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Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible
bbartlog10

I am not so sure about that. I am thinking back to the Minnesota Twin Study here, and the related fact that heritability of IQ increases with age (up until age 20, at least). Now, it might be that we're just not great at measuring childhood IQ, or that childhood IQ and adult IQ are two subtly different things. 

But it certainly looks as if there's factors related to adult brain plasticity, motivation (curiosity, love of reading, something) that continue to affect IQ development at least until the age of 18. 

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3jacob_cannell
Straight forward result of how the brain learns. Cortical/cerebellar modules start out empty and mature inwards out - starting with the lowest sensory/motor levels closest to the world and proceeding up the hierarchy ending with the highest/deepest modules like prefrontal and associative cortex. Maturation is physically irreversible as it involves pruning most long-range connections and myelinating&strengthening the select few survivors. Your intelligence potential is constrained prenatally by genes influencing synaptic density/connectivity/efficiency in these higher regions, but those higher regions aren't (mostly) finishing training until ~20 years age.
Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible
bbartlog50

Some points:

  • the 23andme dataset is probably not as useful as you project. They are working from a fixed set of variants, not full genomes or even a complete set of SNPs known to vary. There are certainly many SNPs of interest that just aren't in their data.
  • in projecting the gains from discovering further variants that affect intelligence, it's not clear whether you've accounted for the low hanging fruit effect. With these statistical approaches, we obviously discover the variants of largest effect first. Adding millions of additional genomes or genotypes w
... (read more)
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7GeneSmith
It's possible the source I read was misleading, but last I checked they use SNP arrays with 650k variants, which is roughly all loci with minor allele frequency >1%. That's enough to make quite a strong predictor, especially since they have a fair number of non-european participants with different linkage disequilibrium (more helpful for pinpointing the causal variant in a cluster). The simulation accounts for that. That's why gain per additional edit is logarithmic. We'll get better at identifying rare variants with large causal effects soon. UK Biobank just released 500k whole genomes in late November, so we should see the first studies on that data come out in the next few months. The simulations we ran assume that the dataset only contains variants with minor allele frequencey >1%. Any vairants with lower frequency than that will increase the average marginal effect per edit but aren't necessary for this tech to work in general. This is why I specifically used language in the post like "don't take this too seriously" and "I don’t expect such an IQ to actually result from flipping all IQ-decreasing alleles to their IQ-increasing variants for the same reason I don’t expect to reach the moon by climbing a very tall ladder" There's less difference between genetic ancestry groups when it comes to editing than there is for embryo selection. With embryo selection, you can rely on linkage disequilibrium patterns remaining relatively consistent among Europeans to compensate for your uncertainty about which variant in a cluster is causal. You can't do that with editing. So getting data from other ancestry groups (particularly Africans, who have the greatest variance in LD structure) will actually editing more efficient for everyone, including Europeans. The lack of non-European data is slowly being solved, but at the moment I know of no non-European data source that has good IQ phenotype data. There are definitely biobanks and consumer genomics companies who have t
[Discussion] How Broad is the Human Cognitive Spectrum?
Answer by bbartlog42

We tried to model a complex phenomenon using a single scalar, and this resulted in confusion and clouded intuition.
It's sort of useful for humans because of restriction of range, along with a lot of correlation that comes from looking only at human brain operations when talking about 'g' or IQ or whatever. 
Trying to think in terms of a scalar 'intelligence' measure when dealing with non-human intelligences is not going to be very productive.

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4Noosphere89
I somewhat disagree here. Yes, If we truly tried to create a scalar intelligence that was definable across the entirety of the mathematical multiverse, the No Free Lunch theorem would tell us this can't happen. However, instrumental convergence exists, so general intelligence can be done in practice. From tailcalled here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GZgLa5Xc4HjwketWe/instrumental-convergence-is-what-makes-general-intelligence Specifically, there are common subtasks to real world tasks.
The Cowpox of Doubt
bbartlog10

It's conceivable that current level of belief in homeopathy is net positive in impact. The idea here would be that the vast majority of people who use it will follow up with actual medical treatment if homeopathy doesn't solve their problem.

Assume also that medical treatment has non-trivial risks compared to taking sugar pills and infinitely dilute solutions (stats on deaths due to medical error support this thesis). And further that some conditions just get better by themselves. Now you have a situation where, just maybe, doing an initial 'treatment' with... (read more)

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1danielechlin
I've been making increasingly more genuine arguments about this regarding horoscopes. They're not "scientific," but neither are any of my hobbies, and they're only harmful when taken to the extreme but that's also true for all my hobbies, and they seem to have a bunch of low-grade benefits like "making you curious about your personality." So then I felt astrology done scientifically (where you make predictions but hedge them and are really humble about failure) is way better than science done shoddily (where you yell at people for not wearing a mask to your intensity.) So I settled on the 52/48 rule -- science, the truth, liberal democracy, all of these things have about a 2% edge over their enemies. It's very rational to wind up in the 48 (a small mistake not a big one) and very hard to beat a 48 when you need to (like persuading people to take vaccines). I agree that humility is a good start. This seems to fit what I've lived through much better than my old ideology prior of like, 100-epsilon/epsilon.
Monitoring for deceptive alignment
bbartlog1-3

It's not clear to me how you get to deceptive alignment 'that completely supersedes the explicit alignment'. That an AI would develop epiphenomenal goals and alignments, not understood by its creators, that it perceived as useful or necessary to pursue whatever primary goal it had been set, seems very likely. But while they might be in conflict with what we want it to do, I don't see how this emergent behavior could be such that it would be contradict the pursuit of satisfying whatever evaluation function the AI had been trained for in the beginning. Unles... (read more)

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