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This argument never made much sense to me because overall IQ is correlated positively with health and longevity. Sure, it might change the nature of the afflict

This argument never made much sense to me because overall IQ is correlated positively with health and longevity. Sure, it might change the nature of the afflictions we get, but mostly this just feels like an argument from just comeuppance, when in reality nature doesn't give a damn about being fair.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
I used to be involved in the online gifted community. Slightly above average IQ is correlated with generally doing better across the board. "Genius" type IQs are so strongly associated with a raft load of various problems, such as ADHD and OCD, that some people call them comormidities for lack of a better word. The information stuck with me because I have a genetic disorder and was one of the top people in my graduating high school class and won a National Merit Scholarship. I'm certainly not looking for some "gotcha" for smart people, just trying to make my own life work. I know a bit more than average about both genetic disorders and high intelligence. My knowledge of both is certainly not motivated by some ugly impetus.
- bradleyjg 7y ago
  The general form of this problem is that the correlations, including things like retest and test-to-test repeatability, all come from the fat part of the curve (say +/- 2 sd). But people love to extrapolate those findings to the part of the tail where there is no good data.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  It's unreasonable to expect initial modifications to start out as swathe modifications summing to tens of IQ points. The first gene modifications are going to be fixated on the safest changes that can be made to health and, along the road, things that correlate most convincingly with IQ and positive outcomes. We'll only see increases in base rates of geniuses born at this point as an incidental byproduct of moving the line one step closer. The average person undergoing these modifications will be better off for it, and early failures will predominantly be due to issues in doing these modifications well, not intrinsic negative byproducts of IQ enhancement. This is all speculation, but it makes more sense to me than how you presented it.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Some issues: IQ tests have problems, but aren't completely useless. But it means there's always some legitimacy to the argument that "Them that has, gets" aka that it's cultural, it's "who you know, not what you know" etc. People with "very high IQs" fundamentally approach problems differently from others. They aren't trying to build a better metaphorical apple. They show up with an orange instead. Your idea of "better" doesn't really parse for me. A bird flies better than a fish. A fish swims better than a bird. But a (gilled) fish out of water will soon die from lack of oxygen. When you modify genes, there is one certainty: You are changing things. There is much less certainty that you are changing them for the better and my understanding of life, the universe and everything suggests it's probably deluded to believe you can change things for the better with zero downside.
    - Veedrac 7y ago
      It's this core idea that compromise is equivalence that I was arguing against. You're comparing the fish with the birds, but you're forgetting the other fish that got infected with some specific disease before going extinct. Humans are new, living in environments a thousand times newer. There is very little reason to believe that we've hit a local optimum, and a lot to believe that some mental characteristics (like being in the bottom half of aggressiveness) would be pretty much universally positive.
      - lanstin 7y ago
        Oh my god the hubris. You want to start engineering out agressiveness potential? Given that genes code for a system that is then trained by experience maybe you want to tweak the training set first.
        Veedrac 7y ago
        ---
        dang 7y ago
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  Be very skeptical about wearing mental disorders as honor badges. I was a higher-than-average IQ kid, but it wasn't because of greater intelligence, but because I was introvert, and introvert hobbies usually make you score better at traditional IQ tests. I said "was" because I don't think I'm more intelligent than average. Personally, I think IQ tests are bogus because the more you take, the higher your IQ becomes. It's not your intelligence that grows, but your understanding of what IQ tests expect of you.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Be very skeptical about wearing mental disorders as honor badges. I was involved with online support groups. These were not people looking for bragging rights. They were people trying to make their lives work and finding that their differences were a significant social burden that was often threatening to outright ruin their lives. One point of clarification: I don't have a mental disorder. I have a genetic disorder, which is a serious medical condition. My original assertion was that there is some evidence that some genetic disorders correspond to higher IQ. I stand by that. The detail about the more well established pattern that issues like OCD are known to be a problem for people with extremely high IQs was introduced to rebut the idea that the lives of "smart people" are globally better in every way from that of "average people." But replies focusing on that seem to be moving the goal posts, which makes it difficult to meaningfully engage.
bilbo0s 7y ago
I think you are maybe conflating people with slightly higher than average IQ's, like those who maybe were in NHS in high school or something, with geniuses. They are not at all the same thing. There's a lot of debilitating ailments when you start getting into the top half of the 1% IQ elites. There are many people looking into the why's? and the how's? of that, because it is absolutely something that we should be trying to get a better understanding of.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  To be clear, I'm not denying that genius correlates with certain mental afflictions. I'm denying that this should be a major reason to be concerned about IQ enhancement through genetic modifications, and would add to my original point by suggesting that there are clearly also ways for people to attain exceptionally intelligent brains while not having these issues (since many examples exist), and it is not at all obvious that we couldn't purposefully aim for that space.
  - lanstin 7y ago
    Safe to bet if our biology was easily tweaked to make us all super smart without cost evolution would have found it. Engineering is all about trade offs. And having people of differing abilities seems to make groups stronger and more likely to survive.
    - Veedrac 7y ago
      This isn't a safe bet at all; we're the first arrivals, it would be a shock if we did everything right the first time.
      - lanstin 7y ago
        We didn't do anything. Evolution is a relatively efficient searcher but a very bad respector of modern systems design principals. Each chemical pathway has a tendency to be tied to multiple unrelated systems. The genome itself is only for a developmental system/architecture largely consistent across the vertebrates. We could try surpressing say visible agression traits and discover 50% of the folks die in their fifties due to some previously unknown liver metabolism or get super depressed when their kids grow up or get phantom limb pains. If some one gene swap would make people 10% smarter and not kill their groups off faster, odds are we have the better gene. Biology is just a lot more complex than code, or vaccines. I mean i might be wrong maybe increasing "fitness of mind" will be as easy as a smallpox vaccine. But i haven't read any genetic or proteomic stuff that makes me say, oh wow this is simpler than we thought. What i see is people building software to get a grip on the complexity of these systems.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I used to be involved in the online gifted community. Slightly above average IQ is correlated with generally doing better across the board. "Genius" type IQs are so strongly associated with a raft load of various problems, such as ADHD and OCD, that some people call them comormidities for lack of a better word. The information stuck with me because I have a genetic disorder and was one of the top people in my graduating high school class and won a National Merit Scholarship. I'm certainly not looking for some "gotcha" for smart people, just trying to make my own life work. I know a bit more than average about both genetic disorders and high intelligence. My knowledge of both is certainly not motivated by some ugly impetus.

bradleyjg 7y ago
The general form of this problem is that the correlations, including things like retest and test-to-test repeatability, all come from the fat part of the curve (say +/- 2 sd). But people love to extrapolate those findings to the part of the tail where there is no good data.
Veedrac 7y ago
It's unreasonable to expect initial modifications to start out as swathe modifications summing to tens of IQ points. The first gene modifications are going to be fixated on the safest changes that can be made to health and, along the road, things that correlate most convincingly with IQ and positive outcomes. We'll only see increases in base rates of geniuses born at this point as an incidental byproduct of moving the line one step closer. The average person undergoing these modifications will be better off for it, and early failures will predominantly be due to issues in doing these modifications well, not intrinsic negative byproducts of IQ enhancement. This is all speculation, but it makes more sense to me than how you presented it.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Some issues: IQ tests have problems, but aren't completely useless. But it means there's always some legitimacy to the argument that "Them that has, gets" aka that it's cultural, it's "who you know, not what you know" etc. People with "very high IQs" fundamentally approach problems differently from others. They aren't trying to build a better metaphorical apple. They show up with an orange instead. Your idea of "better" doesn't really parse for me. A bird flies better than a fish. A fish swims better than a bird. But a (gilled) fish out of water will soon die from lack of oxygen. When you modify genes, there is one certainty: You are changing things. There is much less certainty that you are changing them for the better and my understanding of life, the universe and everything suggests it's probably deluded to believe you can change things for the better with zero downside.
  - Veedrac 7y ago
    It's this core idea that compromise is equivalence that I was arguing against. You're comparing the fish with the birds, but you're forgetting the other fish that got infected with some specific disease before going extinct. Humans are new, living in environments a thousand times newer. There is very little reason to believe that we've hit a local optimum, and a lot to believe that some mental characteristics (like being in the bottom half of aggressiveness) would be pretty much universally positive.
    - lanstin 7y ago
      Oh my god the hubris. You want to start engineering out agressiveness potential? Given that genes code for a system that is then trained by experience maybe you want to tweak the training set first.
      - Veedrac 7y ago
        ---
        dang 7y ago
ASalazarMX 7y ago
Be very skeptical about wearing mental disorders as honor badges. I was a higher-than-average IQ kid, but it wasn't because of greater intelligence, but because I was introvert, and introvert hobbies usually make you score better at traditional IQ tests. I said "was" because I don't think I'm more intelligent than average. Personally, I think IQ tests are bogus because the more you take, the higher your IQ becomes. It's not your intelligence that grows, but your understanding of what IQ tests expect of you.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Be very skeptical about wearing mental disorders as honor badges. I was involved with online support groups. These were not people looking for bragging rights. They were people trying to make their lives work and finding that their differences were a significant social burden that was often threatening to outright ruin their lives. One point of clarification: I don't have a mental disorder. I have a genetic disorder, which is a serious medical condition. My original assertion was that there is some evidence that some genetic disorders correspond to higher IQ. I stand by that. The detail about the more well established pattern that issues like OCD are known to be a problem for people with extremely high IQs was introduced to rebut the idea that the lives of "smart people" are globally better in every way from that of "average people." But replies focusing on that seem to be moving the goal posts, which makes it difficult to meaningfully engage.

bilbo0s 7y ago

I think you are maybe conflating people with slightly higher than average IQ's, like those who maybe were in NHS in high school or something, with geniuses. They are not at all the same thing. There's a lot of debilitating ailments when you start getting into the top half of the 1% IQ elites. There are many people looking into the why's? and the how's? of that, because it is absolutely something that we should be trying to get a better understanding of.

Veedrac 7y ago
To be clear, I'm not denying that genius correlates with certain mental afflictions. I'm denying that this should be a major reason to be concerned about IQ enhancement through genetic modifications, and would add to my original point by suggesting that there are clearly also ways for people to attain exceptionally intelligent brains while not having these issues (since many examples exist), and it is not at all obvious that we couldn't purposefully aim for that space.
- lanstin 7y ago
  Safe to bet if our biology was easily tweaked to make us all super smart without cost evolution would have found it. Engineering is all about trade offs. And having people of differing abilities seems to make groups stronger and more likely to survive.
  - Veedrac 7y ago
    This isn't a safe bet at all; we're the first arrivals, it would be a shock if we did everything right the first time.
    - lanstin 7y ago
      We didn't do anything. Evolution is a relatively efficient searcher but a very bad respector of modern systems design principals. Each chemical pathway has a tendency to be tied to multiple unrelated systems. The genome itself is only for a developmental system/architecture largely consistent across the vertebrates. We could try surpressing say visible agression traits and discover 50% of the folks die in their fifties due to some previously unknown liver metabolism or get super depressed when their kids grow up or get phantom limb pains. If some one gene swap would make people 10% smarter and not kill their groups off faster, odds are we have the better gene. Biology is just a lot more complex than code, or vaccines. I mean i might be wrong maybe increasing "fitness of mind" will be as easy as a smallpox vaccine. But i haven't read any genetic or proteomic stuff that makes me say, oh wow this is simpler than we thought. What i see is people building software to get a grip on the complexity of these systems.