Some notes: "Variation in IQ during adulthood is about 70% genetic." The proviso "during adulthood" is important: "The heritability of IQ increases with the c

Some notes: "Variation in IQ during adulthood is about 70% genetic." The proviso "during adulthood" is important: "The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood." (Is it just me or is that a weird thing for it to do.) That being said, the Wilson Effect paper goes on to say, "It is important to specify the populations to which any results can be generalized and not misinterpret what they mean. The samples were drawn almost exclusively from Western industrial democracies. These settings have characteristic environments. Only a few of the participants were raised in real poverty or by illiterate parents, and all study participants had access to the contemporary educational programs typical of those societies. This is the domain to which we can generalize." In any case, for most of my life the variation in earring-wearing was almost 100% genetic, so there's that. "A lot of this seems to have to do with literal brain size (which is correlated with intelligence at about 0.2)..." 0.2 is not a very strong correlation. And correlations are funny. (https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) "There have already been intelligence explosions. Long ago, humans got smart enough to invent reading and writing, which let them write down training data for each other and become even smarter (in a practical sense; this might or might not have raised their literal IQ, depending on how you think about the Flynn Effect)." This is a direct contradiction to Alexander's apparent argument above, unless you consider reading and writing to have a significant genetic component. (Heritability? Oh, yeah, I'd expect reading and writing to have pretty high heritability, at least historically.) But is knowing things really what you mean by intelligence? "Later on, we invented iodine supplementation, which let us treat goiter and gain a few IQ points on a population-wide level." Fortunately, iodine supplementation is also highly heritable. "...were emphasizing how rather than magical intelligence, AI would need slow, boring work on the nitty gritty of computation..." How are LLMs doing on that whole hallucination thing? The ability to solve novel problems? P.s. A fun video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo