You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Douglas_Knight comments on Stupid Questions, December 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 01 December 2015 10:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (138)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 06 January 2016 08:31:05PM *  1 point [-]

My lower bound is that mutational load contributes 10% of the variance in IQ. I call that small. Independently, I propose that there should be room for 50 standard deviations in improvement. Although it's not clear what more would even mean. Surely linearity would break down. What I mean by the possibility of "50 standard deviations" is 20 disjoint sets of changes, each of which would accomplish 2.5 standard deviations.

If the typical gene is deleterious and contributes 1/N of a standard deviation, then there is room for N standard deviations of improvement above the mean. Of course there is a mixture of genes of different effect sizes. I expect genes of both effect sizes 1/10 and 1/100. Say, half of each. That gives room for 55 standard deviations of improvement.

If variation came from positive genes, an additive model would suggest much more room for improvement, but such genes would be much less likely to combine well than correcting mutations to the wild type.