I think that most people who do not have severe cognitive deficiencies are capable of understanding what "efficient charities" are. I think that most people are quite capable of understanding the statement, "Ethanol will waste a lot of money and will still generate as much (or more) pollution than gasoline. To top it off, it will also raise the price of food products, both for you and for people who will actually starve as a result." Most issues like this, one can figure out what's going on by reading wikipedia for half an hour. Perhaps that takes a high IQ, but from my experience, when people are given clear and accurate arguments, they are generally capable of getting them. The problem is that they never bother seeking out decent arguments. They either just don't care, or they seek out arguments that support whatever their beliefs happen to be.
In other words, the problem is not that people are stupid. The problem is that people simply don't give a damn. If you don't fix that, I doubt raising IQ will be anywhere near as helpful as you may think.
I think that most people who do not have severe cognitive deficiencies are capable of understanding what "efficient charities" are
I have specific empirical evidence against this point from attempting to convince people on facebook causes to instead support more efficient causes. I am considering a top-level post on it.
If you are surrounded by money pumps, is it rational to bet with them, or correct their functioning?
I do not know if this strategy would apply in the Western world; but in Africa, I think much could be gained simply by nutritional intervention. IQ is, to a good approximation, 50% genetic; much of the environmental effect is childhood nutrition; it follows that widespread distribution of vitamins might have a nice effect over time, in addition to the more usual benefits. It also seems possible that this might work in those strata of the American population that subsist mainly on fast food, although I expect the effect would be less - likely there are already patchwork government programs that distribute vitamins to the poor.
I suppose the question is not whether it would be good, but rather how. Some quick brainstorming:
I think people are "smarter" now then they were, say, pre-scientific-method. So there may be more trainable ways-of-thinking that we can learn (for example, "best practices" for qualitative Bayesianism)
Software programs for individuals. Oh, maybe when you come across something you think is important while browsing the web you could highlight it and these things would be presented to you occasionally sort of like a "drill" to
I have tried to research the economic benefits of cognition enhancement, and they are quite possibly substantial. But I think Roko is right about the wider political ramifications.
One relevant reference may be: H. Rindermann, Relevance of Education and Intelligence for the Political Development of Nations: Democracy, Rule of Law and Political Liberty, Intelligence, v36 n4 p306-322 Jul-Aug 2008 argues (using cross-lagged data) that education and cognitive ability has bigger positive effects on democracy, rule of law and political liberty than GDP. There ar...
Nick Bostrom proposed that we should work hard looking for ways to enhance the cognition of research scientists, because even a small increase in the average intelligence of research scientists would increase research output by a large amount, because there are lots of scientists.
I wonder about this. Isn't it the case [translation: I'm sure I read in some general-audience psychology book once] that for just about every human activity, scientific research included, there's a certain level above which differences in intelligence, at least in the sense of ...
Do you think you might be underestimating the capabilities of the statistically average person of 100 IQ?
Now, if the average voter could understand the concept of photosynthetic efficiency, and could understand a simple numerical calculation showing how inefficient corn is at converting solar energy to stored energy in ethanol, this policy choice would have been dead in the water.
There's an obvious point you're overlooking here.
Plants are, indeed, only about 3% efficient at converting the energy in sunlight into chemical energy, and that's before the l...
Interestingly, this may be actually happening. It's fairly clear that people today are taller than they once were...
My observations here on LW, thanks to the karma system, lead me to believe there is no threshold effect. People always have great difficulty following the ideas of someone a level above them, regardless of what level they are at. Eliezer's posts are so friggin' long because they are designed to be understood by people a level below him.
I suspect, as I've said repeatedly on LW, that increasing the baseline of intelligence would only lead us to construct a more elaborate society, with more complicated problems, and an even greater chance of catastrophic fa...
It's interesting speculation but it assumes that people use all of their current intelligence. There is still the problem of akrasia - a lot of people are perfectly capable of becoming 'smarter' if only they cared to think about things at all. Sure, they could still go mad infallibly but it would be better than not even trying.
Are you implying that more IQ may help in overcoming akrasia?
if we could improve the intelligence of the average voter by 10 IQ points, imagine how much saner the political process would look
It's highly non-obvious that it would have significant effects. Political process is imperfect but very pragmatic - what makes a lot of sense as there's only as much good an improved political process can do, and breaking it can cause horrible suffering. So current approach of gradual tweaks is a very safe alternative, even if it offends people's idealistic sensibilities.
More intelligence also means more competence at doing potentially world-destroying things, like AI/upload/nano/supervirus research. It does seem to me like the anti-risk effect from intelligence enhancement would somewhat outweigh the pro-risk effect, but I'm not sure.
I'm not sure intelligence enhancement alone is sufficient. It'd be better to first do rationality enhancement and then intelligence enhancement. Of course that's also much harder to implement but who said it would be easy?
It sounds like you think intelligence enhancement would result in rationality enhancement. I'm inclined to agree that there is a modest correlation but doubt that it's enough to warrant your conclusion.
Here at Less Wrong, the Future of Humanity Institute and the Singularity Institute, a recurring theme is trying to steer the future of the planet away from disaster. Often, the best way to avert a particular disaster is quite hard for ordinary people to understand as it requires one to think through an argument in a cool, unemotional way; more often than not the best solution will be lost in a mass of low signal-to-noise ratio squabbling and/or emoting. Whatever the substance of the debate, the overall meta-problem is quite well captured by this catch from this month's rationality quotes:
"People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly.
Attempting to target the meta-problem of getting people to be slightly less mad when it comes to abstract or general thought, especially public policy, is a tempting option. Robin Hanson's futarchy proposal is one way to combat this madness (which it does by removing most people from the policymaking loop). However, another important route to combating human idiocy is to find technologies that make humans smarter. Nick Bostrom proposed that we should work hard looking for ways to enhance the cognition of research scientists, because even a small increase in the average intelligence of research scientists would increase research output by a large amount, as there are lots of scientists. But improving the decisionmaking process of our society would probably have an even more profound effect; if we could improve the intelligence of the average voter by about one standard deviation, it is easy to speculate that the political decisionmaking process would work much better. For example, understanding simple logical arguments and simple quantitative analyses is stretching the capabilities of someone at IQ 100, so it seems that the marginal effect of overall IQ increases would be quite a large marginal increases in the probability that a politician was incentivized to focus on a logical argument over an emotionally appealing slander as the main focus of their campaign.
As a concrete example, consider the initial US reaction to rising oil prices and the need for US-produced energy: pushing corn ethanol, because a strong farming lobby liked the idea of having extra revenue. Now, if the *average voter* could understand the concept of photosynthetic efficiency, and could understand a simple numerical calculation showing how inefficient corn is at converting solar energy to stored energy in ethanol, this policy choice would have been dead in the water. But the average voter cannot do simple physics, whereas they can understand the emotional appeal of "support our local farmers!". Even today, there are still politicians who defend corn ethanol because they want to pander to local interest groups. Another concrete example is some of the more useless responses that the UK public has been engaging in - and being encouraged to engage in - to prevent global warming. People were encouraged to unplug their mobile phone chargers when the chargers weren't being used. David McKay had to wage a personal war against such idiocy - see this Guardian article. The universal response to my criticism of people advocating this was "it all adds up!". I quote:
There's a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy. Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big and score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.
Toby Ord has a project on efficient charity, he has worked out that the difference in outcomes per dollar for alleviating human suffering in Africa can vary by 3 orders of magnitude. But most people in the developed world don't know what an "order of magnitude" is, or why it is a useful concept. This efficient charity concept demonstrated that the derivative
d(Outcomes)/d(Average IQ)
may be extremely large, and may be subject to powerful threshold effects. In this case, there is probably an average IQ threshold above which the average person can easily understand the concept of efficient charity, and thus all the money gets given to the most efficient charities, and the amount of suffering-alleviation in Africa goes up by a factor of 1000, even though the average IQ of the donor community may only have jumped from 100 to 140, say.
It may well be the case that finding a cognitive enhancer suitable for general use is the best way to tackle the diverse array of risks we face. People with enhanced IQ would also probably find it easier (and be more willing) to absorb cognitive biases material; to see this, try and explain the concept of "cognitive biases" to someone who is unlucky enough to be of below average IQ, and then go an explain it to someone who is smarter than you. It is certainly the case that even people of below average IQ *do sometimes*, in favourable circumstances, take note of quantitative rational arguments, but in the maelstrom of politics such quantitative analyses get eaten alive by more emotive arguments like "SUPPORT OUR FARMERS!" or "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!" or "EVOLUTION IS ONLY A THEORY!" or "IT ALL ADDS UP!".