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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.

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.