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army1987 comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
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Adults?
It is well-known that a bunch of things (e.g. iodine deficiency) will suppress your IQ. And yes, there are (genetically) bright kids made stupid by their environment (deficiencies, malnutrition, trauma, etc.) and in a counterfactual universe where these deficiencies don't happen the kids would grow up to have higher IQ.
But almost all of IQ suppression happens in childhood and I don't know of "single heath care interventions" which would raise the IQ of an adult from 80 to 120.
What kind of interventions do you have in mind?
You consider that plausible based on what evidence?
Think e.g. about the economic effect of converting the stupid part of some country's population to smart people. It is enormous and would completely dwarf the 20Bn price which is what, a rounding error in the US Federal Budget?
Anything that moves someone from level 10 pain to painfree has probably that effect. If I put a 120 IQ person on level 10 pain I doubt they will get over 80 points on an IQ test.
The mnemonsyth data is laying around for years without anyone analysing them to find more effective algorithm for human learning.
Paying some quant who actually knows something about statistical modelling to take on the task is relatively cheap. Probably less than 100,000$ for a result that matters significantly for improvement of general cognition.
That's an example of a very obvious area to invest money if you care about cognitive enhancement. As a result I don't see the world in a way where a lot of people are seriously trying to advance cognitive enhancement who are understanding the landscape well enough to direct funds to obvious areas. I think it's even worse if you look at nonobvious but potentially good ideas that cost a bit of money.
I do approve of CFAR but we don't live in a world where they have billions of dollars.
Is there anything remotely like that going on in a non-trivial fraction of the population? The closest I can think of is sleep deprivation, but I'd be very surprised if the effect of non-extreme cases of it is more than 10 IQ points, let alone 40.
Purely from introspection, I would bet that sleep deprivation costs me less than 10 points of IQ-test performance but the equivalent of much more than 10 IQ points on actual effectiveness in getting anything done.
My introspection had similar results about sleep deprivation and mental performance before I tried Anki. Now that I've actually measured my performance with the software, I know it can be as low as 50 % of my peak performance measured in latency of recall when even slightly (2-3 hours) sleep deprived. Of course, Anki measures memory, not IQ.
This experience made me update significantly in the direction that my introspection, at least in the case of mental performance, sucks. My social life has suffered as a result of this realization.
My scores at stuff like Lumosity and Quantified Mind tend to always be great in the morning (a couple hours after I wake up), but unless I slept enough the previous night they suck balls in the early afternoon; they get better again in the evening if I take a nap in the afternoon. My self-perceived wakefulness and willpower levels vary similarly, but several hours earlier (i.e. I underestimate my mental performance right before lunch and overestimate it right after my afternoon nap).
Of course I'm speaking with hindsight here, but it doesn't seem at all surprising that you could be as much as 2x slower at some mental tasks when sleep-deprived. I'd expect that to translate to less than a 10-point loss in IQ-like tests -- maybe that's unrealistic?
How has your social life suffered?
I keep a pretty strict sleep schedule and drink very little alcohol. Almost any nightly socializing is gone, and there used to be a lot of that. I see this as a net positive though.
Ah, I understand. Thanks.
You've doubtless thought about this already, but I'll say it anyway just in case: Your happiness and net effectiveness (at whatever you seek to do) may be affected as much by your network of friends and associates as by your own mental performance. Trading in social life for increased sharpness may be far from an unambiguous win.
Stanley Coren put some numbers on the effect of sleep deprivation upon IQ test scores.
There's a more detailed meta-analysis of multiple studies, splitting it by types of mental attribute, here:
A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Short-Term Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Variables, by Lim and Dinges