I’m concerned about nonlinearly bad outcomes from losing a few IQ points. I don’t think it’s just that if I lost 5 IQ, I’d work more slowly. Perhaps I just wouldn’t understand certain things; there maybe thoughts I can no longer think; insights I could no longer have. I’m worried about this both for impact reasons (helping solve alignment) and for personal reasons: my mental acuity is important to my life-enjoyment, via grasping new concepts and enjoying self-study (you do mention happiness effects). On an extreme end of the spectrum (which COVID would not take me to), I doubt an 80-IQ TurnTrout would much enjoy self-study, however slowly that progressed for him.
I’m similarly worried about about “tipping point” effects from other possible long COVID symptoms, like fatigue (“straw that broke the camel’s back”; fatigue may not just reduce my productivity and enjoyment by 5%, but make it consistently hard for me to do important thing X at all due to insufficient activation energy).
IQ affects many things. If you roughly double your income when you go up 60 IQ points, each IQ point is about 2% added income. Each IQ point is probably also .1% happiness (.01/10). It also probably reflects some underlying worse health that may have other affects. It’s hard not to overcount when something is correlated with everything. However, I think the largest effect here will be the money-equivalent (impact, perhaps). We can double this at the end to account for other effects. Giving up 1⁄50 of this for an IQ point is equivalent to a lost week of production every year, which, while not the same as lost life, is still pretty bad.
Right. I think these are all fair, and I’ve tried to take them into account and be pretty conservative in not underestimating the risk. There are obviously a bunch of balancing forces on the opposite side from those you’ve laid out—eg the tipping point effect balances against the “you never notice” effect, otherwise you’re double-counting. In general, I’m trying to find a coherent picture that takes into account the negatives while not overcounting them—it seems very easy to overcount given that all good things correlate and all bad things correlate, but small affects don’t actually send one into a spiral.
To sanity-check my calculations, let’s consider what it would do to increase the amount of weighting to IQ by a factor of 3. I had estimated a .15-point loss in IQ is .5% of your life-equivalent lost, so tripling this would mean 1.5%. Then losing 1 IQ point would be equivalent to 10% of your life, and every fifth of a standard deviation would be a third of your life-equivalent. This would mean at your margins, exercising like two half-hour amounts in a week would cause your life to get 20% better. I think that stretches the bounds of credulity. Even a factor of 2 increase seems to stretch things, unless you’re very comfortable counting 70% of your life’s value as coming from that small edge of intelligence that differentiates eg a better-than-average grad student from an average grad student (maybe IQ 140 vs IQ 130).
Re “this”, I think I meant productivity but had changed the sentence. I’ll edit to fix.
I’m concerned about nonlinearly bad outcomes from losing a few IQ points. I don’t think it’s just that if I lost 5 IQ, I’d work more slowly. Perhaps I just wouldn’t understand certain things; there maybe thoughts I can no longer think; insights I could no longer have. I’m worried about this both for impact reasons (helping solve alignment) and for personal reasons: my mental acuity is important to my life-enjoyment, via grasping new concepts and enjoying self-study (you do mention happiness effects). On an extreme end of the spectrum (which COVID would not take me to), I doubt an 80-IQ TurnTrout would much enjoy self-study, however slowly that progressed for him.
I’m similarly worried about about “tipping point” effects from other possible long COVID symptoms, like fatigue (“straw that broke the camel’s back”; fatigue may not just reduce my productivity and enjoyment by 5%, but make it consistently hard for me to do important thing X at all due to insufficient activation energy).
What does “this” refer to, above?
Right. I think these are all fair, and I’ve tried to take them into account and be pretty conservative in not underestimating the risk. There are obviously a bunch of balancing forces on the opposite side from those you’ve laid out—eg the tipping point effect balances against the “you never notice” effect, otherwise you’re double-counting. In general, I’m trying to find a coherent picture that takes into account the negatives while not overcounting them—it seems very easy to overcount given that all good things correlate and all bad things correlate, but small affects don’t actually send one into a spiral.
To sanity-check my calculations, let’s consider what it would do to increase the amount of weighting to IQ by a factor of 3. I had estimated a .15-point loss in IQ is .5% of your life-equivalent lost, so tripling this would mean 1.5%. Then losing 1 IQ point would be equivalent to 10% of your life, and every fifth of a standard deviation would be a third of your life-equivalent. This would mean at your margins, exercising like two half-hour amounts in a week would cause your life to get 20% better. I think that stretches the bounds of credulity. Even a factor of 2 increase seems to stretch things, unless you’re very comfortable counting 70% of your life’s value as coming from that small edge of intelligence that differentiates eg a better-than-average grad student from an average grad student (maybe IQ 140 vs IQ 130).
Re “this”, I think I meant productivity but had changed the sentence. I’ll edit to fix.