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Comment by Moshe_Silnorin | Hacker News Reader

There is already a huge wealth and status divide between those born with high IQs and those born with normal IQs.

The incentives are such that it's going to happen. Also, it looks like very-large increases in IQ will be possible once we have millions of genomes tagged with their donor's IQ and a reliable means of editing thousands of alleles. More than a few standard deviations. I would certainly use this were it available today. If a rich person has to fly to Korea to do it, so what? Any country that bans it will fall behind.

The gains from this may be such that governments will think it worth subsidizing it for the poor's children. High IQ people commit less crimes, pay more taxes, tend not to use welfare. Liberals and conservatives will likely both converge on such subsidization.

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You're assuming IQ correlates with some capitalist notion of success, and genetic engineering can significantly improve IQ.

Both are debatable.

Empirically, many people with high IQs do badly financially, for a variety of reasons - not least because IQ doesn't correlate with ambition, creativity, strategic insight, mental health, empathy, or social skills.

Practically I'd expect useful intelligence enhancement would be incredibly difficult, with many potential side effects.

If you want to improve population intelligence, it may be better to invest in better nutrition, health care, and education.

>High IQ people commit less crimes

Or do they just get caught less often, and convicted less often if they're caught?

Empirically, on average they do better. There are brilliant losers. But brilliant people, on average, are wealthier and have higher status than less-brilliant people. Also, I suspect conscientiousness (another big factor in success) has a significant heritable component.

>If you want to improve population intelligence, it may be better to invest in better nutrition, health care, and education.

We've already plucked this fruit. Genetic engineering of embryos to IQs higher than any living human looks possible without side effects, as alleles that effect intelligence aren't likely to be additive: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421

Conscientiousness?

Damn auto correct! But conciseness is huge factor in success. Very few unconscious people achieve much of anything.

Consciousness?

>a huge wealth and status divide between those born with high IQs and those born with normal IQs //

Are you saying that's the primary reason for the status divide? Any citations that support that, the most recent research I've seem looked at societal status/wealth of families a few generations back and then traced living descendants to find how stratified things were. They found a high degree of stratification; that across generations it was far less likely that poor ancestors had wealthy descendants. Perhaps IQ goes this way too?

>High IQ people commit less crimes //

Or get caught less often. Wealthy people (in the UK) often commit some common crimes at what seems like a far larger rate because the penalty is usually just a fine and to the wealthy it's pocket-change [speeding, parking offences, tax evasion ...].

>Perhaps IQ goes this way too?

Yes. IQ is highly heritable.

Gwern has a good page covering this research: http://www.gwern.net/iq

As most people desire wealth and intelligent people are better at achieving their desires, wealthy people tend to have higher IQs on average than less-wealthy people. This has class implications as IQ is highly heritable. This isn't good or just; it's just the state of things. When I was young I was a blank slatist, but the world kept disappointing me. Marvin's razor:the most depressing explanation is likely be the truth.

> Or get caught less often.

I suppose smart criminals are less likely to get caught. Nice selection effect there, but I doubt it accounts for much of the difference.

You seriously think that high IQ people are committing as much crime as "whoever else", but get caught less often? Seriously?

Obviously a high IQ person on average will have a better job/more money and therefore have less reason to commit crimes.

You think average/below average IQ people are scared to jaywalk, illegally park because they're scared of the fine?

Does your ideology really cloud your reasoning to that extent?

There are all kinds of criminals. Hi IQ adults probably don't (generally) shoplift $3 worth of beauty products nor hold up gas stations for $56.

Bernie Madoff was probably pretty smart though don't you think?

And there are no doubt plenty of others who are too smart to get caught, and if caught not prosecuted, and if prosecuted not convicted. I'm not convinced hi IQ people commit that much less crime. Just that they probably commit less petty crime.

'Crime' is a ridiculous term, because the argument reduces to everyone is a criminal to some degree. But I think it's well established that there is a negative correlation between IQ and crime, of course not just using raw conviction rates, but after attempting to correct for factors like arrest/conviction rates.

mikerichard's point about less 'reason' to commit crime I think is a good one. A lot of crime stems from desperation.

Now I don't know about trying to create some kind of Bentham inspired calculus to put criminality on a weighted scale versus IQ and see if it all balances out.... The most terrible outliers are often economic or political leaders, by definition, their power in society gave them opportunity to commit "worse" crimes.

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