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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2427 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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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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