There are longitudinal studies showing that people with 99.99th percentile performance on cognitive tests
Uses other tests than IQ test, right? I do not dispute that a cognitive test can be made which would have the required reliability for detecting the 99.99th percentile. The IQ tests, however, are full of 'continue a short sequence' tests that are quite dubious even in principle. It is fundamentally difficult to measure up into 99.99th percentile, you need a highly reliable measurement apparatus, carefully constructed in precisely the way in which IQ tests are not. Extreme rarities like one in 10 000 should not be thrown around lightly.
Mensa is less selective than elite colleges or workplaces for intelligence
There are other societies. They all are not very selective for intelligence either, though, because they all rely on dubious tests.
and much less selective for other things like conscientiousness, height, social ability, family wealth, etc.
I would say that this makes those other places be an unrepresentative sample of the "high IQ" individuals. Even if those individuals who pass highly selective requirements on something else rarely enter mensa, they are rare (tautology on highly selective) and their relative under representation in mensa doesn't sway mensa's averages.
edit: for example consider the Nobel Prize winners. They all have high IQs but there is considerable spread and the IQ doesn't seem to correlate well with the estimate of "how many others worked on this and did not succeed".
Note: I am using "IQ" in the narrow sense of "what IQ tests measure", not as shorthand for intelligence. The intelligence has the capacity to learn component which IQ tests do not measure but tests of mathematical aptitude (with hard problems) or verbal aptitude do.
note2: I do not believe that the correlation entirely disappears even for IQ tests past 99th percentile. My argument is that for the typical IQ tests it well could. It's just that the further you get up the smaller fraction of the excellence is actually being measured.
Uses other tests than IQ test, right?
Administering SATs to younger children, to raise the ceiling.
I would say that this makes those other places be an unrepresentative sample of the "high IQ" individuals.
Well Mensa is ~0 selectivity beyond the IQ threshold, and is a substitute good for other social networks, leaving it with the dregs. "Much more" is poor phrasing here, they're not rejecting 90%. If you look at the linked papers you'll see that a good majority of those at the 1 in 10,000 level on those childhood tests wind up with elite university/alumni or professional networks with better than Mensa IQ distributions.
-- Nick Szabo
Nick Szabo and I have very similar backrounds and interests. We both majored in computer science at the University of Washington. We're both very interested in economics and security. We came up with similar ideas about digital money. So why don't I advocate working on security problems while ignoring AGI, goals and Friendliness?
In fact, I once did think that working on security was the best way to push the future towards a positive Singularity and away from a negative one. I started working on my Crypto++ Library shortly after reading Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. I believe it was the first general purpose open source cryptography library, and it's still one of the most popular. (Studying cryptography led me to become involved in the Cypherpunks community with its emphasis on privacy and freedom from government intrusion, but a major reason for me to become interested in cryptography in the first place was a desire to help increase security against future entities similar to the Blight described in Vinge's novel.)
I've since changed my mind, for two reasons.
1. The economics of security seems very unfavorable to the defense, in every field except cryptography.
Studying cryptography gave me hope that improving security could make a difference. But in every other security field, both physical and virtual, little progress is apparent, certainly not enough that humans might hope to defend their property rights against smarter intelligences. Achieving "security against malware as strong as we can achieve for symmetric key cryptography" seems quite hopeless in particular. Nick links above to a 2004 technical report titled "Polaris: Virus Safe Computing for Windows XP", which is strange considering that it's now 2012 and malware have little trouble with the latest operating systems and their defenses. Also striking to me has been the fact that even dedicated security software like OpenSSH and OpenSSL have had design and coding flaws that introduced security holes to the systems that run them.
One way to think about Friendly AI is that it's an offensive approach to the problem of security (i.e., take over the world), instead of a defensive one.
2. Solving the problem of security at a sufficient level of generality requires understanding goals, and is essentially equivalent to solving Friendliness.
What does it mean to have "secure property rights", anyway? If I build an impregnable fortress around me, but an Unfriendly AI causes me to give up my goals in favor of its own by crafting a philosophical argument that is extremely convincing to me but wrong (or more generally, subverts my motivational system in some way), have I retained my "property rights"? What if it does the same to one of my robot servants, so that it subtly starts serving the UFAI's interests while thinking it's still serving mine? How does one define whether a human or an AI has been "subverted" or is "secure", without reference to its "goals"? It became apparent to me that fully solving security is not very different from solving Friendliness.
I would be very interested to know what Nick (and others taking a similar position) thinks after reading the above, or if they've already had similar thoughts but still came to their current conclusions.