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.
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.