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twanvl comments on The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas - Less Wrong
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Comments (58)
An important goal could be to increase rationality in the world. I believe that would do more good in the long term than trying to solve aging. The best way to achieve that through this suggestion box would be an idea that is simple and direct and hard to get wrong.
For the first two points (simple and direct) better education would help. How about improving science classes by including actual science, that is, learning to change your mind and to look at evidence. However, I fear this will be very hard to get right, and hard to get accepted by teachers. Does anyone have other suggestions for improving rationality?
Psychosurgery or pharmaceutical intervention to encourage some of the more positive autistic spectrum cognitive traits seems more likely to work than this. We are far from identifying the genetic basis of intelligence or exceptional intelligence, never mind an aspect as specific as rationality.
It's also not clear that it is in someone's self interest to do this. I know you said retroviral genetic engineering, but for now I'll assume that it would only be possible on embryos. In that case, if someone really wanted grand children, it is not clear that making these alterations in her children would be the best way to achieve that goal.
Would those genes have time to be expressed later in life?
Also, how heritable is rationality? How do we even measure it, to find out? And if we find some subset of our genes which can be reasonably tweaked to enhance rationality, I'm guessing that they would probably affect people's capability to be rational, in a bunch of indirect ways. There would have to be a memetic component, alongside any genetic tweaks we make. I think.
That sounds a bit too long-term, though. By the time that becomes viable and socially acceptable (if it ever becomes so), we will be many presidencies into the future.
Also, for people to recognize that rationality enhancement is in their best interest you need some baseline level of rationality.
Do you know of any evidence suggesting strong heritability of rationality?
I'm skeptical of a strong heritability for rationality independent of IQ. Your original statement suggested to me that you knew of stronger evidence than 'most things are heritable'. If you don't know of any such evidence I'm inclined to remain firmly on the fence.
Have you read The Millionaire Next Door? The book is about people of very ordinary intelligence who are more rational about money than many smarter people.
I haven't read it but I don't think this kind of example talks directly to the question of whether rationality is a strongly heritable trait independent of IQ. My current hypothesis (not strongly held or supported by large amounts of evidence) is that rationality is more a learned skill or habit of thinking which will tend to correlate with IQ (because higher IQ people will learn it easier/faster and apply it better) but that some high IQ people have failed to learn it and some lower IQ people have become quite good at it.
Examples of lower IQ people who are more rational than higher IQ people do not on their own help to distinguish whether rationality is a separately heritable trait from IQ or a learned habit of thinking.
I would not be hugely surprised if certain big 5 personality traits or other potentially heritable personality traits made people more inclined to learn rational thinking which might provide an indirect basis for heritability of rationality.
I wasn't reading carefully, so I just offered evidence that rationality is somewhat independent of IQ.
Didn't the people in that book get rich by saving a lot and investing aggressively for the long term?
How's that strategy working out?
I don't know of any follow-ups.
They invested conservatively, not aggressively. I expect they're better off than people who got heavily into debt, but probably not as well off as some people who were insiders enough to not lose too much when they made bad investments for other people.
I meant aggressively in the sense of well-diversified and stock-heavy (hence the "long-term" bit). If they got rich off of bond interest, well, it wasn't investment acumen that explains their success, but a) raw earning power, and b) not spending it all.
"Assume a high income" is not all that helpful.
Unfortunately, exactly what they invested in wasn't something I was very sensitive to, and I don't remember it.
Generally, they had fairly ordinary incomes, and they invested in things which were considered low-risk at the time. A fair number of them had real estate in the sense of owning car dealerships (used car lots?), with the land under the business being a large part of their wealth.
They disliked spending money. It was common for them to be men whose wives made a full-time job of running the household cheaply. (There was a later book called The Millionaire Woman Next Door.)
For heritability, I think rationality is closer to reading than it is to intelligence.
How heritable is reading?
For the time being, I'll just consider literacy as a binary quality, leaving aside differences in ability. In developed countries, with literacy rates around 99%, literacy is probably some what heritable because that <1% cannot read because of some sort of learning defect with a heritable component.
In Mail, with a 26.2% literacy rate, literacy is not very heritable. The illiterate there are a consequence of lack of educational opportunities. I think that the situation we are in regarding the phenotype of "rational" is closer to the Mali scenario rather than the developed world scenario.
You mean in general or for rationality in particular? Lots of things are heritable, to varying (and often disputed) extents. I tend to think genetic factors are often underestimated when explaining human variability. I'm not familiar enough with the evidence for heritability of other high level cognitive abilities to make a very good estimate for the heritability of rationality however.
I've just bought What Intelligence Tests Miss for my Kindle after reading the article series here. As I said, I'm skeptical that rationality as an independent factor from IQ is strongly heritable but I'm open to evidence to the contrary which is why I was curious if you had any.
No, it's not, but I think it's a reasonable excuse for not having a more specific prior than 'low and uncertain'. Being more specific in my prior would not be very useful without being more specific about what exactly the question is. I sometimes see a tendency here to overconfidence in estimates simply because a bunch of rather arbitrary priors have been multiplied together and produced a comfortingly precise number.
I don't know what it is. I suspect it is not a well established piece of information. I'm not convinced that heritability for 'traits-in-general' is a good basis for rationality in particular. Do you have a reference for a good estimate for this distribution?
How about teaching self-experimentation?
This is interesting about creativity and project-oriented education.