces risks across all of the ~12 disease conditions in the polygenic disease panel. That is, risk reduction is not zero-sum, as far as we can tell: you are not forced to trade off one disease risk against another, at least for the 12 diseases on the panel. Further work on this is in progress. 

In related work we showed that DNA regions used to predict different risks are largely disjoint, which also supports this conclusion. See 

Pleiotropy: Myths and Reality (blog post) 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-68881-8 (paper).

To summarize, several groups have now validated the risk reduction from polygenic screening (PGT-P). The methodologies are different (i.e., simulated genotypes vs studies using large numbers of adult siblings) but come to similar conclusions. 

Whether one should regard, for example, relative and absolute risk reduction in type 2 diabetes (T2D) of ~40% and ~3% (from figure above) as important or valuable is a matter of judgement. 

Studies suggest that type 2 diabetes results in an average loss of over 10 quality-adjusted life years -- i.e., more than a decade. So reducing an individual's risk of T2D by even a few percent seems significant to me. 

Now multiply that by a large factor, because selection using a genomic index (see figure) produces simultaneous risk reductions across a dozen important diseases.

Finally, polygenic predictors are improving rapidly as more genomic and health record data become available for machine learning. All of the power of modern AI technology will be applied to this data, and risk reductions from selection (PGT-P) will increase significantly over time. See this 2021 review article for more.

Practical Issues 

Aurea, the first polygenically screened baby (PGT-P), was born in May 2020.

See this panel discussion, which includes 

Dr. Simon Fishel (member of the team that produced the first IVF baby) 

Elizabeth Carr (first US IVF baby) 

Prof. Julian Savalescu (Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford) 

Dr. Nathan Treff (Chief Scientist, Genomic Prediction)

Dr. Rafal Smigrodzki (MD PhD, father of Aurea) 

Astral Codex Ten recently posted on this topic: Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies :-) Many of the comments there are of high quality and worth reading. 

Ethical Issues 

Once the basic scientific results are established, one can meaningfully examine the many ethical issues surrounding embryo selection. 

My view has always been that new genomic technologies are so powerful that they should be widely understood and discussed -- by all of society, not just by scientists. 

However, to me it is clear that the potential benefits of embryo PRS screening (PGT-P) are very positive and that this technology will eventually be universally adopted. 

Today millions of babies are produced through IVF. In most developed countries roughly 3-5 percent of all births are through IVF, and in Denmark the fraction is about 10 percent! But when the technology was first introduced with the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the pioneering scientists had to overcome significant resistance. There may be an alternate universe in which IVF was not allowed to develop, and those millions of children were never born.

Wikipedia: ...During these controversial early years of IVF, Fishel and his colleagues received extensive opposition from critics both outside of and within the medical and scientific communities, including a civil writ for murder.[16] Fishel has since stated that "the whole establishment was outraged" by their early work and that people thought that he was "potentially a mad scientist".[17]

I predict that within 5 years the use of polygenic risk scores will become common in some health systems (i.e., for adults) and in IVF. Reasonable people will wonder why the technology was ever controversial at all, just as in the case of IVF.

This is a very complex topic. For an in-depth discussion I refer you to this recent paper by Munday and Savalescu. Savalescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, is perhaps the leading philosopher / bioethicist working in this area. 

Three models for the regulation of polygenic scores in reproduction 

Journal of Medical Ethics

The past few years have brought significant breakthroughs in understanding human genetics. This knowledge has been used to develop ‘polygenic scores’ (or ‘polygenic risk scores’) which provide probabilistic information about the development of polygenic conditions such as diabetes or schizophrenia. They are already being used in reproduction to select for embryos at lower risk of developing disease. Currently, the use of polygenic scores for embryo selection is subject to existing regulations concerning embryo testing and selection. Existing regulatory approaches include ‘disease-based' models which limit embryo selection to avoiding disease characteristics (employed in various formats in Australia, the UK, Italy, Switzerland and France, among others), and 'laissez-faire' or 'libertarian' models, under which embryo testing and selection remain unregulated (as in the USA). We introduce a novel 'Welfarist Model' which limits embryo selection according to the impact of the predicted trait on well-being. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of each model as a way of regulating polygenic scores. Polygenic scores create the potential for existing embryo selection technologies to be used to select for a wider range of predicted genetically influenced characteristics including continuous traits. Indeed, polygenic scores exist to predict future intelligence, and there have been suggestions that they will be used to make predictions within the normal range in the USA in embryo selection. We examine how these three models would apply to the prediction of non-disease traits such as intelligence. The genetics of intelligence remains controversial both scientifically and ethically. This paper does not attempt to resolve these issues. However, as with many biomedical advances, an effective regulatory regime must be in place as soon as the technology is available. If there is no regulation in place, then the market effectively decides ethical issues.

Dalton Conley (Princeton) and collaborators find that 68% of surveyed Americans had positive attitudes concerning polygenic screening of embryos.