I greatly appreciate this kind of critique, thank you!
My guess is this is too big of an ask, and I am already grateful for your post, but do you have a prediction about how much of the variance would turn out to be causal in the relevant way?
My current best guess is we are going to be seeing some of these technologies used in the animal breeding space relatively soon (within a few years), and so early predictions seem helpful for validating models, and also might also just help people understand how much you currently think the post overestimates the impact of edits.
if I had to guess, then I would guess that 2⁄3 of the effects are none causal, and the other 1⁄3 are more or less fully causal, but that all of the effects sizes between 0.5-1 are exaggerated by a factor of 20-50% and the effects estimated below +0.5 IQ are exaggerated by much more.
But I think all of humanity is very confused about what IQ even is, especially outside the ranges of 70-130, so It’s hard to say if it is the outcome variable (IQ) or the additive assumption breaks down first, I imagine we could get super human IQ, and that after 1 generation of editing, we could close a lot of the causal gap. I also imagine there are big large edits with large effects, such as making brain cells smaller, like in birds, but that would require a lot of edits to get to work.
Thank you! I’ll see whether I can do some of my own thinking on this, as I care a lot about the issue, but do feel like I would have to really dig into it. I appreciate your high-level gloss on the size of the overestimate.
This is why I don’t really buy anybody who claims an IQ >160. Effectively all tested IQs over 160 likely came from a childhood test or have an SD of 20 and there is an extremely high probability that the person with said tested iq substantially regressed to the mean. And even for a test like the WAIS that claims to measure up to 160 with SD 15, the norms start to look really questionable once you go much past 140.
I think I know one person who tested at 152 on the WISC when he was ~11, and one person who ceilinged the WAIS-III at 155 when he was 21. And they were both high-achieving, but they weren’t exceptionally high-achieving. Someone fixated on IQ might call this cope, but they really were pretty normal people who didn’t seem to be on a higher plane of existence. The biggest functional difference between them and people with more average IQs was that they had better job prospects. But they both had a lot of emotional problems and didn’t seem particularly happy.
I greatly appreciate this kind of critique, thank you!
My guess is this is too big of an ask, and I am already grateful for your post, but do you have a prediction about how much of the variance would turn out to be causal in the relevant way?
My current best guess is we are going to be seeing some of these technologies used in the animal breeding space relatively soon (within a few years), and so early predictions seem helpful for validating models, and also might also just help people understand how much you currently think the post overestimates the impact of edits.
if I had to guess, then I would guess that 2⁄3 of the effects are none causal, and the other 1⁄3 are more or less fully causal, but that all of the effects sizes between 0.5-1 are exaggerated by a factor of 20-50% and the effects estimated below +0.5 IQ are exaggerated by much more.
But I think all of humanity is very confused about what IQ even is, especially outside the ranges of 70-130, so It’s hard to say if it is the outcome variable (IQ) or the additive assumption breaks down first, I imagine we could get super human IQ, and that after 1 generation of editing, we could close a lot of the causal gap. I also imagine there are big large edits with large effects, such as making brain cells smaller, like in birds, but that would require a lot of edits to get to work.
Thank you! I’ll see whether I can do some of my own thinking on this, as I care a lot about the issue, but do feel like I would have to really dig into it. I appreciate your high-level gloss on the size of the overestimate.
This is why I don’t really buy anybody who claims an IQ >160. Effectively all tested IQs over 160 likely came from a childhood test or have an SD of 20 and there is an extremely high probability that the person with said tested iq substantially regressed to the mean. And even for a test like the WAIS that claims to measure up to 160 with SD 15, the norms start to look really questionable once you go much past 140.
I think I know one person who tested at 152 on the WISC when he was ~11, and one person who ceilinged the WAIS-III at 155 when he was 21. And they were both high-achieving, but they weren’t exceptionally high-achieving. Someone fixated on IQ might call this cope, but they really were pretty normal people who didn’t seem to be on a higher plane of existence. The biggest functional difference between them and people with more average IQs was that they had better job prospects. But they both had a lot of emotional problems and didn’t seem particularly happy.