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Comment by Moshe_Silnorin | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this, but not a popular opinion. Hence the down votes you are getting. Korea and China don't have the same memetic immune response to such ideas, injecting one's children with growth hormone in hope of increasing future job prospects, for example, is extremely common in Korea. I suspect embryo selection and generic engineering for increased IQ will take off in East Asia first. Then we will be forced to allow it to compete. 50+ more IQ points looks very possible: https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421

However, any significant lag could spell the end of American economic dominance. For this reason, I intend to start investing more in Korean firms in the next few decades.

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A better way to increase iq would be to raise the socioeconomic level...

If genetic boosting is actually possible and not fringe bullshit, it's way faster than socioeconomic fixes, which seem to take 10 years per 3 iq points.

Nope. Genetic engineering works far, far better. We've already plucked the low hanging fruit of adequate nutrition, early education, salt iodization, and lead reduction. Anyway, those reduce mental retardation, they don't improve the baseline too much. And the Flynn effect looks to be slowing or reversing. 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the world when the average 5th grader is mastering chromodynamics is hard to even contemplate.

Is there any foreseeable way to apply gene editing like this to adults? Could existing adults (us) in the future make use of this type of IQ increase?

Not impossible but much, much, much more plausible with embryos. Modifying billions of neurons is a very, very tall order, and would likely be much less effective after the brain is grown. Embryo selection and modification are almost doable now, we just don't know which alleles to select for or edit in. A gift you can give your children but one you are unlikely to be able to get for yourself.

This is true, as much as I disagree with his ideas. Trying to genetically modify a living adult across many cells is very difficult.

Who's ideas?

> Genetic engineering works far, far better.

Um, do we know that? Unless I've missed some very interesting research that sounds like an extremely untested hypothesis.

It's untested in the sense that no genetic engineering has been done in humans, yes. (Unless you count gene therapy to cure disease, which is fairly different.)

However, there are some pretty strong reasons to think it would work, at least if we're just talking about improving within the typical range of human ability. Going to the extremes of existing ability and beyond is probably possible too, but there are more unexpected problems that could exist.

Has IQ-improving gene-editing been proven in animals then?

Yes: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/human-speech-gene-can.... (That said, you'd need to use a different approach in humans, because we don't have any smarter species that we can copy genes from.)

People in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean water. Lots of other folks in the world also don't have clean water. Doesn't that seem like an easier thing to fix than trying out experimental therapies?

This might particularly interest you: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

The gist of it is, in 1970 someone asked a director of NASA why billions of dollars were being spent on exploring space when millions of children were still dying on Earth. The response in part explained that NASA's R&D was paving the way for satellites with better weather forecasting, better communications, and better equipment that was making its way into people's everyday lives. While a bit morbid to say, the advancements made by NASA have arguably saved many more lives in the long run.

It's hard to see the point in investing in experimental technology whose payoff is unknown, especially when we have definite problems with feasible solutions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The possible payoffs - cancer cures, age prolongation, enhanced food production, disease and sickness prevention - that can come from investing in gene therapies are just too great to ignore.

As a side-thought, the technological singularity is thought of as the point at which we create an AI smarter than us, triggering a run-away effect of self-improvement. What if we end up doing it to our own race first through intelligence-improving gene modification? Can you imagine the implications of applying that intelligence to solving the rest of our problems?

doesn't doing both seem more effective

And if you're interested in helping people in places that don't have access to these things that salt ionization is almost certainly the thing to work on first.

http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/sal...

As to Flint that does seem to be finally over now, though goodness knows it went on for a distressingly long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#2017

I think you're putting too much faith into IQ.

Shockley only had an IQ of ~125 (even though he became an eugenicist...).

More importantly, Feynman used his low IQ score (124 I think) to show how useless the IQ test was as a predictor of intelligence.

IQ mean is 100 and stddev is 15. He was in the top 5.5% of human intelligence.

There are tests that don't use a standard deviation of 15. Feynman might have done, for example, the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test[1], which has a standard deviation of 24.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell_Culture_Fair_III

What Shockley and (especially) Feynman did is well beyond a 95th percentile of ability.

Ability isn't well distributed to where it can have a maximal benefit in a given field. It's often said that people as smart as Einstein (and Feynman) are currently living and dying on subsistence living farms.

What hasn't been said, but is equally true, is that people as capable in physics as Einstein as currently working as waitresses in No Where, Idahoe. Or they're slaving away as bit-actors in Hollywood because that's what they love.

Or they're sitting behind a computer, typing away on HN, never to know that they're potentially amazing theoretical physicists simply because their 7th grade teacher turned them off to the idea of physics in general so they studied computer science instead.

Until there's some kind of test that tells you your aptitudes at very subject, you'll always have people pick suboptimal paths to excellency and something other than what they absolutely theoretically could have been best at.

There is an ongoing minor controversy around Feynman's IQ score. See Steven Hsu here for some context: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einste....

Oh, and enjoy this one: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120214100719.h...

IQ test are a proxy for g. They are meaningless when applied to computers.

My point is that the IQ test is meaningless in measuring intelligence....

They really are meaningful. How about we make a deal? You read Intelligence: All That Matters and I'll read The Mismeasure of Man again.

Here's a neat primer from Vox on some of the social science behind IQ. It's incredibly predictive of people's life outcomes!

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence

That is...much better than I would have expected of Vox.

People are talking more about 15 point gains through embryo selection now rather than 50 point gains. The later might be possible at some point but even the former isn't quite within the grasp of current science.

> 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the world when the average 5th grader is mastering chromodynamics is hard to even contemplate.

We will have super smart burger flippers?

No amount of life quality can raise iq by the magnitude in the parent post.

If we don't try, then we'll have a lot of poor, sick, and unhappy geniuses walking around.

I wonder which types of crime they'll optimize?

Wow. That's amazing. You're actually arguing that we need to keep hoi polloi stupid so that it's easier to control them.

No, he's arguing that we provide the "hoi polloi" with a higher quality of life...

It only takes you so far. Mainland China is 99, Hong Kong is 107.

The ethnicity is virtually the same so that is being as close to a controlled parameter as it realistically can be without doing unethical things.

Would it not be the same argument as GMOs, that we don't understand the consequences enough and therefore shouldn't be used? N. Taleb has quite a detailed critique of GMOs, I'm wondering if this is the same to that and if the same concerns apply.

Well what happens when people start modifying people not for illness, but for other characteristics. You start having parents paying for their kids to make them faster, stronger, smarter, etc. You are left with two classes of citizens which might already be the case with wealth inequality. What about athletics with gene doping? It might be inevitable, but you have to think about what might end up happening.

So because some people might benefit and not others, we're all supposed to be stuck with these Savannah-adapted bodies forever? That's the ultimate crab bucket mentality.

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