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.

James_Miller comments on Open thread, December 7-13, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: polymathwannabe 07 December 2015 02:47PM

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

Comments (223)

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

Comment author: passive_fist 08 December 2015 05:39:43AM *  4 points [-]

The reason this approach won't work is that genes aren't linear factors that can added up together in that way. Even in something as simple as milk production, you need to do selection over multiple generations and evaluate each generation separately, building up small genetic changes over time.

If you could construct an actual model relating various genes to intelligence, in a way that took into account genetic interactions, then you could do what you propose in a single generation, but we are very very far from being able to construct such a model at present.

As it stands today, if you just carried out that naive approach you would end up with a non-viable embryo or, in the best-case scenario, a slightly-higher-than-average intelligence person. Not a super-genius.

Comment author: James_Miller 08 December 2015 10:26:04PM 1 point [-]

When researching my book I was told by experts that the intelligence genes which vary throughout the human population probably are linear. Consider President Obama who has a very high IQ but who also has parents who are genetically very different from each other. If intelligence genes worked in a non-additive complex way people with such genetically diverse parents would almost always be very unintelligent. We don't observe this.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 16 December 2015 02:14:53AM 1 point [-]

Consider President Obama who has a very high IQ

Evidence?

Comment author: James_Miller 16 December 2015 02:16:44AM 0 points [-]

Harvard Law Review

Comment author: Lumifer 16 December 2015 05:53:59AM 3 points [-]

Counter-evidence: affirmative action.

In any case, it's interesting that Obama's SAT (or ACT) scores are sealed as are his college grades, AFAIK.

Comment author: solipsist 08 January 2016 06:49:20PM 0 points [-]

HLS students of any skin color have high IQs as measured by standardized tests. The school's 25th percentile LSAT score is 170, which is 97.5th percentile for the subset of college graduates who take the LSAT. 44% of HLS students are people of color.

Comment author: Lumifer 08 January 2016 08:31:22PM 1 point [-]

44% of HLS students are people of color.

When I see funny terms like "people of color" (or, say, "gun deaths"), I get suspicious. A little bit of digging, and...

Black students constitute 10-12% of HLS students. Most of the "people of color" are Asians.