5 ms·

Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold. Regardless, 5 standard deviations is enormously huge. Every

Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold. Regardless, 5 standard deviations is enormously huge. Every person born would be as smart as the most elite scientists today. The most elite scientists in the future will be far smarter than anyone who ever lived. This has enormous military consequences, much larger than squeezing the dry rag of education.

ddingus 7y ago
It's too good to be true. There will be a catch of some sort. Color me ultra critical. And "dry rag" very seriously devalues people. Maybe doing that is the catch itself. One does wonder. Good education is more than a filter. Great people are a combination of nature and nurture.
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  Whatever your normative beliefs, we do not live in unipolar world. Our options are constrained by our competition. If the west makes this technology illegal, we will eventually be in conflict in a technological landscape we are too dull to comprehend. After which our laws, traditions and values will enter the history books.
  - igor47 7y ago
    This argument can be used to create and justify a race to the bottom in any field. Whatever your normative beliefs, those people over there are barbarians and will destroy everything you care about unless you destroy it first. How do we break the cycle?
    - ZhuanXia 7y ago
      That is a question so hard we need a genetically engineered supergenius to solve it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    Your claims sound no different than that of a proponent of eugenics in the early 20th century. And just as foolhardy.
    - jlawson 7y ago
      This is like a parody of every content-free guilt-by-association argument I've ever seen. Zero attempt to engage issues, obviously incoherent comparison with half-real historical bogeymen backed up by no attempt at argumentation... And really, you think early eugenicists were afraid Africans would become smarter than them? A fallacious, inappropriate personal attack backed by implied, unjustified, blatantly wrong comparisons. Make an actual argument please.
    - amfsn 7y ago
      Eugenics were crushed with violence, they weren't actually disproved.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Maybe. I actually do not believe it will be illegal. More likely, it will be abused, come with some unforeseen consequences, and diverse. Smarts will not be all that is attempted. Augmentation by combining biotech with electromechanical will happen too. There will be factions of various kinds. Who says We will have any meaningful control over the really smart augmented people, for example? They may mature, look around at the mess and have very different ideas on how this all goes. Should be a very interesting time.
lanstin 7y ago
Teaching does increase kindness and intelligence, however. Just as practise of difficult skills can increase ones abilities. Or have none of your experiences left you smarter than before?
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  Certainly, a natural-born genius raised by wolves wouldn't make any great contributions to mathematics. I suspect that what gets missed in the nature/nurture debate that the two are in a complex feedback loop, with the result being the product not just of nature and nurture but how the two interacted. I would think even if we run out of low-hanging fruit in optimising our biology, correctly tailoring education to temperament (or vice versa if that's how the societies of the future prefer to approach it) could be another huge area of advancement.
  - lanstin 7y ago
    No doubt once we or our AIs understand the biology a lot more thoroughly the future looks bright. But it is not like getting to a new software company and speeding up the build times by 10x.
hash872 7y ago
>Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold This is a pretty bad analogy man. Education, starting with basic literacy & numeracy, improves virtually everyone who goes through it- which is why mandatory education is part of every society now. Literacy alone completely changes outcomes for say women in developing countries. Just mandating an extra 4 years of high school in agricultural countries that really could've used the teenage help in the fields was a huge step forward for humanity. Education is an improvement process more than a filtering process, no one is born knowing how to read, count, do algebra, code, etc. I agree it does contain a filtering element too, but societies where the construction workers & janitors can read are better than ones where they can't
- soberhoff 7y ago
  Are you familiar with Caplan's Case against Education? Here's a good review (and some critique): https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3678 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3678 Caplan makes a very compelling case that education, while inarguably teaching something, primarily serves to signal preexisting ability.
  - hash872 7y ago
    ....all education? Basic literacy & numeracy? Teaching children how to count and their ABCs? How do you think civilization would function, then? I think that Caplan is arguing against college and further on
    - soberhoff 7y ago
      This is addressed in the summary. No, these essential skills are given a pass.
  - Faark 7y ago
    Do you have a more on point summary? That's a lot of text and the parts I skimmed say little against education. Obviously education is used for signaling ability. Not using it this way would be stupid, since it's one of the best tools for that we have. Kind of like the SSN seems to be used as ID in the US. Doesn't mean both of them don't also serve their original purpose anymore. And I haven't found much of of that in that 11 page blog post. Then there is a bunch about how to build better schools. This seems reasonable in principle, since the way we teach especially in early years is still heavily influenced from by long ago times with different workforce needs and a different culture in general. But lets better not get into the actually mentioned proposals. And this still does hardly fit the "IQ unrelated from schools" narrative discussed in the comments here. So back to those: If school has no impact, then were do those traits we aspire come from? Are here actually people who believe you can just dump an infant with perfect genes in front of a TV, feed (&co) it regularly, and then expect it to become a genius in adulthood? If not, then what makes the difference and why shouldn't some "school" help citizens apply whatever it is, supported by policy?
pcrh 7y ago
>5 standard deviations is enormously huge. And also hyperbolic. There is no current science that suggests the ability to create such a difference in individuals by genetic engineering.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Even if the first step is .25sd, then those people could maybe provide another .25sd and so on and on. A gradual increase simply dependent on previous GMO.
- gwern 7y ago
  'Genetic engineering' routinely moves traits by 5 standard deviations. Countless breeding programs have accomplished that or much more, and even under the narrowest definition of 'genetic engineering', something like editing in chestnut blight resistance will increase the trait by many SDs (going from ~0% chestnut trees surviving to a large fraction of them surviving). That is, after all, how evolution works.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    In animals or plants, for simple traits, yes. Complicated, polygenetic traits with virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors? Much more difficult. Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification. For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably.
    - gwern 7y ago
      > In animals or plants, for simple traits, yes. No, complex traits too. Come on. Dog intelligence and personalities? The domesticated foxes? Any of the many mouse/rat selective breeding experiments like Tryon? Personality, intelligence, these sorts of traits are all highly heritable and about the only thing everyone can agree on that heritability means is that you can select on it. 'virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors'? Give me a break! > Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification. ??? None of that is a real problem. You are wildly gesturing at hypotheticals and making stuff up. Being 'polygenetic' is not a problem, it's a blessing. > For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably. Yes, we do. The PGSes have identified hundreds of variants at genome-wide significance, and there are thousands at high posterior probability, with nontrivial cumulative predictive power in the general population.
jayd16 7y ago
If we always select the same genes then it's not fair to say we'll create a smarter scientist.
alasdair_ 7y ago
>Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold. Teaching people to read and write and do basic arithmetic significantly improves their overall outcome by almost any measure you care to look at. How is this not enrichment?
Paul-ish 7y ago
> The most elite scientists in the future will be far smarter than anyone who ever lived. This doesn't necessarily follow. It assumes the variance on IQ will remain the same, but a (potentially large) part of the variance comes from genetic differences.
cousin_it 7y ago
> Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold. But the Bessemer process does create steel. I'll be the first to agree that education doesn't give much knowledge (apart from basic reading and arithmetic, which take a few months at most). But it gives you something else: 1) Ability to show up on time 2) Ability to sit still and do boring stuff for hours every day 3) Belief in importance of grades Basically it's a forced personality change, turning children into worker bees. That's why it takes years and why it's so valuable to employers.

ddingus 7y ago

It's too good to be true. There will be a catch of some sort. Color me ultra critical. And "dry rag" very seriously devalues people. Maybe doing that is the catch itself. One does wonder. Good education is more than a filter. Great people are a combination of nature and nurture.

ZhuanXia 7y ago
Whatever your normative beliefs, we do not live in unipolar world. Our options are constrained by our competition. If the west makes this technology illegal, we will eventually be in conflict in a technological landscape we are too dull to comprehend. After which our laws, traditions and values will enter the history books.
- igor47 7y ago
  This argument can be used to create and justify a race to the bottom in any field. Whatever your normative beliefs, those people over there are barbarians and will destroy everything you care about unless you destroy it first. How do we break the cycle?
  - ZhuanXia 7y ago
    That is a question so hard we need a genetically engineered supergenius to solve it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Your claims sound no different than that of a proponent of eugenics in the early 20th century. And just as foolhardy.
  - jlawson 7y ago
    This is like a parody of every content-free guilt-by-association argument I've ever seen. Zero attempt to engage issues, obviously incoherent comparison with half-real historical bogeymen backed up by no attempt at argumentation... And really, you think early eugenicists were afraid Africans would become smarter than them? A fallacious, inappropriate personal attack backed by implied, unjustified, blatantly wrong comparisons. Make an actual argument please.
  - amfsn 7y ago
    Eugenics were crushed with violence, they weren't actually disproved.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Maybe. I actually do not believe it will be illegal. More likely, it will be abused, come with some unforeseen consequences, and diverse. Smarts will not be all that is attempted. Augmentation by combining biotech with electromechanical will happen too. There will be factions of various kinds. Who says We will have any meaningful control over the really smart augmented people, for example? They may mature, look around at the mess and have very different ideas on how this all goes. Should be a very interesting time.

lanstin 7y ago

Teaching does increase kindness and intelligence, however. Just as practise of difficult skills can increase ones abilities. Or have none of your experiences left you smarter than before?

SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Certainly, a natural-born genius raised by wolves wouldn't make any great contributions to mathematics. I suspect that what gets missed in the nature/nurture debate that the two are in a complex feedback loop, with the result being the product not just of nature and nurture but how the two interacted. I would think even if we run out of low-hanging fruit in optimising our biology, correctly tailoring education to temperament (or vice versa if that's how the societies of the future prefer to approach it) could be another huge area of advancement.
- lanstin 7y ago
  No doubt once we or our AIs understand the biology a lot more thoroughly the future looks bright. But it is not like getting to a new software company and speeding up the build times by 10x.

hash872 7y ago

>Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold This is a pretty bad analogy man. Education, starting with basic literacy & numeracy, improves virtually everyone who goes through it- which is why mandatory education is part of every society now. Literacy alone completely changes outcomes for say women in developing countries. Just mandating an extra 4 years of high school in agricultural countries that really could've used the teenage help in the fields was a huge step forward for humanity. Education is an improvement process more than a filtering process, no one is born knowing how to read, count, do algebra, code, etc. I agree it does contain a filtering element too, but societies where the construction workers & janitors can read are better than ones where they can't

soberhoff 7y ago
Are you familiar with Caplan's Case against Education? Here's a good review (and some critique): https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3678 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3678 Caplan makes a very compelling case that education, while inarguably teaching something, primarily serves to signal preexisting ability.
- hash872 7y ago
  ....all education? Basic literacy & numeracy? Teaching children how to count and their ABCs? How do you think civilization would function, then? I think that Caplan is arguing against college and further on
  - soberhoff 7y ago
    This is addressed in the summary. No, these essential skills are given a pass.
- Faark 7y ago
  Do you have a more on point summary? That's a lot of text and the parts I skimmed say little against education. Obviously education is used for signaling ability. Not using it this way would be stupid, since it's one of the best tools for that we have. Kind of like the SSN seems to be used as ID in the US. Doesn't mean both of them don't also serve their original purpose anymore. And I haven't found much of of that in that 11 page blog post. Then there is a bunch about how to build better schools. This seems reasonable in principle, since the way we teach especially in early years is still heavily influenced from by long ago times with different workforce needs and a different culture in general. But lets better not get into the actually mentioned proposals. And this still does hardly fit the "IQ unrelated from schools" narrative discussed in the comments here. So back to those: If school has no impact, then were do those traits we aspire come from? Are here actually people who believe you can just dump an infant with perfect genes in front of a TV, feed (&co) it regularly, and then expect it to become a genius in adulthood? If not, then what makes the difference and why shouldn't some "school" help citizens apply whatever it is, supported by policy?

pcrh 7y ago

>5 standard deviations is enormously huge. And also hyperbolic. There is no current science that suggests the ability to create such a difference in individuals by genetic engineering.

Avamander 7y ago
Even if the first step is .25sd, then those people could maybe provide another .25sd and so on and on. A gradual increase simply dependent on previous GMO.
gwern 7y ago
'Genetic engineering' routinely moves traits by 5 standard deviations. Countless breeding programs have accomplished that or much more, and even under the narrowest definition of 'genetic engineering', something like editing in chestnut blight resistance will increase the trait by many SDs (going from ~0% chestnut trees surviving to a large fraction of them surviving). That is, after all, how evolution works.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  In animals or plants, for simple traits, yes. Complicated, polygenetic traits with virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors? Much more difficult. Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification. For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably.
  - gwern 7y ago
    > In animals or plants, for simple traits, yes. No, complex traits too. Come on. Dog intelligence and personalities? The domesticated foxes? Any of the many mouse/rat selective breeding experiments like Tryon? Personality, intelligence, these sorts of traits are all highly heritable and about the only thing everyone can agree on that heritability means is that you can select on it. 'virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors'? Give me a break! > Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification. ??? None of that is a real problem. You are wildly gesturing at hypotheticals and making stuff up. Being 'polygenetic' is not a problem, it's a blessing. > For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably. Yes, we do. The PGSes have identified hundreds of variants at genome-wide significance, and there are thousands at high posterior probability, with nontrivial cumulative predictive power in the general population.

jayd16 7y ago

If we always select the same genes then it's not fair to say we'll create a smarter scientist.

alasdair_ 7y ago

>Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold. Teaching people to read and write and do basic arithmetic significantly improves their overall outcome by almost any measure you care to look at. How is this not enrichment?

Paul-ish 7y ago

> The most elite scientists in the future will be far smarter than anyone who ever lived. This doesn't necessarily follow. It assumes the variance on IQ will remain the same, but a (potentially large) part of the variance comes from genetic differences.

cousin_it 7y ago

> Education is more a filtering mechanism than an enrichment mechanism. Panning does not create gold. But the Bessemer process does create steel. I'll be the first to agree that education doesn't give much knowledge (apart from basic reading and arithmetic, which take a few months at most). But it gives you something else: 1) Ability to show up on time 2) Ability to sit still and do boring stuff for hours every day 3) Belief in importance of grades Basically it's a forced personality change, turning children into worker bees. That's why it takes years and why it's so valuable to employers.