Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) can increase people’s IQ for like less than $1 per point of IQ. I doubt you will find any better intervention for increasing IQ.
Assuming that’s true, it’s a fantastic intervention and should be another high priority (in my uninformed opinion).
There’s a few reasons I care about more advanced biotech for HIA:
Most important reason: I think there’s a large benefit to humanity from having specifically more very very smart people. Humanity is, in many ways, bottlenecked on having lots more good ideas (e.g. to cure diseases, become societally / psychologically / physically healthier, etc.).
In the slightly longer run, it’s probably necessary to continue giving people the opportunity to be/get smarter. You can’t double-remove lead from the environment.
In the longer run, reprogenetics would actually be a better intervention. In the vein of point 2, there’s more room for benefit, because any of millions and millions of parents can choose to give quite substantial additional cognitive capacity (in probabilistic expectation) to their future children.
On 1 I think you are making a few common assumptions & the world may actually be more bottlenecked on broadly implementing existing ideas, thus we need higher average intelligence around the world for that implementation.
And a more general point, a lot of genes associated with higher intelligence are also associated with introversion/anti-socialness & with various mental abnormalities like OCD & others. By optimizing purely for IQ in genes you may be creating less collaborative & less happy individuals.
the world may actually be more bottlenecked on broadly implementing existing ideas, thus we need higher average intelligence around the world for that implementation.
I suppose we’re bottlenecked on both? I’m thinking of things like
curing cancer
curing all those other diseases
figuring out how to make aligned AGI
figuring out how to convince people to not make AGI
figuring out how to improve group epistemics, especially given social media and the internet
figuring out how society can work out its values better, given all the present constraints (poor incentives, etc.)
figuring out how to broadly implement existing ideas
etc.
And a more general point, a lot of genes associated with higher intelligence are also associated with introversion/anti-socialness & with various mental abnormalities like OCD & others. By optimizing purely for IQ in genes you may be creating less collaborative & less happy individuals.
I agree this would be a potentially significant concern if true, but I don’t think it’s mostly true, or at least I haven’t seen evidence for this and I’ve seen evidence against. Can you point to what you’re thinking of? The main thing I’m aware of in this vein is a slight (~.2, depending on source and the exact question) positive correlation between IQ and autism. IQ and other clinical mental conditions tend to be negatively correlated.
Note also that to a significant extent parents using reprogenetics can, if they want, avoid much undesired pleiotropy by also genomically vectoring against risk for autism etc.; and scientists can build polygenic scores for IQ or similar which exclude genes known to have pleiotropy with those other conditions. That’s not necessarily perfect, but I would guess it can feasibly be pretty effective.
Savage, Jeanne E., Philip R. Jansen, Sven Stringer, et al. “Genome-Wide Association Meta-Analysis in 269,867 Individuals Identifies New Genetic and Functional Links to Intelligence.” Nature Genetics 50, no. 7 (2018): 912–19. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0152-6.
Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) can increase people’s IQ for like less than $1 per point of IQ. I doubt you will find any better intervention for increasing IQ.
Assuming that’s true, it’s a fantastic intervention and should be another high priority (in my uninformed opinion).
There’s a few reasons I care about more advanced biotech for HIA:
Most important reason: I think there’s a large benefit to humanity from having specifically more very very smart people. Humanity is, in many ways, bottlenecked on having lots more good ideas (e.g. to cure diseases, become societally / psychologically / physically healthier, etc.).
In the slightly longer run, it’s probably necessary to continue giving people the opportunity to be/get smarter. You can’t double-remove lead from the environment.
In the longer run, reprogenetics would actually be a better intervention. In the vein of point 2, there’s more room for benefit, because any of millions and millions of parents can choose to give quite substantial additional cognitive capacity (in probabilistic expectation) to their future children.
(Though it bears repeating that there has to be a motivational firewall here. Above I’m discussing my background motivation, not my concrete aims in reprogenetics. See my comment here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QLugEBJJ3HYyAcvwy/new-cause-area-human-intelligence-amplification?commentId=5yxEpv9vFRABptHyd . This separation is important for several reasons, a main one being that we want to steer clear of eugenical pressures, where some supposed benefit to humanity is used to justify pressuring / coercing people into reproductive (or other) choices unjustly. See https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html )
(Separately from HIA, there’s other huge benefits of reprogenetics, centrally avoiding disease.)
On 1 I think you are making a few common assumptions & the world may actually be more bottlenecked on broadly implementing existing ideas, thus we need higher average intelligence around the world for that implementation.
And a more general point, a lot of genes associated with higher intelligence are also associated with introversion/anti-socialness & with various mental abnormalities like OCD & others. By optimizing purely for IQ in genes you may be creating less collaborative & less happy individuals.
I suppose we’re bottlenecked on both? I’m thinking of things like
curing cancer
curing all those other diseases
figuring out how to make aligned AGI
figuring out how to convince people to not make AGI
figuring out how to improve group epistemics, especially given social media and the internet
figuring out how society can work out its values better, given all the present constraints (poor incentives, etc.)
figuring out how to broadly implement existing ideas
etc.
I agree this would be a potentially significant concern if true, but I don’t think it’s mostly true, or at least I haven’t seen evidence for this and I’ve seen evidence against. Can you point to what you’re thinking of? The main thing I’m aware of in this vein is a slight (~.2, depending on source and the exact question) positive correlation between IQ and autism. IQ and other clinical mental conditions tend to be negatively correlated.
For example, Savage et al. [1] state:
Their supplementary figure 10:
(from https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41588-018-0152-6/MediaObjects/41588_2018_152_MOESM1_ESM.pdf)
Note also that to a significant extent parents using reprogenetics can, if they want, avoid much undesired pleiotropy by also genomically vectoring against risk for autism etc.; and scientists can build polygenic scores for IQ or similar which exclude genes known to have pleiotropy with those other conditions. That’s not necessarily perfect, but I would guess it can feasibly be pretty effective.
Savage, Jeanne E., Philip R. Jansen, Sven Stringer, et al. “Genome-Wide Association Meta-Analysis in 269,867 Individuals Identifies New Genetic and Functional Links to Intelligence.” Nature Genetics 50, no. 7 (2018): 912–19. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0152-6.