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all 15 comments

[–]Ruairdhri 1 point2 points  (1 child)

With current technology we cant permanently increase intelligence (of which IQ is a very biased and unreliable measure) however in the future we will almost certainly be able to do so.

We already know the "drawback" to increased intelligence and why creatures more intelligent than us havent naturally evolved. The nervous system uses large amounts of energy and in nature anything that increases energy consumption is generally bad unless it increases energy intake and/or survivability/reproducablity more.

TL/DR Being smart uses more calories than being dumb, when an animals main purpose is to feed itself this is bad.

[–]gwern 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(It's not just calories: the limiting resource could be iodine, iron, zinc, sleep, infections, protein, mutation load...)

[–]hans-schwanz -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Didn't read the article, but wouldn't that include learning and practicing.

[–]gwern 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Didn't read the article,

/sigh

but wouldn't that include learning and practicing.

Not necessarily, because IQ != learning or practicing. But more specifically, there is some evidence that memory may be limited in part by resources or other efficiency concerns - memories can interfere, and the more learning one does, the more synaptic renormalization may be necessary (to eliminate gross increases in how much energy each neuron sucks up). Discussed there.

[–]PirateRo -2 points-1 points  (9 children)

The problem with your analysis is two-fold: First, it involves just your perspective so it is heavily biased. Secondly, it really underscores your lack of understanding of evolutionary theory.

In many ways, looking at some situation as if it were a singular event that just magically appears can lead anyone astray. Generally appearing in bad science-fiction, no such thing can possibly appear in this way. Instead, there is a broad movement across many different technologies and disciplines that lead to growth and change. Some of this is predictable, other events, like black swan events, are not so predictable yet you can see something must occur just given the build up of critical mass. While you may not know what exactly might happen, you might be able to estimate when some event should with some reasonable success.

To say that an increase in something like intelligence somehow draws a kind of penalty misses the point of the theory. In a world of mouths all chomping, speed and dexterity might help at the start but the mouths will only get faster in their turn. Intelligence might remove an individual from the mouths altogether. With that extra space, things can take a turn in a different direction. More becomes possible because resources are redirected along different lines.

And that is the real point here. Different ideas. Not just a single point of view but the point of view of millions, all diverse as possible, all seeking answers, providing answers and asking still more questions.

It occurred to me that if we were to go extinct because four guys in control of the world decided hunting asteroids was a pointless waste of effort and resource and we all died, I'd be furious. If, however, we all applied our collective wisdom to tackle the problem and we still died, I'd get it: We were selected out. We weren't smart enough to solve so adult a puzzle. Got it. I wouldn't be happy about that, either but I'd get it.

So can we increase intelligence? Absolutely. Should we try? With every last penny we have. For how long should we try? For however long it takes. And we must persevere in our effort, even if it means we engineer our future evolution.

And it will not be only engineering more intelligence but different intelligence, and not just improving the body but creating other bodies or doing without bodies entirely (the Organians may have had something there).

So, to coin a phrase: Yes, we can.

[–]api 1 point2 points  (8 children)

We can almost certainly optimize our existing capabilities with drugs, augmentations, etc., as athletic doping demonstrates. Intelligence is a much more complex trait, but there's nothing to prevent it from being similarly "doped."

There may be side effects, especially for more radical things. This hints as to why evolution might not have done it already-- if it negatively impacts fitness in other ways, it would have been selected against.

But I think there is validity to the argument re: major leaps forward. Boosting IQ by ten points? Maybe. Boosting it to levels unheard of in ordinary humans? Unlikely without something far more complex and difficult than drugs or other simple hacks.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Boosting IQ by ten points? Maybe.

Sure. In fact, arguably we've already done this, since a 10 point average gain is roughly equivalent to the gain realized from fixing iron and iodine deficiencies. But deficiencies are one-time deals...

[–]api 1 point2 points  (5 children)

But how many one-time deals might there be? I doubt we could claim we've discovered them all.

Evolution doesn't produce perfectly optimized systems. That's a huge misconception. It produces things that are sufficient to survive and procreate. There are many other traits that have historically trumped intelligence: good immunity to infectious disease, physical endurance, ability to survive on different diets, white skin to prevent vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes or dark skin to not get toasted at lower ones, etc.

And intelligence may not have been selected for as strongly as people think. It's good to some extent, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that very high intelligence is often associated with antisocial traits (very maladaptive in any culture where community membership is heavily emphasized), mental illness, and lower fertility (due to intentional management of fertility perhaps?). So selection for intelligence might be weak beyond what is required for ordinary day-to-day life and reproduction.

But we know that 180 IQs exist, so we know that we have the genetic potential to achieve that. Might there not be a large number of one-time fixes that could permit a substantial fraction of the population to approach that number?

I do agree though that going beyond what evolution has accomplished will not be possible via any series of simple "hacks," for the reasons you explain.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (4 children)

But how many one-time deals might there be? I doubt we could claim we've discovered them all.

Actually, we pretty much can claim we have. Diets have been examined in huge surveys and datasets, nutrition science has done things like put animals on artificial diets to look for signs of deficiency compared to high-quality enriched natural diets (one of the methods used to discover lithium was in fact a nutrient, IIRC), and IQ has been correlated against pretty much everything possible.

And yet! We still have not turned up any major effect sizes since iron and iodine, and those were discovered like half a century ago. (In the case of lead, arguably, it's been known for millennia.)

We've looked really hard, with huge sample sizes in some epidemiological cases. And we haven't found anything. I don't know what better evidence you could want for the claim 'there are almost certainly few or no deficits left to be found which do not fall under one of the loopholes outlined in the essay'.

And intelligence may not have been selected for as strongly as people think. It's good to some extent, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that very high intelligence is often associated with antisocial traits (very maladaptive in any culture where community membership is heavily emphasized), mental illness, and lower fertility (due to intentional management of fertility perhaps?). So selection for intelligence might be weak beyond what is required for ordinary day-to-day life and reproduction.

The reproductive fitness is already addressed in the essay as a potential loophole, and there's better avenues for that anyway: in a lot of samples in wealthy industrialized countries, IQ (and education in particular) correlates with decreased reproductive fitness.

But we know that 180 IQs exist, so we know that we have the genetic potential to achieve that.

Only in a crude sense. For starters, it's not even clear that it's meaningful to talk about a 180 IQ (How do you norm such a test intended to measure 5.3 standard deviations above the mean?), or what real consequence there might be, or what is driving IQ differences that far out (mutational load? It would take quite an intervention to do anything about that!).

[–]api 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I can accept that re: single factor correlations. We've looked at single nutrients, single drugs, etc. But that's only a very small sampling of the possibility space.

Take a popular nootropic for example: piracetam. Many users claim that adding choline supplementation greatly increases its effectiveness. (I'm aware that it likely only has small to no effect on IQ, but it does seem to affect something for some people. I'm using it as a multi-factor example.)

Imagine there are a hundred different known nootropics. The sum of all k-combinations of a set of 100 is a large number:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination#Number_of_k-combinations_for_all_k

My calculator gives: 1267650600228229401496703205376

That's what I'm getting at when I talk about huge evolutionary search spaces.

And if X+Y+Z has an effect, nothing guarantees that X, Y, Z, Z+Y, X+Z, etc. would have any effect. Let's say X, Y, and Z affect different steps in a synthesis pathway. In that case I can imagine biochemical scenarios were each is detrimental alone.

For all we know there is a drug cocktail with the ability to double IQ, but we have a one in 21024 chance of finding it.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I can accept that re: single factor correlations. We've looked at single nutrients, single drugs, etc. But that's only a very small sampling of the possibility space.

Unfortunately, it's most of the possibility space we can sample.

(Somewhere in the digits of pi is a program for a superintelligent artificial intelligence, as well as a copy of the best novel that will ever be written, and also the exact description of the best anti-cancer treatment humanity will ever discover. Unfortunately, knowing this is true is entirely useless.)

For all we know there is a drug cocktail with the ability to double IQ, but we have a one in 21024 chance of finding it.

If it is impossible to find such a drug, then that would seem to prove the point: if evolution can't find a way to either synthesize the drug or affect the relevant pathways somehow despite sampling billions of humans over countless generations, how on earth can we? (And with such a low prior probability, requiring so much evidence to overcome, how would we ever know we had found it...?)

Purely as a practical matter, there aren't going to ever be any discoveries which do not fall under one of the loopholes, even if they might exist somewhere out there in Platonia.

[–]api 1 point2 points  (1 child)

"if evolution can't find a way to either synthesize the drug or affect the relevant pathways somehow despite sampling billions of humans over countless generations, how on earth can we?"

Good question. I don't have a hard answer, but I do have to point out that human intelligence seems better at some things than evolutionary processes.

Short short version: there might be ways of exploring the fitness landscape that we could pull off using mathematics, big data, and our reasoning abilities that discover features that evolutionary processes have not been good at discovering. By contrast, we know that evolutionary processes are better than we are at discovering other kinds of features. So let's call the first set A, and the second set B: features we would be efficient at finding, and features evolution is more efficient at finding. If we assume that most of the set B is already found -- a logical assumption -- then we must ask: to what extent do sets A and B overlap? How many A "tricks" might not be in the set B?

As an analogy, consider conventional gas drilling vs. fracking. Think of different learning algorithms as being analogous to different drilling techniques. Conventional straight drilling can access some resources but not others. Once conventional drilling has exhausted a field, fracking may still be able to extract additional resource.

Here's a place to start for the long version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization

Learning theory was my thing for a while, and I studied it rather deeply.

[–]gwern 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do have to point out that human intelligence seems better at some things than evolutionary processes.

Certainly. But I would point out that we did not go to the moon by feeding albatrosses some nootropics or amphetamines - we went to the moon by doing something which looked nothing at all like how birds fly. We can do a lot, but all of the things that we do so well are described very well by a claim like "interventions may not be simple" - the Apollo program was exceedingly complex and remains one of the largest scientific and engineering programs ever, up there with the Manhattan Project etc.

If we assume that most of the set B is already found -- a logical assumption -- then we must ask: to what extent do sets A and B overlap? How many A "tricks" might not be in the set B?

I think it's hard to say. There's a serious selection bias at play: anything natural systems do better than us, we're not going to try to replace artificially unless we really have to. Most people leave their kidneys alone rather than use a dialysis machine. We don't have giant industrial plants cracking carbon dioxide into oxygen because, well, real plants do it so much better.

That is, human inventions are cherrypicked to fall into the tiny area of tasks natural things either do not do or we can do better.

Here's a place to start for the long version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization

Yes, I've heard of the no-free-lunch theorems.

[–]PirateRo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure how complicated it is. It emerges from cells just like muscles and skin and it evolved right here at the bottom of a gravity well and more than once.

Intelligence is niche driven and humankind is surrounded by intelligence. I do not see it as either special or as us at the top of any ladder. Having intelligence to fill your niche just means that you stave off something eating you until you can reproduce and that has been the hallmark of success.

All you have to do to realize this is not the difference in DNA between chimps and people. It is 2%. And that 2% gives us quite a lot of stuff, like SpongeBob. Chimps couldn't possibly conceive of a happy, bright yellow sponge living at the bottom of the ocean in a pineapple. So, no, there's been no selection against it. All it means is that something hasn't eaten you (yet).

Also, I do not think IQ is a meaningful measure. But if we were talking raising IQ ten points, I think we blow past something like that just on the Flynn effect.

[–]WhichDoctor -1 points0 points  (0 children)

that article felt mildly pretentious.