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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.
I think of intelligence like I think of processing power in a computer. Now below a certain level, if you don’t have enough, it’s going to be nearly impossible to do anything useful. I think there are several types:, linguistics, mathematics, art, social. These can’t be used interchangeably— meaning I can’t use artistic intelligence to understand math or language, nor can I use mathematical intelligence to learn to write poetry. To my mind these sit atop a more general CPU that is needed for any type of thinking. And I further think that we’re dealing with multiple genes in multiple places which to my mind would complicate any sort of simple correlation to ethnicity. Until we know which genes exist in which population it’s impossible to tell for sure.
The reason I can't quite use this analogy is that even if you have a slow computer, as long as it is Turing-Complete, it CAN complete any given task you put before it, even if it takes literal centuries.
So being faster or slower to complete tasks is not quite the same as being able to handle more complex tasks. I sincerely believe there are problems that 150+ IQs can handle that are utterly beyond a 100 IQer, even if you gave the 100 specific, detailed instructions on how to complete it and gave them years to work on it without interference. MAYBE if you stuck a team of cooperative 100s who are at least capable of delegating tasks and getting along.
So there's other bottlenecks. "Working Memory" is probably the big one. I think extremely high IQ people are also defined by being able to fit a LOT more information in their working memory and thus can can bring all those mental resources to bear at once, rather than having to painstakingly write everything out and do each individual mental calculation one at a time.
So perhaps add in RAM to the equation. If you can't fit the majority of the problem in your head, at least big enough chunks of it to make progress, then you'll find yourself unable to ever solve it.
Side note, this is often how I feel most constrained when faced with complex problems. I can't actually 'visualize' the problem in my head because trying to load all the details in ends up pushing some parts out, and I can compensate by writing out bits of info, but this always slows me down substantially.
Here's the thing, though. No real world computer is Turing-complete. They all have finite storage and thus fail the infinite tape requirement. For an obvious example, try running eg. Stable Diffusion on an early 90s PC - you simply can't because they don't have enough storage for the model and results, even if you allowed infinite time.
Reminds me of the assertion that a 2004-2006 research supercomputer could probably have been capable of training GPT-3.
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