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This is well put. What we don't understand as well, when it comes to different forms of intelligence, is what the trade offs are. Whereas it's very easy to see that the weight reduction that helps you cycle faster can hinder your sumo wrestling prowess.
What do you think the trade-offs are? I think you mentioned below how spending time with Cambridge math students led you to believe that high-IQ people are defective in other ways.
I have seen statistics showing that high IQ is highly correlated with many other factors of success, such as marriage stability, high incomes, mental health, physical health, and lifespan. People who have high IQs do not go senile as early.
Furthermore, it seems to me people with above-average IQs have more friends than those with below-average IQs.
But, clearly the stereotype of the Poindexter math student exists for a reason. So it may be that there is a threshold beyond which negative characteristics emerge. Or it may be that it's not so much high IQ, as it is an autistic level of fascination with math, that leads to the typical phenotype of the Cambridge math student.
In any case, there seems like a clear and obvious benefit to going from an IQ of 100 to one of 115.
The experience of the IQ 150 math student is so strange that it doesn't really generalize to the greater population. Although, even here, society will massively benefit from higher IQs even if the individual doesn't.
Neurotypical people with high IQs learn how and when to pretend to be stupider than they are very early - I can see my 4-year-old son (who has a diagnosis, but is noticeably less autistic than his brother or either parent) doing it already. So if you did meet a 160-IQ neurotypical, they would come across as being as smart as necessary under the circumstances, not as smart as they actually are.
You would identify that person because they have enjoyed improbable success in multiple different g-loaded activities, not because they are scarily bright in person - scaring the normies is, after all, stupid.
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It's currently beneficial to be 115 iq rather than 100 iq but it could certainly be possible that such a big jump in iq in a single generation risks various other deleterious effects when selecting so strongly for only one thing.
And what if we expand this to include people who have a median familial iq of 85 or even lower. Should the target still be 115? How big a rate of increase is really healthy? How hard should we really select?
So this is impossible without gene editing. The reality of this technology is much different than perception. The average woman with IVF has 7 embryos to choose from. Many of those will be unviable or not ideal for other reasons. Maybe, maybe, you can select between 2 or 3 on average.
You're not getting IQ of 115 from a median family IQ of 85, not that those people do IVF anyway.
I didn't say this was currently possible, I responded to your example of going from 100->115.
Let's say the industry booms and technology advances so we can have a 100 embryos to choose from in 10-20 years, what then?
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I think the embryo case below probably is going to be about the tail end of the curve because of the Silicon Valley demographics of people who'd use an embryo selection service for IQ. They are people with high IQ, who've been successful because of their IQ, and are in a culture that is a bit obsessed with IQ, so they especially care about that of their kids and may be trying to terminate the IQ130 embryo in favour of his 140 brother!
I find it highly likely that at the lower, mainstream part of the curve, IQ is indeed more simply correlated with many good things – a less alloyed good if you will.
But as for trade-offs to do with types of intelligence in general, it just seems pretty intuitive to me that if you take a bunch of archetypal impressive people, successful in different ways, you will find many whose brilliance could have been compromised by being too good at logic and not distracted enough from logic puzzles by other parts of life.
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