Konkvistador comments on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 July 2012 10:45PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 02 July 2012 09:12:48AM 6 points [-]

Plenty of Room At The Top

Feynman once said there's Plenty of room at the bottom (nanotechnology). In the context of human genetics, it's clear there's plenty of room at the top -- possibly as much as +30 SDs based on existing variance in the human population!

...

Finally, regarding the +30 SD number, one could reason in a completely different way. Since only 10 billion or so humans have ever lived, and there are probably many many more distinct genotypes/phenotypes (e.g., 2^(many thousands) based just on gene variants), it is unlikely that the already realized phenotypes could be near the maximum potential of the species on any trait. I often argue with other physicists about the true exceptionality of, e.g., Einstein, based on this kind of logic (i.e., many more physicists, drawn from a much larger talent pool, have lived post-Einstein than pre-Einstein).

Wow.

Comment author: moridinamael 02 July 2012 10:53:55PM 7 points [-]

Could you or someone explain what exactly this means? My interpretation is that he's estimating based on the number of ways you can rearrange existing genes floating around in the aggregate human genome that it is possible for humans to exist who are 30 standard deviations smarter than average. This violates my heuristic that one should avoid extrapolating far outside the domain of actual data.

This is very interesting, please tell me if I'm misunderstanding something.

Comment author: gwern 02 July 2012 11:02:36PM 7 points [-]

That was my understanding as well. As discussed in the comments, SDs/IQs are just percentiles - ordinal, not cardinal -, so it's not obvious what 30 SDs would translate to. If Einstein is 15 SDS out, maybe 30 SDs just means you are a physics genius like him but also a little bit wittier than he was.

Comment author: DanielLC 03 July 2012 08:07:59PM 1 point [-]

15 SDs out is less than 10^-50. There's only been about 10^11 people. In all probability Einstein wasn't even the smartest of them.

Comment author: gwern 03 July 2012 09:22:31PM 1 point [-]

Yes, I believe Hsu made that exact comparison in the comments.

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