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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2194 thread views

Making Cognitive Enhancement Palatable

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: I think that cognitive genetic enhancement is important for ensuring we have a better and lasting future. Many people have an intuitive dislike for the idea of using genetic enhancement to make a baby smarter but have little issue with in vitro fertilization (IVF). I try to build from a foundation of the acceptable practice of IVF to PGT-P for IQ.

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Thing is, this is going to be for middle-class and upwards of that. Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other (starting age six, I understand from this edifying story).

There's no point in educating these kids above their station, and why would you want them smart enough to recognise their shitty rung of the ladder, be dissatisfied and possibly able to organise to do something more effective than street protests and burning down police stations? They are always going to be at the bottom of the ladder, because great now you're IQ 120. Meanwhile, the rungs above you are making sure their embryos are selected to be IQ 130-140 before implantation in the hand-picked surrogate for gestation, and the classes above you will keep their grip on what they've already got. Before, identifying and recruiting any smart underlings was worth it in order to co-opt that productivity for your own benefit, but now that you can reliably be sure all your kids are smart enough for the new world, you don't need recruits that have to be taught how to be middle-class.

Any jobs the smart underlings can do will be automated/replaced by AI away, and holding on to the slots in the PMC are going to be more competitive as white collar jobs become vulnerable to replacement by AI. Why bother creating competition from below? Leave the masses dumb and ignorant as your children, and their children, pull further and further away, and throw sops to keeping the peace with bread and circuses and legalised drugs, until you can figure out a way to prevent them reproducing at all. Robots will be cheaper and better anyway.

Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other

This is such a quintessentially leftist, zero-sum, all-goods-are-positional-goods, spoils-system, school-pecking-hierarchy point of view. Do you think violent crime is an unchangeable quantity that can only be shifted around like liquid in a hydraulic system, that there's a fixed supply of non-crappy homes such that only a few get to have them, that the economy just needs someone to be on obese and on welfare? That all that IQ score represents is deviation from the median rather than a noisy proxy for absolute cognitive ability, so any improvement will only produce accelerated running in place?

It reminds me of The Citadel of Ricks from that damn cartoon – which is either brilliant satire or an expression of an extraordinarily pathological world model, or both, I guess. Unironic superhumans who can individually construct physics-breaking tools and AI-powered assistants – exploiting each other, building elaborate chains of abuse, maintaining artificial scarcity, ineffectively doing menial jobs to the point of burnout, in a mockery of a dysfunctional American city.

I'd understand it if you predicted a culling, seeing as you expect AI to be economically useful. But who the fuck needs to maintain a permanent underclass that requires babysitting, armed cops and shitty schools? Would our genetically-augmented overlords invest into reintroducing lead-laced gas and asbestos walls, while they're at it?

If I am to be blunt, I think this entire line of thinking is a cope. I think people hide in this worldview from admitting that some groups they care about are just fucked up – not relatively or conventionally, but in some rigorously definable, absolute, physical, embarrassing but potentially rectifiable sense. That there are hard limits on what can be achieved with «85 IQ», which do not follow from it being 1 SD below the «100 IQ» and thus non-competitive in a market economy. Limits on impulse control, cooperation, general decision-making. And moving beyond these limits allows for building an all-around nicer society for everyone, without extra requirements for morality of its elites.

Sure, they can try to cement their advantage – though that'd require the «PMC» to coordinate far more than they've been able so far. On the other hand, the main reason to avoid falling down the hierarchy is knowing how much it sucks down there. Sucks absolutely, not relatively. Scarcity begets crab mentality. And stupidity multiplies scarcity.

There is a huge demand for horror stories about the Japanese way of life. Japanese elites are not inhumanly virtuous or selfless; Japanese culture and society are rather hierarchical. There is, I'm sure, some violence, some bullying, some crappy housing in Tokyo – just very little, relatively speaking. But there certainly are no armed security guards in Tokyo schools. It's not because the undesirables have all been tucked away somewhere on Hokkaido. It's partially, but in a very large part, because there does not exist an underclass with sub-90 IQ in modern Japan. And no one deserves to be born into such an underclass.

@Eetan would no doubt gleefully remind me that the Japanese public has no guns anyway, so those guards wouldn't have had anything to do. Well, fair point. But there's very little non-gun violence either. There's virtually no shit like this in Japan. If the demand to lay down arms and obey can be made legitimate, guaranteeing extreme safety is one of the better ideas.

There's virtually no shit like this in Japan

I look at this and I'm amazed how good the facilities are compared to school I was in, are.

Thing is, this is going to be for middle-class and upwards of that. Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other

So...they'd be in the same situation as a variety of Asian immigrant groups? High IQ children, poor parents, bad schools, sounds like the Hmong a generation ago. Recall that for a while, "what about the Hmong" was often used as an argument proving Asians aren't a model minority.

As of 2019, Hmong household income ($68k/year) was higher than average ($65.7k).

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/asian-americans-hmong-in-the-u-s/

If they have the same IQ as poor Asian kids, they might also have the same crime rate and out of wedlock birth rates as poor Asian kids. That would solve the problems of going to schools full of stabby kids pretty quickly and the problem of single parent homes in a generation or so.

Once you solve the problem of "poor people are terrible to be around" by raising their IQ, poverty in America isn't actually a big deal. If you disagree, try to name a good or service you think poor Americans lack.

They are always going to be at the bottom of the ladder, because great now you're IQ 120. Meanwhile, the rungs above you are making sure their embryos are selected to be IQ 130-140

You seem to be assuming that technology for embryo selection will develop along the lines of cars (where the 10x more expensive car is perhaps 2x as good as a Corolla) as opposed to along the lines of cell phones (where even Elon Musk uses an iPhone). Why do you believe this?

I can see one plausible story: regulators prevent poor parents from accessing the technology while the rich get it done in Macau.

Don't agree here. I think raising IQ will unlock a lot of cognitive capital, which is good for the economy and society, and help mitigate or reverse these social problems. IQ is positively correlated with virtually every social metric there is.

Any jobs the smart underlings can do will be automated/replaced by AI away, and holding on to the slots in the PMC are going to be more competitive as white collar jobs become vulnerable to replacement by AI. Why bother creating competition from below?

But this will be offset to some degree by increased economic growth ,and hence more PMC jobs, due to increased productivity from having more smart people overall, and higher standards of living too.

IQ is positively correlated with virtually every social metric there is.

I midly agree a-priori although too high intelligence can make someone incompatible with others (see inferential distance) and make someones become too serious, I believe hyperintellectualism reduce abilities to produce humor/jokes.

But isn't the common belief that very high IQ people are contingently but empirically correlated with cognitive disorders such as e.g the autism/asperger spectrum?

But isn't the common belief that very high IQ people are contingently but empirically correlated with cognitive disorders such as e.g the autism/asperger spectrum?

The common belief is that this common belief is caused by a common misperception. Very high IQ people who lack cognitive disorders are less interesting than very high IQ people who have cognitive disorders, so they're less noticed, in favor of very high IQ people who have cognitive disorders. And so people falsely get the notion that having cognitive disorders is more common among very high IQ people.

However, that is just a common belief. I don't know if there's extensive research on this, and even if there were, if the extensive research is credible.

It seems autism is not associated with high IQ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21272389/

but on the other hand we have this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/

also there is more basis for asperger https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24362849/

maybe this is true for way outliers, but people with IQs in the 110-130 range seem mostly well adjusted. The terman study showed high IQ more successful overall. also, most of the maladaptive problems arise from dealing with less intelligent people. so raising national IQ could mitigate this too.

Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other

No they won't. That's what an IQ of 120 means. "A ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn’t a physical location, its people." Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.

(A surprising amount of people don't seem to realize this; they talk about good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods as if rich people used their wealth to hog all the good real-state where shootings and robberies and rapes and so on don't happen, as if those were natural phenomenon like lighting bolts rather than something caused by the people who actually live in those neighborhoods; likewise, complains about disparities in funding, as if schools in rich areas were taking advantage of a gold mine they unfairly took over rather than taxing the economic surplus produced by superior human capital)

Education doesn't do shit because trying to teach algebra to a boy with an IQ of 85 is a waste of time. Increasing his IQ to ONE HUNDRED AND FUCKING TWENTY would be the biggest improvement in the human condition since the industrial revolution.

Even if they start materially poorer, you have eliminated all the dysfunction. College students also live in material poverty, but they have much better lives, because they are smart and hard-working and nonviolent. "If you take the exact same facilities and you fill them with inner city gang members, drug addicts, ex-convicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and single mothers, you get a housing project."

And just like college students, after a while those 120 IQ kids will start accumulating capital and lifting themselves out of poverty. It's much easier to follow the Success Sequence when you have the intelligence of an undergrad.

Yes, they will still be below elite kids who got uplifted to an IQ of 140, but that's relative poverty, not absolute poverty. Caring about that is the politics of envy. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's." It's societal poison.

I can't find it, but there was a study a few years ago that showed that people would pay a lof of money to be able to control who who their neighbours were.

The current set of parents are not going to be IQ 120. That's the problem. And the whole "a rising tide lifts all boats" model has been shown not to work. Higher intelligence is valuable in part because of scarcity. When everyone is smart, then we hit the treadmill: everything has now been boosted up a step. Remember the credentialism debate? Job that you could get with no qualifications except a strong back and willingness to work hard -> job now needs high school diploma -> job now needs some form of degree/further education -> job has been automated away because machines are cheaper and faster.

120 will become the new 85. That's what you are not seeing. As for the "more smart people = more productivity = more PMC jobs", how is that working out with the wave of tech layoffs starting right now? When there's an economic downturn, "stock price valuation" becomes a lot more important than "we have all these smart people working for us that we have employed due to DEI initiatives". They trim down the workforce to the bone, and being smart and productive now means you are expected to do the work of two people.

I'm sceptical, because all this moon-shot optimism of the past has turned out very differently in reality. "Increased automation means people will have so much leisure time!" No, increased automation meant "now that we can be in communication with the other side of the world, you have to work weirder hours so you can be there when the markets in Tokyo open" and all the "yeah you're expected to work 60+ hours starting out to get anywhere in your career".

Same with IQ enhancement: yes, it will have benefits. No, the benefits will stay with the usual people and not "now everyone is a minimum of IQ 120, poverty is solved!" We've been 'solving' poverty for a long time, and yet it still lingers on.

120 might be the new 85 in terms of the relative position in society but they will still not be as violent, or stupid as an 85.

And the economy will change as economies are dynamic, if everybody is > 120 then some of the more entrepreneurial 120s will create employment for the people around that IQ level.

Maybe you are just afraid of competition.

Can't make it without an artificial class barrier to keep out the proles who weren't raised middle class?

120 will become the new 85.

There was Homo erectus once. Now it's Homo sapiens. When the latter replaced the former, did "120 become the new 85"? Do the sapiens enjoy better society?

No, increased automation meant "now that we can be in communication with the other side of the world, you have to work weirder hours so you can be there when the markets in Tokyo open"

19th century, no automation: you die from hunger.

I'm sceptical, because all this moon-shot optimism of the past has turned out very differently in reality. "Increased automation means people will have so much leisure time!" No, increased automation meant

It actually meant exactly that. People work way less hours now. (That's not even addressing the nature of work, namely that they're not working nearly as much in physically harmful and toxic environments, hell, even janitors today have less demeaning tools).

Not everything is a zero-sum game. No, really.

I notice I (IQ 130) followed the success sequence perfectly but I'm still a social outcast.

The success sequence is not a tool for avoiding social isolation; it just averts poverty. Are you poor? If not, it did its job.

Fair point.

Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.

Yes, but its not clear IQ 120 by itself would fix that. Genetic enhancement would be a thus-far-impossible level of decoupling between intelligence and other correlates of good outcomes, it might break currently observed correlations.

We still don't know of any drawbacks of IQ (or genetic correlates of IQ) no matter how many corrections we do; nor any interesting non-additive effects. Cognitive ability is independently causal for all of the good stuff, albeit it doesn't explain the whole of it; the common factor behind cognitive ability and good stuff (physical basis of g, apparently just high neurological and more general cellular functioning) has got to explain an even greater proportion, and this is what we'd be maximizing via IQ selection. For IQ-good outcomes relationship to be substantially explained by a confounder, it would require a very sneaky pervasive bias everyone is missing.

Would our hypothetical children who were embryo-selected for IQ PGS alone to the effect of 20 (or 40) points be perfectly equal in success to their natural intellectual peers? Indeed, it's not clear. Would they be better off – in the expected direction of less dysfunction – than the baseline, or rather, than random implanted embryos? You can bet on it.

P.S. This isn't really the best strategy for embryo selection, anyway. Gwern finds that:

selection can be made more effective by selecting on multiple phenotype traits: considering an example using 7 traits (IQ/height/BMI/diabetes/ADHD/bipolar/schizophrenia), there is a factor gain over IQ alone; the outperformance of multiple selection remains after adjusting for genetic correlations & polygenic scores and using a broader set of 16 traits.

I mostly agree.

nor any interesting non-additive effects

I dont know what people have with non-additive effects. In a highly polygenic trait, non-additive effects of genes are hard to detect because theyre almost certainly irrelevant even if real.

Would they be better off – in the expected direction of less dysfunction – than the baseline, or rather, than random implanted embryos? You can bet on it.

That is mostly what I expect as well. Im just saying that theres a lot more evidence that it "might as well be" IQ/genetics, than that it actually is.

Why would it be a decoupling?

One example for what this could look like is low mutational load: Its also correlated with all the good things, including IQ, and certainly causally upstream of it. Genetic IQ enhancement in a narrow sense wouldnt fix that, and if it has any effects not mediated by IQ (it almost certainly does), you wouldnt get those, whereas currently they strongly correlate with IQ. Now, in this case, if you know about it and are already doing genetic enhancements, its easy to fix that as well. But there could be more things like this.

Basically, noone has run an RCT on IQ increases, because we havent been able to do them.

Genetic IQ enhancement in a narrow sense wouldnt fix that,

In some sense, low mutational load is easier to get rid of: if you have good genome editing, but few data samples for study, you can just eliminate rare alleles in embryo rather than look for correlations in huge dataset for useful alleles. (Some have speculated that bc. long-term effect of purging of rare alleles is bad, there might be action to require people who purge old rare alleles to also take some new rare alleles).

Also, IQ is much more affected by mutational load that most traits. If our hypothetical uplifted 120 IQs would have somewhat shorter lifespans than natural 120 IQs, it's still a win.

noone has run an RCT on IQ increases, because we havent been able to do them.

No. We aren't doing RCT on IQ increases because our society is hostile towards it. We could have just cloned some genuises already, it's simpler, but we don't.

why wouldn't it?

Because you’re not gene editing, you’re picking embryos which has full genomes rather than pieces.

In humans, good traits are correlated. Beautiful people tend to be smarter. Smarter people tend to be harder working. And so on. It would be amazing if selecting for high-IQ embryos did not also select for high-IQ correlates.

If that were true I would expect a great number of physicist and mathematicians to be hot: in my academic experience that is not true, and even looking at the average celebrity scientist they not seem particularly good looking. Conversely I would expect many models to be at least bright: it doesn't seem so. There could be various explanation: I only know about the statistical outliers, people that enjoy Math and Physics are uglier than average so they are statistical outlier regarding the correlation between IQ and beauty or this correlation is extremely weak.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apartweak

Except that high-IQ is also strongly correlated with sociopathy, neuroticism, suicide, sexual deviancy, etc... so who's to say that you're actually selecting for a positive trait and that you wouldn't get better results selecting for a quality like conscientiousness or physical fitness than you would IQ?

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