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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 b
by 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 agoSome 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 agoIt'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 agoOh 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 agoPersonal attacks will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lanstin 7y agoMalaria vaccination/parasite elimination/even vector elimination would seems to have a different risk/cost/benefit profile than removing, without anfull knowledge of the biology or the social stability implications, a defining emotional/mental characteristic of our species. But whatever, maybe you plan this change just for the "betas and gammas" we alphas can keep flaming away.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't call names in arguments on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- chr1 7y agoBefore genetic modifications we should try cloning people (especially famous scientists) to see how much of IQ is genetic, and how is it affected by the environment.