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Notes -
Building off the embryo selection discussion below:
What do you think IQ is exactly?
I’ve always thought about a general factor of intelligence as very similar to a general factor of athleticism. In this context, IQ is a measure of the former much like a triathlon time can be a measure of the latter.
In every sport, triathlon time is going to be positively correlated with ability across the whole population. However, the absolute best performers on specific tasks will not be the ones that do the best in triathlon, because each task has room for optimization that has negative tradeoffs for triathlon performance ("no free lunch"). If you single-mindedly select for triathlon performance, you’ll get a generally more athletic population. On the other hand, you’ll funnel away from getting a Bolt, a Phelps, a Messi, a Jordan, a Federer, etc. Contributions to athleticism aren’t necessarily linear. Individually sub-optimal parameters can align just right to produce optimal results.
There are potential unforeseen consequences of restricting available gene-space by widespread adoption of IQ optimization. Traits are notoriously polygenic (each trait is affected by many genes), and virtually every gene is pleiotropic (each gene affects many traits). Our understanding of both intelligence and genetics is rife with unknown unknowns. Would we still get von Neumann, Einstein, etc.? Supposing the technology became widely available and affordable, is that a fence you’d be willing to tear down?
Edit: It seems I didn't communicate my main concern particularly well. There are two issues with a myopic optimization on IQ: one is negative health effects due to pleiotropy of the associated genes. The other, which I am more concerned with here, is the potential for "lost opportunities". This is what I was trying to illustrate with the triathlon analogy. You can get a narrowing of the variations in intelligence types and a potential restriction on the very upper end of ability. We don't know if Newton, Gauss, Einstein, von Neumann, Ramanujan, and Tao all had a similar combination of traits that led to their exceptional abilities, or if they all had different pieces that fit together in unique ways to produce a unique form of genius (what I meant by "not summing linearly"). Analogous to the way that Phelps, Bolt, and Messi have very different body compositions that produce their unique athletic excellence. A population of excellent triathletes would be more athletic, much like a population of people with 115 IQ would be more intelligent, but that kind of optimization may come at the expense of the variation needed to produce those truly exceptional at related but slightly orthogonal tasks.
I'd put it as "Generalized ability to efficiently process increasing levels of complexity."
Now, its fair to say that efficiently processing some areas of complexity won't translate automatically to others, I think we can take autistic-savants and similar cases as evidence.
But that's really the sum total of what it seems to 'represent' about a person. If you moved them from Tic-Tac-Toe, to Connect-Four, to Checkers, to Chess, at which point would they genuinely start struggling?
Someone who works mostly with 2-dimensional concepts or in constrained workspaces probably demands lower IQ than someone who works in 3-D (or 4-D!) concepts in very open-ended environments. The former, for example could be a NASCAR driver who just has to be aware of his immediate surroundings and only has to navigate a closed circuit, and the latter would be an airline pilot or, perhaps, the technician who fixes the airplane, where there are a lot more variables at play, to say the least.
Reality can be 'infinitely' complex in theory, but someone who is comfortable with higher levels of complexity and can deduce certain patterns or cause-effect relationships is, almost certainly, going to be better at navigating the world. I read some research a while back, which I haven't been able to find again, suggesting that there's a strong negative correlation between reported IQ and the number of auto accidents someone experiences in their life.
Makes intuitive sense to me. The ability to think ahead and grasp possible consequences of an action "if I do X, then Y could possibly happen, and I might be injured or killed." and to notice when others are behaving in a way that might likewise cause an issue will help avoid negative outcomes by simply avoiding situations that could lead to such outcomes.
Now, high IQ can be hobbled by intense OCD, or high anxiety, or a lack of executive function, and I think that is mostly what will explain the divergence between IQ test results and real world success and status. Being socially inept can also be a major impediment. The slight 'paradox' is that an IQ test is a very constrained environment with minimal distractions and all the problems are 'legible' so even somebody with a crippling mental illness can probably perform well if they have the mental horsepower.
But I do think that, especially when measured across broad populations, IQ differences are the main reason some places are able to create and maintain complex civilizations with bridges that stay up, computers, and airplanes and others just revert to the simplest techs they can operate despite tons of outside assistance pouring in.
I think so. The space of all possible designs for human minds is large, and contains Einstein and Jeffrey Dahmer and Hitler and Mister Rogers, so we would certainly not want to move more into the space where there are more sociopaths than 'normals,' but the space is still constrained and thus its highly unlikely we accidentally produce a few MEGAHITLERS by accident.
The risk of creating a bunch of Jeffrey Dahmers (IQ of 145, allegedly) instead of more Einsteins and Von Neumanns is pretty minimal, and probably wouldn't kill us off, and on net I think we see improvement in everybody's standard of living. And probably faster than we would have 'normally.'
If I was presented with a button that, when pushed, instantly raised every living person's IQ by 5 points (as measured on tests), but changed nothing else, I would happily push it, I think it would substantially improve things in the near term and would have few negative side effects even across the long term.
What this tech sort of promises to do is achieve that same outcome, but across a longer timescale.
Jeffery Dahmer may have been very smart, but the vast majority of serial killers are of average or below-average intelligence.
I'll add the caveat that the selection of serial killers who have been caught might not reflect the entire population of serial killers. The smarter ones might have avoided detection entirely.
But I picked Dahmer because his whole thing was he was particularly intelligent and completely sociopathic and depraved... so we do NOT want more of them running around if we start selecting for more intelligence.
It would take quite a few additional Dahmers to make up for the loss of the predominantly low-IQ people committing 15,000 homicides per year.
Or just a couple of them, but they have access to bio-engineered diseases.
But enough about Fauci.
*Peter Daszak.
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