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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2368 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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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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