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We don't need smarter people, we need better ethics. Many of the monsters from history were highly intelligent. Many of the world's problems have ready solution
by Joeri 9y ago
We don't need smarter people, we need better ethics. Many of the monsters from history were highly intelligent. Many of the world's problems have ready solutions which are not applied because people are being clever. Think of intelligence as a force multiplier, if you apply it to a bad person they become a terrible person. It would be disastrous to start genetic engineering for intelligence prior to tackling the ethics problem.
The biggest issue with better ethics is that we can't define them, so we couldn't optimize for them. Nobody agrees on what a good person is because nobody agrees on the meaning of good. But meanwhile the real world outcomes are decidedly not good.
- wiz21c 9y agospot on
- sleepychu 9y agoAs you approach the limit of intelligence the danger that you'll realise altruism works for the whole but not the individual must increase, right?
- brlewis 9y agoAre you saying that as people get smarter they're less likely to think satisfaction in life comes from being someone who makes the world better? That they're more likely to think that satisfaction in life comes from getting more stuff than the next guy?
- sleepychu 9y agoI think if you engineer for maximum intelligence, yes. I want to make the world better but it's a bad use of my time from an individual perspective.
- narrator 9y agoElitism needs people to be unequal. That will weaken as an ideology when people can copy each other's genes. Inequality might still be retained by carefully guarding information and knowledge that confers an advantage.
- Kostic 9y agoIt seems to me that you are arguing for wisdom. Ethics are a product while wisdom is an ability, like intelligence.
- dmichulke 9y agoBeing 'bad' is IMO a consequence of two things: - You can be bad (i.e., lack of consequences) - You want to be bad (i.e., some sort of reinforcement, often $). Now both of these are de facto there if you become a high level politician and that's IMO the reason for real world outcomes [...] decidedly not good
- mtreis86 9y agoSome people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle. Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time. Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries. This is too complex of a concept to limit it to two coinciding factors, IMO we are all all of these things in differing quantities. Hopefully people learn that the consequences of bad actions are rarely beneficial long term and develop processes to mitigate.
- croon 9y ago> Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it. > Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle. Sure, but that's almost exclusively due to mental illness, not "rationality". > Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time. Survival is reinforcement. > Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries. Mostly because closer to the limit means more reinforcement. Simple risk/reward. I want to think that being good is non-religiously rewarded (ie. in this life), but I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think it takes effort not to take unethical shortcuts or make profitable but hurtful decisions.
- chestervonwinch 9y ago>> Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions. > So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it. Says Dylann Roof (convicted of mass shootings at a church in South Carolina), "I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry."
- zxcb1 9y agoIt would really be interesting to know if there was a correlation between genes and ethics.
- pas 9y agoThere is. The question is how much. There are various studies regarding this, I haven't read them (any of them): https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+standards&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&oq=heritability+of+moral https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+s...
- afarrell 9y agoMany of the monsters from history also operated in a world order which rewards monstrous behaviour and kills Ned Stark.
- ajuc 9y agoVery intelligent monsters in very intelligent society are still less of a problem, than very intelligent monsters in an average society.
- obstinate 9y agoI see this error so often on hn. You say, "we don't need x, we need y." When in reality we need neither, and both would be highly beneficial.
- mr_overalls 9y agoThis is a false choice. Society would almost certainly benefit from a larger proportion of highly intelligent people, and doubly so if they were also engineered with a genetic predisposition toward cooperation and prosocial behavior.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoAlmost certainly not. That gives us 'politically correct police states'. Put everybody in a rubber room and make sure they are nice to one another. A recipe for the downfall of society, collapse of the economy, end of social evolution. Its complicated to nation-build. Any that work now, do so because of competition and selection. Remove that with 'intelligent design' and all adaptation stops. Fitness plummets.
- mr_overalls 9y agoI suppose the devil is in the details. I'm not thinking of something like the genetically engineered humans of Brave New World, where docility is hard-wired into the lower classes. I'm thinking more along the lines of attenuating certain (hypothetical) genetic contributors to antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis, etc. Not engineering docile perfection, just less of the obviously really bad stuff. Edit: I do share your concerns about stopping Darwinian selection, though. Choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.
- Danihan 9y ago>choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact. lol, that's a great line.
- ansible 9y ago...in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217... If we don't achieve a technological singularity in the next couple decades, I doubt that an alien invasion will be a worry a couple centuries from now. I say this because of impending ecological collapse, which will end human civilization as we know it... if not humanity in total. And I'll save for another time a rant about how expensive it is for anything to cross interstellar distances. At most we'll see a self-replicating probe that tries to subsume all matter in the solar system, the "invaders" won't physically travel here.
- zach 9y agoI have good news: if we get smarter people, it seems that we may get better ethics too. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_code247572.pdf?abstractid=2656755&mirid=1&type=2 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_cod...
- pas 9y agoSmarter people will be at least harder to propagandize, brainwash and so on.
- Joeri 9y agoActually, there is a lot of literature that indicates the opposite. Informing people of bias makes them more susceptible to it (by making them better at rationalizing away their bias). And the backfire effect causes people to become more certain of wrong opinions when presented with evidence to the contrary. The idea that intelligence produces rationality is a myth.
- pas 9y agoSure, probably there is a valley. But it'd be pretty strange that IQ would not correlate with real world adaptation efficiency. After all, intelligence is useless if you can't use it to better navigate the world, because it itself misleads you (then you are better off with just fight-or-flight instincts). And probably tendency for rationality has a genetic component too.
- ucontrol 9y agoI'd say we need both.
- devcpp 9y agoGood thing we can max out all the good genes. I suppose it will have secondary effects but in small steps it should work.