I never qualified 'low' with 'very' or 'really'. If numbers make you feel better 'low' means roughly 1-10% probability. I find it a little backwards when someone focuses so much on precisely quantifying an estimate like this before the exact question is even clarified. I see it a lot from non-technical managers as a programmer.
I started this thread by asking for the information you were using to arrive at your (implied) high confidence in a genetic basis for rationality. There's been several recent articles about What Intelligence Tests Miss and I haven't started reading it yet (though it is now sitting on my Kindle) so I was already thinking about whether rationality as a separate trait from IQ is a distinct and measurable trait. I haven't seen enough evidence yet to convince me that it is so your implication that it is and is strongly heritable made me wonder if you were privy to some information that I didn't know.
While assigning numerical probabilities to priors and doing some math can be useful for certain problems I don't think it is necessarily the best starting point when investigating complex issues like this with actual human brains rather than ideal Bayesian reasoning agents. I'm still in data gathering mode at the moment and don't see a great benefit to throwing out exact priors as a badge of Bayesian honor.
means roughly 1-10% probability
of what threshold heritability coefficient?
Really, you should give a set of probabilities: P(H>0.01), P(H>0.02), P(H>0.03),, ... P(H>0.98), P(H>0.99).
A reasonable distribution might be some quasi-linear function?
Given that memory, verbal intelligence, spatial reasoning and general intelligence all have values of H of around 0.4, it seems that P{H>0.3) ~ 70%
The question that the ideas are supposed to be in response to is:
Here are links to some proposed ideas that you should vote for, assuming you agree with them. You do have to register to vote, but the email confirmation arrives right away and it shouldn't take much more than two minutes of your time altogether. Why should you do this? The top voted ideas from this request for ideas will be seen by some of the top policy recommendation makers in the USA. They probably won't do anything like immediately convene a presidential panel on AGI, but we are letting them know that these things are really important.
Research the primary cause of degenerative diseases: aging / biological senescence
Explore proposals for sustaining the economy despite ubiquitous automation
Establish a Permanent Panel or Program to Address Global Catastrophic Risks, Including AGI
Does anyone have any other ideas? Feel free to submit them directly to ideascale, but it may be a better idea to first post them in the comments of this post for discussion.