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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   25769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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No, I don't think so. We can already clone Von Neumann, and we can't actually engineer smarter people than that in the way we engineer airplanes or computers because we don't know how either intelligence or neurology work at that level.

We can certainly do iterated embryo selection on top of Von Neumann ... but I don't think that's going to work that well, you're running into non-additive effects there.

You can just take Von Neumann's genome and eliminate very rare variants (which are usually deleterous which is why they are rare), not even him was free from it (early cancer death).

Maybe that gets him 5 IQ points, certainly not 100. Or very likely that he was selected as one of the smartest out of billions people means that there's just less juice to squeeze out of that.

You don't need to know how intelligence works, you just need to sequence enough people in genome wide association studies, build a polygenic score and then run it

Right, that doesn't get you to 250 IQ or above existing variation I think.

250 IQ is 10 standard deviations from mean IQ 100, SD=15

If we have 1000 offspring per generation via egg harvesting embryos, taking the top 1% (10) they should be 2.33 SD from the mean

With 80% heritability, response to selection per generation is 1.86 SD

Thus it will take 5.36 (6) generations of selective breeding to get 250IQ with 1000 offspring per generation

Or 6 * 20 weeks = 2.3 years

If egg/sperm are from +3 SD donors, it's 3.76 (4) generations, or 1.53 years

Please consider donating towards my volcano lair lab on Kickstarter

Right, I'm suggesting that the mathematical model stops applying. Like, imagine humans are now cars. You can make a faster car than you did last time by copying the techniques of all the best car factories (this is sorta what embryo selection does). Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that, though I think non-additive effects will prevent that. But you can't make a car that goes at 1000 mph by picking out the best techniques from existing car factories. You'd need to do more technical design work than that, or have a LOT of new mutations and natural selection on them.

Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that

well if you somehow get established breed of sperm and eggcells that are 10-20% better than the best, wouldn't be that accomplishment by itself? You can have population of high IQ humans that can procreate naturally and their regression to mean is not to 100 or 105 but 160. Good?

Yes I agree that it would be good to do that, and have made many posts to that effect. Although we don't even need embryo selection for that since we can already identify smart parents, it's useful.

It's possible to study nonlinearity... though of course you are right, it's difficult and one of problems here that due to ethics problem nobody gets dataset on million IQ - genome pairs (we need to oversample at edges of distribution too)

You can't take half the components of a Ferarri and half the components of a Ford pickup, mix them together and have a working car. The piston of one wouldn't fit in the cylinder of the other.

But you can mix the genomes of males and females of the same species.

Cars have very few components so the variation is eg swapping out this brand of muffler for another one - they must all fit together. Genetic variation is extremely small (modifying less than a billionth of the system) - and mostly independent of other variation.

Imagine a car with 10,000 tunable components, that can vary without breaking the machine (life is robust to variation)

There are 8 billion cars, almost completely stock. Some have a few parts well tuned, and are fast, some have a few parts detuned and are slow

The fastest cars have 500 components perfectly tuned and are 4 or 5 standard deviations faster

What I'm saying is we look at millions of cars tuning matched to speed. We use this to work out what the best tuning is, then we select for that, making a car that uses existing components, but the combination has never existed before naturally.

We KNOW we can rapidly selectively breed animals that vary enormously from the natural stock. Look at racehorses, dogs, milk production in cows, the giant extremely fast growing chickens we eat today that lay eggs at phenomenal rates etc etc

We KNOW we can rapidly selectively breed animals that vary enormously from the natural stock.

Yes, that involves actually growing these animals to adults and testing them, but not hoping that our linear regression (19th century math) PGI is true.

Your position here is not the mainstream one, if you asked a hundred researchers in genetics if they thought your method could reach 250 IQ they would disagree. I was trying to do the sort of broad explanatory analogy we do a lot of here because it's a general interest place, but there are technical reasons why you're wrong. If you want to convince anyone, you should use rhetoric that acknowledges you're in an unfavored position.

I am a geneticist - nobody talks about selectively breeding human IQ because it gives you bad press, your uni may fire you and you will no longer get any grants.

But humans are just animals, and IQ is just a normally distributed polygenic trait... so ask them about whether it would be possible to say breed +5SD weight or wing size in fruit flies or mice length and they will say "of course"

The rapid turn around of generations via embryonic eggs is science fiction, but it's much closer to "geostationary sattelite" than "warp drive".

Curious. Why people do genetics research at all if it's prohibited where it matters the most, or "EA PGS explains 4% of variance"? Do (some) geneticists secretly hold politically incorrect opinions?

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... okay

As you said, 250 IQ is 10 SD. 5 SD and 10 SD are very different. If you had said 175 IQ, I would not have said that was categorically impossible. While I still do think that IQ is going to have construct issues, if you just assume a normal distribution there will be people who have + 5 SD out of 9 billion people.

The thing, though, is that intelligence isn't like muscle mass. In two ways. One (pretty confident), it's not just a thing you can measure. We genuinely do not know what the capabilities of '250 IQ' would refer to. No such people exist, not even close. IQ is defined by rank ordering an existing distribution and mapping it to a normal. If you carried out your method, and the 250 IQ person wasn't actually practically smarter than the 160 IQ person, you could still say - well, he's 250 IQ, because of the distribution of test scores we inferred the way we did the selection! And there wouldn't actually be anything wrong with that, other than the person not actually being usefully smarter.

Two, (much less confident, plausible but not more likely than not imo that the scientific consensus disagrees with this) intelligence isn't something where there's an obvious disadvantage to more of it. For muscle mass, past a certain point there's some fitness advantage from being stronger but it's more than compensated for by things like energy / diet requirements. So in an artificial environment with infinite food, it's really easy for natural selection to just modify whatever regulates how much muscles grow and grow more and have them get massive. I think intelligence is just hard, though. It's just a very complicated thing, and there's no simple way to have more of it if some other tradeoff is fixed. More intelligence mostly isn't a matter of increasing the number of neurons, plenty of people with the same head size as von Neumann just weren't von Neumann. And at von Neumann's scale non-additive effects probably play a significant role in getting you from 'very smart' to 'top 100', and natural selection just won't work as well on those.

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What if we asked them 'how fast we could genetically engineer 300 IQ humans if genetics budgets were >10% from military spending"?

I think they'd still say roughly what I'm saying - we'd need to actually understand how intelligence works to make changes that go that far from natural designs and we don't. There's a decent amount of funding in genetics and neuroscience, not 60B/year but decent. They'd also probably say that IQ might not mean anything at 300 and that being that smart might not actually be physically possible even if it did mean something.

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