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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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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.
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.
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.
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