Improving the development and deployment of existing human intelligence is the strongest logical pathway for expanding human intelligence.
1. Most humans don't develop to anywhere near their full potential.
2. It's unclear whether even the "best" humans are anywhere near actual limitations.
3. Most humans spend large amounts of time doing drudge, unrewarding work below their full developed potential that could be better accomplished in other ways.
Things like efforts to expand AI potentially chip away at 3.
Imagine all humans working at their full potential. Would we have fewer people because we do not need that much potential?
Would this have caused world wars decades, centuries, or millennia earlier?
What will be the cost of making all humans work at their full potential?
Maybe a hard problem to solve.
They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are scattershot and disorganized.
But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative expression, and wealth, too.
Imagine taking another small step in the direction towards developing and exploiting human talent and allowing for self-actualization.
That was what I was getting at in my previous post: having everyone at peak potential is great when everyone is aligned. If there is internal strife, peak potential just means bigger conflicts. Taken to the extreme, that means bigger wars and billions of dead people. Until we can figure out the coordination problem, human limitations are not the biggest problem IMO.
My counterpoint is that even without people being aligned, we're far outperforming the past and what people hundreds of years ago thought we might do with increased privilege. Indeed, we even have less strife overall, even if we have many more axes of disagreement and fewer shared values.
It's pretty dated regarding the roles of women and men, but the ideas are very interesting nevertheless. One of the big insights is that many people might not be ready to operate at full potential - they would succumb to various forms of insanity.
Look how the Internet's 'network effect' amplified the voices of conspiracy theorists all over the world. Now imagine an enhancement of that kind of paranoia: this is what the super-rationalist protagonists had to deal with in Brainwave...
Most of us have more interesting work that more fully uses our intellectual potential than typical people had a few hundred years ago.
And most of us also get more time in leisure, now, than people a few hundred years ago.
I think there's progress, but it's uneven. Look at what step changes of using a little more human creativity and intelligence-- the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial and Information revolutions-- completely upending our society each time.
We really do have more people working stem and less need for physical resource use, at least in some areas.
B won't expand human intelligence.
C is paved with unintended consequences. Wait until it's not playing.
So, IMHO, mostly A.
To ellaborate: aren't there unintended consequences of very high intelligence?
Just think of a kid adopted out of the nursery by two smart parents. Is that kid: A) more likely to score higher on tests, B) more likely to score lower on tests, or C) exactly as likely to score high/low on tests no matter who his adoptive parents are?
Edit: This is my opinion on what I consider a fact based on a fair bit of research and first hand observation. People are free to disagree with this but if they've made it to this point still holding that opinion then I think it's unlikely anything I could say would change their minds.
Given the difficulty of defining an objective measure for intelligence and the confounding factors of upbringing, I think it is almost impossible to find a good source on this sort of thing. Why should we go on a snipe hunt to prove your point?
IQ is not a perfect metric, but it is a decent predictor of many outcomes.
> the confounding factors of upbringing
This is why you do twin studies and studies using adoption as a control. We have quite a wealth of them. A good critical review of the evidence on both sides is here: https://humanvarietiesdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/the...
* Identical twins have a much higher correlation coefficient of intelligence than fraternal twins (table 5).
* Identical twins raised apart have a correlation coefficient for intelligence of around .73 (MZA studies).
* Correlation coefficients of IQs of biologically unrelated siblings raised in the same adoptive environment are approximately 0.
There are obvious confounds the paper mentions:
* Fraternal twins may not have identical environments.
* Adoptive environments may not represent typical parenting environments.
* Some of these studies have had poor controls and practices.
* Distribution of results from studies looks bimodal which indicates something weird is going on.
Still, even if you take the most critical view I think you have to accept that there is still substantial heritability of intelligence. These results cannot be convincingly explained any other way.
You replied to my comment of "genes don't even have to boost intelligence for kids from smart parents to be more likely to be intelligent" with "Unfortunately intelligence is mostly genetic, look it up..." I'm not sure why you used the word "unfortunately" or what you want me to look up since you didn't even appear to be responding to what I wrote.
> but if they've made it to this point still holding that opinion[...]
I'm confused as to what this is intended to mean.
> [...]then I think it's unlikely anything I could say would change their minds.
How can you know to what extent anyone reading this has made up their mind about anything?
Approximately C. See IQ adoption studies like https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-willoughby.pdf#page=6 for the scatterplot for adoptive parental IQ vs adoptee.
I am imagining if any couple could adopt; taking the same kid (which of course we cannot do) and having them raised by a couple of college professors vs. a couple of meth addicts living in a drug den - I would be absolutely stunned if there were no difference in what kind of test scores the kid would get growing up.
There were a bunch of studies on identical twins who were adopted in different families, so it can be tested. I think they showed the same thing (kids parents more important than adoptive parents) but I'm not certain and can't quickly find the studies to verify.
Here, unfortunately that doesn't get around the confounding factor that only parents deemed suitable candidates by adoption agencies are able to adopt and raise children, so they are not an accurate cross section of all possible parents. I don't dispute that there may be a threshhold at which some innate traits take over (or fail to do so) from the benefits of a nurturing environment (which may have diminishing returns past a certain point).
Not only do we have evidence that the heritability of intelligence is high, from twin studies, but also: adopted siblings' intelligence is only slightly correlated-- barely better than strangers. Biological sibling intelligence raised in the same house are very closely correlated.
This seems to imply once parenting is "good enough", these types of environmental effects don't affect IQ in adulthood to a significant degree.
Perhaps the most interesting finding: parenting does seem to affect IQ scores in early childhood more than genetics, but by adulthood the strengths of these relationships have completely reversed.
Into adulthood I find it very difficult to say whose intelligence is "better" in anything close to an objective way. While the results of genetic influence may become evident in some kinds of tests, it is just as easy to conceive tests at which the same candidate would fail yet someone else with a lower IQ might do very well. The possibilities are endless and I really don't think outside of cases of abuse or neglect creating specific developmental deficiencies as you mentioned that we can meaningfully quantify intelligence generally. If we could better do so I think the influence of parenting might still become more evident than what we see in IQ tests.
> No one is arguing that.
Well, my initial comment was simply an attempt to make the point that parenting can have an effect whether or not genetics do and the reply I got was "look it up".
Intelligence is difficult to quantify and define. BUT: peoples abilities on a wide variety of tasks are positively correlated. This strongly implies there is some kind of underlying factor that makes you better at "all things", and this is what IQ tests attempt to measure.
e.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#/medi...
Of course, the correlation coefficients are not 1; so of course someone can have a lower IQ than you but far outperform you in one of these tasks.
The results from IQ tests seem to be very strong predictors of many outcome measures later in life-- indeed, more than parenting seems to predict these things.
edit: from the wikipedia article on g factor:
" Research indicates that tests of g are the best single predictors of job performance, with an average validity coefficient of .55 across several meta-analyses of studies based on supervisor ratings and job samples. The average meta-analytic validity coefficient for performance in job training is .63.[76] The validity of g in the highest complexity jobs (professional, scientific, and upper management jobs) has been found to be greater than in the lowest complexity jobs, but g has predictive validity even for the simplest jobs. Research also shows that specific aptitude tests tailored for each job provide little or no increase in predictive validity over tests of general intelligence."
The usual analogy is that you can always lower the IQ of a child by hitting them on the head with a hammer or by lacing their food with lead powder. But no intervention has been found that raises IQ.
The South Korean twin had an IQ of 100 (Slightly below average for her country) and the US twin had an IQ of 84. (Significantly below average)
So, still no evidence of an intervention that can increase IQ, but plenty of evidence that it can be lowered.
Since almost no one, without deliberate intervention, experiences an environment completely free of known factors that are detrimental to IQ compared to the optimum environment, it's purely a semantic game to say that there are no known interventions that increase IQ.
All the other ones will happen to the best of our ability, but only for specific groups, and people(Or at least people like me) could wond up seeing them as almost cults, for a long while until it is totally proven safe and beneficial.
The rest of us, at least for now without major cultural change, will just do more and more of our "thinking" outside our heads.
Unless you can prove, via decades long studies, that your enhancements are totally safe and side effect free, with not even some headaches or 1 in 10000 complications, I'll just... use google.
Even if you did have the studies I'd still want to personally meet enhanced people and see for myself if it altered their personality or caused some random aches and pains, or had some other regrettable thing they didn't bother to do a study for.
Even after all that, there could still be social discrimination. If cyborgs were disliked my most people, I'll probably leave it to the people who are passionate about enhanced intelligence.
Sure, maybe I could get a better job. Maybe I would even be able to understand 3D space well enough to do things like driving and not occasionally walking directly into door jambs.
But by the time you have the enhancements cars will be self driving and computers will be able to do even more of the math I'd want to do.
I don't think I have any close friends who want a Neuralink.
CAD programs are essentially already a primitive form of neural prosthesis. We can work with shapes we couldn't work with mentally, and workflows outside of the traditional "Imagine, understand, write it down" are possible.
Even if ALL the problems are solved, it probably will only be useful to people working in specific cutting edge sectors, and for committed philosophers(Professional or amateur) who belong to a school that is not against enhancements in the first place.
But... in the short term, I think we could still make massive gains purely by improving education and child-rearing. If our schools and families actually raised and educated kids _properly_ (whatever 'properly' is), we'd see huge improvements in average IQ.
Real improvements that may be culturally infeasible, and also could be very damaging if they are done wrong.
Getting rid of parasites improves educational outcomes of children. Possibly their IQ as well.
Who knows how much smarter would we be if flus, colds and other duseases didn't ravage bodies of our children.
Which failures are you talking about?
From my school mates I have seen many of them who had on paper low IQ to have great careers as entrepreneurs, salesmen, athletes, craftsmen. I have also cases with top students who did not go anywhere.
So I am not sure whether an average increase of IQ would help the society.
Literacy for sure helps, but I am not convinced about IQ.
IQ, more than any other psychometric measure, predicts a wide variety of positive life outcomes including income, health, longevity, not being incarcerated, etc.
Here [0] is a simplistic article about it, but there are endless studies and discussions about this, all with the same clear and uncontroversial result.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
Further reading:
[1] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/07/massive-danish-sibling-...
Who spends their time doing lots of tests? Rich kids. Being wealthy also predicts a wide variety of positive life out ones including income, health, longevity, and not being incarcerated
For example: Examining the predictive value of IQ tests between siblings in the same household (who generally have the same access to resources).
Answer: IQ remains very powerfully predictive even within a household.
A century of study and attempts at intervention have all pointed to an overwhelmingly clear result: It's not wealth that makes someone have high IQ. It's high IQ that makes people wealthy.
Children do inherit high IQ from their parents who had high IQ, but the mechanism of this isn't through wealth, it's genetic. About 80% of the variance in IQ is by genetic parentage.
Example study: Examining adoptees' IQ scores in relation to their genetic parents versus the parents who raised them. Answer: They inherit their measured IQ from their genetic parents; the adoptive parents have essentially no effect (the last 20% of variation is basically random).
That doesnt mean anything.
The fact that everyone has counterxamples for the IQ’s predictive strength from their immediate cycle, shows how reliable of a metric it is.
So I will have to suffer with “Counterxamples” for a bit
In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't even know what they do.
If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double production of some cell type without hurting the child *too* much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without some very clumsy side effects.
Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said, there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making people healthier.
You could just try turning a few known knobs and see what happens. The efficacy is probably moderate-- maybe 7 IQ points or so with the currently known genes. But a change of mean IQ by 7 is actually a pretty substantial advantage-- it's half a standard deviation, and predicts about $4k more income per year.
Yes, it's unethical and there's probably substantial human cost.
Or, there's even a shortcut of just testing for people with high IQs that also possess the best known genotypes (i.e. test both genotype and phenotype) and forcing them to breed.
It should also improve human-to-human communication speed. The whole trick of humans is that we can put our heads together and work as a super-brain. As a side-effect, the normal-humans have distill their work-product into 'ideas' that fit into the heads of other normal humans. It seems unlikely that we'll ever genetically engineer the whole human race, so continuing to produce normal-human-compatible ideas seems like a big win.
If we have genetically engineered super-humans going around, they might have some ideas that are just too big to fit in our normal brains. Breaking compatibility like that seems risky, don't want people out there whose word we just fundamentally have to take on some things.
But for the far future, all of the above seems like a good answer. At least one "something else" is the possibility of nutritional, electrical, or biochemical interventions that can increase brain function without needing to change our genes. Caffeine and beta blockers seem like the best things we've got so far, along with not being in a state of persistent starvation, but there are presumably ways we can do better.
I would bet that it is possible to expand actual consciousness into connected hardware (silicon or engineered nervous tissue), and have that hardware expand a metric you would call intelligence.
The most reasonable thing in a third direction would be improving brain development through specific training in childhood and training as an adult. A lot of intelligence comes down to how the brain organizes itself in response to inputs, and a scientific discipline to optimize this could make a lot of progress. Not that work isn't being done along these lines but I think there is a lot of room to grow here.
What exactly is "human intelligence"?
Are you asking me for a normative judgment (e.g. which one is morally correct?) or some kind of positive one (e.g. which one will improve outcome measure X most?)
Why are you assuming that it's just one? These choices don't seem mutually exclusive.
Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one, I asked about what you thought would be the logical progression (under the assumption that humanity would like to continue to evolve and become more prosperous and becoming more intelligent or building more intelligent tools seems and obvious way to help enable that)
Could be more than one, was just trying to give some large buckets, that's why I added D and asked for people to add their thoughts.
Yah, but what is that?
Are you talking about an IQ score? Ability to do the tasks that ML is not currently good at isn't a great measure (a few years ago, Go or creating high quality paintings would have qualified).
E.g. one example of "D" is "rigorously studying and improving human education". But there's infinite clarification on what the problem you're trying to solve before we agree what improvement is:
* Mean, median, or peak outcomes?
* Performance on a given curriculum, or on a given abstract class of problems? Does creativity count? Is an education system that improves various kinds of quantitative metrics by 20% but results in a 5% less creative and flexible population a "win" or not?
Pretty much all the same arguments apply no matter which approach you consider.
> Not asking for a normative judgement or a positive one,
Well, normative considerations are important. If experimenting with brain-computer interfaces for quick advancement harms humans, is it a "good path"? How do we compare these paths? Quickness, magnitude of results, "best" resulting society, least harms, some kind of cost measure?
So often this blows up when anything related to IQ is brought up, a profound generational trauma of american intellectualism gets a small scene to replay its discourse in suffocating detail.
Maybe this is as close to the root cause as we can publicly get? Our insane tendency to avoid productive discussion and stifle true creative activity, all in favor of hollow wordplay (quasi-statistical if the situation requires, not less hollow). Our education - a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it (going against all solid evidence to the contrary, because the doctrine of never having enough education has to be preached).
There is a word for this, and it is a neologism: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
> a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it
Drilling tons of math in rigorous ways for excessive amounts of time clearly improves various kinds of outcome measures. It also tends to cause other harms.
If we want to improve intelligence, first we need to agree what intelligence is. Then we can talk about what measures are appropriate or ethical to use to try and improve it.
Even if we just take a somewhat stupid measure, and say "all we care about is a hybrid of IQ and SAT-I scores at age 16"-- there's still the question of whether we care more about moving the top performance upwards or the entire distribution.
If we don't agree what intelligence is, we can't answer questions like this. If we use a traditional measure like IQ as a measure of G factor-- I don't think brain-computer interfaces are going to swing things much and they may even make it worse. (But they could also allow explosions in human productivity or quality of life that are not measured on that scale).
e.g. Smartphones have not made us smarter, but they may sometimes allow us to do smarter and better things.
First, it's hard to rigorously reason about and convert to a quantitative metric.
Second, it would seem to imply that many geniuses in the math and sciences are not very intelligent.
Figuring out what we really mean is really hard.
An IQ score is a measure of intelligence, it's not intelligence itself. Just as the temperature you read off a thermometer is only a measure of the heat in the room. The thermometer tells you very little about the position and momentum of the gas particles in the room, only that higher temperatures correlate with more momentum.
The value of IQ scores for measuring human intelligence is that they correlate with all sorts of life outcomes. The hypothesis behind the research is that both the life outcomes and the IQ scores are caused by a single factor, known as g, for general intelligence.
Obviously, if we train some model on IQ tests we can probably get a machine to ridiculously high IQ scores. Does that mean we have created intelligence? No. The machine is not going to show any of the life outcomes we expect from a human with high IQ. It's not going to do anything! That's why none of these machines are intelligent.
The point is, what's "improving intelligence"? It's something that we have a hard time quantifying on a linear, agreed axis. As you point out, IQ scores are a somewhat flawed measure of g, which itself is a somewhat handwavy observation of a underlying factor that is a strong correlate to human performance in a broad set of areas.
And even if you could put that human performance in a linear measure, there's still a question of how you value different changes in that distribution. Which is better-- raising everyone by .1 standard deviations, or boosting a few people near the top by 1 standard deviation?
Essentially, allowing access to a greater corpus of training data as a human right.
Basic Income and Basic Capital (so you can use education)