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> 2. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs (as they get

by gwern 9y ago

> 2. This will lead to a massive rise in availability of human eggs for scientific research, accelerating many fields. Lack of availability of eggs (as they get prioritized for other uses) restricts things like embryo research and other genetic analysis of human germline Don't forget embryo selection: if you can create on demand several dozen or hundred eggs, the estimates of gains from embryo selection go from ~0.5 IQ points to 5-10 IQ points (and similarly for any other trait you might want to select for). 0.5 points is pretty trivial and no one will be beating down doors for that; 10 points, however, is a different proposition. Perhaps more importantly, it's a step towards iterated embryo selection - fertilizing, selecting, then regressing to stem cells, and progressing to sperm/eggs - and doing so for multiple generations, getting +10 points each time, for largely unbounded gains.

bognition 9y ago
Where are you getting the IQ boost from?
- gwern 9y ago
  It's from my analysis of embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection). But you can do it without the complications by treating it as an order statistic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic): what is the expected maximum of a sample of 5 Gaussians (rough current average egg harvest) vs 20 or 100 Gaussians, where the Gaussian is N(0, 0.5 * sqrt(polygenic score))? (Since you are selecting on the polygenic scores, not the unknown adult scores, and 0.5 because you are selecting from embryos which are 50% related ie. siblings.) X_5 vs X_100 is a big difference. (To save you the trouble, it's +1.16SD vs +2.51SD; the difference is actually much bigger than it looks because you lose so many embryos in the IVF process, so it's really more like X_1 vs X_196 or +0.56 vs +2.48SD, but to be more precise, you need to go into the weeds of PGSes and per-stage losses in IVF etc. But the order statistics are a good starting point.)
scarmig 9y ago
What's the reason for thinking the gains are unbounded? AFAICT we could reasonably suppose something like 50 IQ points is within reach via embryo selection, but what would a something like a 300 IQ even mean, and even if it does mean something tangible, why should we assume that's biologically reachable in the same way that a 150 IQ would be?
- gwern 9y ago
  Since historical estimates of figures like von Neumann or Sidis are more like +70-100 points, I would add at least 20 to that as the lower bound on the upper bound. Since such people existed, at least that much must be possible. Of course, there's no way to definitively prove there's any potential to reach above that short of the existence proof of actually creating such people, but there's a lot of considerations which point to much more being possible: many complex traits have been pushed by selective breeding by many SDs, no one has ever been remotely close to genetically optimal and humans are minimally selected for intelligence, there's a large mutation load in terms of gene breakage, absolute measures of cognitive functioning like vocab size or digit span or reaction time generally show humans are nowhere near limits, brain scaling laws do not put humans at near any 0 marginal returns point, etc. Even if there really is a bound at +100 and being able to increase IQ that much doesn't impress you for some reason, then you can simply spend your selection power on selecting for everything else... I shouldn't need to point out that many other traits are very important aside from intelligence.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    When you wrote "largely unbounded gains" I thought not only in terms of genetic potential but also the impact on science / technology / society / culture this would likely have. Pulling numbers out of a hat here: if we could have even, say, 0.015% of the global population, approximately 1 million people, with an IQ of ~200, the effects on the evolution of knowledge could be staggering.
    - Retric 9y ago
      If you look at actual people with 190+ IQ's their contributions are generally minor. We estimate that historic people that did great things had very high IQ's but that's our biases talking. EX: Garry Kasparov is often said to have a sky high IQ but he tested at 135. He did however have an unusually good memory.
MagicWishMonkey 9y ago
If we had the tech to do that we would already have the ability to genetically modify embryos with heightened intelligence. Do we even know what genes are responsible for that?
- lugg 9y ago
  Found your counter interesting so looked up this[1]. We already have the tech to do selection as above but it is cost prohibitive to produce the number of embryos required to do it at scale. Where you misunderstood was that this is selection, not modification. We do not know which genes to modify specifically. We can however, using commonality and statistics, select embryos for increased likelihood of increased intelligence based on a number of different phenotypes. That's where my understanding ends but the link below has more. The interesting idea was that we can repeat the selection process using the already selected for embryos - effectively skipping potentially many generations. As in, your kids could more correctly be your great great great great great grandkids. What I want to know is how far you could theoretically take it before the statistical analysis starts to break down. As in, can we get to twice as intelligent? Does our statistics / scoring even know what that might look like? Could we be looking at human induced evolution? [1] https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#polygenic-scores-for-iq https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#polygenic-scores-for-...
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > As in, can we get to twice as intelligent? Does our statistics / scoring even know what that might look like? No to your second question; that being the case, your first question has no meaning. We don't score intelligence with cardinal numbers, which would be required for "twice as intelligent" to make sense as a concept.
    - gwern 9y ago
      > We don't score intelligence with cardinal numbers, which would be required for "twice as intelligent" to make sense as a concept. We actually do score intelligence with cardinal numbers if one wants to. As I mentioned in my other comment, a number of subtests have absolute scales with true zeros: digit span, vocab, and reaction time come to mind. Quite helpful for cross-species comparisons like humans and chimpanzees...

by gwern 9y ago

bognition 9y ago

Where are you getting the IQ boost from?

gwern 9y ago
It's from my analysis of embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection). But you can do it without the complications by treating it as an order statistic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_statistic): what is the expected maximum of a sample of 5 Gaussians (rough current average egg harvest) vs 20 or 100 Gaussians, where the Gaussian is N(0, 0.5 * sqrt(polygenic score))? (Since you are selecting on the polygenic scores, not the unknown adult scores, and 0.5 because you are selecting from embryos which are 50% related ie. siblings.) X_5 vs X_100 is a big difference. (To save you the trouble, it's +1.16SD vs +2.51SD; the difference is actually much bigger than it looks because you lose so many embryos in the IVF process, so it's really more like X_1 vs X_196 or +0.56 vs +2.48SD, but to be more precise, you need to go into the weeds of PGSes and per-stage losses in IVF etc. But the order statistics are a good starting point.)

scarmig 9y ago

What's the reason for thinking the gains are unbounded? AFAICT we could reasonably suppose something like 50 IQ points is within reach via embryo selection, but what would a something like a 300 IQ even mean, and even if it does mean something tangible, why should we assume that's biologically reachable in the same way that a 150 IQ would be?

gwern 9y ago
Since historical estimates of figures like von Neumann or Sidis are more like +70-100 points, I would add at least 20 to that as the lower bound on the upper bound. Since such people existed, at least that much must be possible. Of course, there's no way to definitively prove there's any potential to reach above that short of the existence proof of actually creating such people, but there's a lot of considerations which point to much more being possible: many complex traits have been pushed by selective breeding by many SDs, no one has ever been remotely close to genetically optimal and humans are minimally selected for intelligence, there's a large mutation load in terms of gene breakage, absolute measures of cognitive functioning like vocab size or digit span or reaction time generally show humans are nowhere near limits, brain scaling laws do not put humans at near any 0 marginal returns point, etc. Even if there really is a bound at +100 and being able to increase IQ that much doesn't impress you for some reason, then you can simply spend your selection power on selecting for everything else... I shouldn't need to point out that many other traits are very important aside from intelligence.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  When you wrote "largely unbounded gains" I thought not only in terms of genetic potential but also the impact on science / technology / society / culture this would likely have. Pulling numbers out of a hat here: if we could have even, say, 0.015% of the global population, approximately 1 million people, with an IQ of ~200, the effects on the evolution of knowledge could be staggering.
  - Retric 9y ago
    If you look at actual people with 190+ IQ's their contributions are generally minor. We estimate that historic people that did great things had very high IQ's but that's our biases talking. EX: Garry Kasparov is often said to have a sky high IQ but he tested at 135. He did however have an unusually good memory.

MagicWishMonkey 9y ago

If we had the tech to do that we would already have the ability to genetically modify embryos with heightened intelligence. Do we even know what genes are responsible for that?

lugg 9y ago
Found your counter interesting so looked up this[1]. We already have the tech to do selection as above but it is cost prohibitive to produce the number of embryos required to do it at scale. Where you misunderstood was that this is selection, not modification. We do not know which genes to modify specifically. We can however, using commonality and statistics, select embryos for increased likelihood of increased intelligence based on a number of different phenotypes. That's where my understanding ends but the link below has more. The interesting idea was that we can repeat the selection process using the already selected for embryos - effectively skipping potentially many generations. As in, your kids could more correctly be your great great great great great grandkids. What I want to know is how far you could theoretically take it before the statistical analysis starts to break down. As in, can we get to twice as intelligent? Does our statistics / scoring even know what that might look like? Could we be looking at human induced evolution? [1] https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#polygenic-scores-for-iq https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#polygenic-scores-for-...
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > As in, can we get to twice as intelligent? Does our statistics / scoring even know what that might look like? No to your second question; that being the case, your first question has no meaning. We don't score intelligence with cardinal numbers, which would be required for "twice as intelligent" to make sense as a concept.
  - gwern 9y ago
    > We don't score intelligence with cardinal numbers, which would be required for "twice as intelligent" to make sense as a concept. We actually do score intelligence with cardinal numbers if one wants to. As I mentioned in my other comment, a number of subtests have absolute scales with true zeros: digit span, vocab, and reaction time come to mind. Quite helpful for cross-species comparisons like humans and chimpanzees...