wedrifid comments on Intelligence Amplification Open Thread - Less Wrong

46 Post author: Will_Newsome 15 September 2010 08:39AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 16 September 2010 02:37:58AM *  10 points [-]

Does the same reasoning apply to cancer treatment and antibiotics?

"If God wanted us to fly he would have given us wings!"

We don't know, and that's the point. There must be a reason, though. If it were that easy to increase your brainpower that way, and there were no other drawbacks, this modification would already have been selected for.

All else being equal we can expect our evolutionary heritage to be reasonably well optimised. But all else isn't equal. I don't have the same goals that the selection for my allelles in the ancestral environment implicitly optimised for. Evolution couldn't optimise for my specific needs at specific times which is one of the reasons we evolved general intelligence to handle that sort of thing.

Interventions, chemical or otherwise that we would consider using are not selected by random. They are created (often) by intelligent design and then selected for via a process of cultural evolution and empirical study.