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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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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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