Friendly to the Extreme: Kids and Adults With Williams Syndrome (Link)
Williams Syndrome is a rare genetic condition [...].
“Little babies will come up to you, they will stare into your face, and it will be hard to actually disengage from that stare,” explained Helen Tager-Flusberg whose lab at Boston University studies the social behavior of children with Williams. “When they’re four or five...whether they know you or not, within about five minutes you’re their new best friend.”
One fascinating study by researchers in Europe found that children with Williams show no racial bias whatsoever. While children, even babies, prefer people of their own race, the neural pathway that imprints for race bias is somehow lacking in children with Williams.
Williams Syndrome is caused by the deletion of roughly 25 genes on chromosome 7. The deletion can occur randomly during the production of a sperm or egg cell. Though there are 20,000 to 25,000 genes in the human genome, even the loss of just 25 genes can have profound effects on a person’s physical, behavioral and cognitive make-up.
[...]
In one experiment to test empathy, the adult experimenter bangs her knee on a table and expresses a great deal of pain. In many runs the lab recorded, the typically-developing child just watched and expressed no empathy or concern. But children with Williams often went right over to the experimenter to rub her knee and ask, “What’s wrong?”
[...]
What do most children with Williams Syndrome do when presented with the creepy spider? They pet it.
Link: abcnews.go.com/Health/friendly-extreme-meet-kids-adults-williams-syndrome/
This reminds me of the Ecstasy research—people aren’t actually friendlier, they just become incompetent at recognizing hostility.
I think that is relevant.
Their very low IQs as well. From a NYT article:
Fascinating, thanks for the link.
Any particular link to rationality?
Williams Syndrome (WS) was discussed a while back on LW in the context of human enhancement.
I was fascinated to learn about WS. It’s like the opposite of autism (or at least autistic savantism): good at social engagement, and bad at analytical thought.
I don’t know if this, like autism, has varying degrees, but if it does, I’ve known at least one person far out on the scale.
I don’t see how Williams Syndrome could be a spectrum, since it’s caused by the deletion of specific genes; they’re either there or they’re not. I do recall one writer (perhaps Simon Baron-Cohen?) speculating that there may be a disorder spectrum opposite autism which has received little recognition because society is much more accommodating of people who’re socially fluent but analytically inept than the reverse.
Not really, but I thought it hints at some important insights and problems. What if it turns out that certain races are more kind than others, how would such knowledge influence CEV? If there are strong genetic factors strongly determining such important human values as altruism and general warmth, the opposite could be the case as well. This all leads to the question, what does it mean to be human? There might be some incoherence if the psychological unity of humans does depend on as little as 25 genes. Therefore CEV could turn out to cause a minority of humans to suffer or be discriminated due to their extreme psychological otherness, because it ultimately has a bearing on their interpretation of ethical questions.
If important human values are as strongly determined by genetic factors as shown by people with Williams Syndrome, then knowing more won’t make the volition of different people with different genetic makeups converge.
Letting the future of the universe be determined by a quick snapshot of the different fraction of human demographic groups… The idea that the same provably friendly AI would do something radically different with the universe if its developed in the decade that Finns represent 60% of the world’s population compared to a decade later when they represent 10% sounds very scary but plausible.
I’ve been thinking about these questions for several years. How I deal with this is that I accept (real) value diversity.
Inhuman respect for sovereignty paired with a strong unbiased recognition of self-determination should be enough as long as people give up desires for universal standards of morality outside their pocket of matter.
People are fine with this in theory but are utterly aghast when I give them even examples of mildly different value systems. This makes me very pessimistic, since the only qualitatively different probable scenario in my mind seems to be all out value warfare.
And that brings it back to a Darwinian struggle, which is likley to eventually destroy value for all currently existing groups.
David Brooks addresses related themes in his recent book Social Animals. I highly recommend this podcast talk. His opening monologue is actually very funny—he notes the similarity between politicians and people with the genetic condition Williams Syndrome :-)
Ohhh, I like this new way of handling deletions.
I was just going to link and repost this blog entry from Steven Hsu’s blog, but changed my mind since it was only peripherally connected to Williams syndrome I changed my mind.
Makes it hard to censor ASCII based basilisks though. ;)
I think that is relevant.
Also relevant is that most William syndrome people have an IQ somewhere in the 60s.
Wow.
Someone needs to engineer a highly contagious retrovirus that gives people this thing. I Imagine it’d make the world a lot better place to live. ((ok, it probably dosn’t work with just gene therapy applied to an adult… but if it did that’d totally be a thing to do. ))
If everyone became like that, one unfriendly human could take over the world.
Williams Syndrome includes serious cognitive deficits. Eliezer suggests that it is not an enhancement of anything, but a mere sparing of the frontal lobes from a deficit in the development of the rest of the brain.
Any volunteers to take the retrovirus?
It’s not an obvious choice to me. Taking a stab on trying to actually trying to think of what I’d do in that situation plunged my simulation way into a tangled web of consequences. Ad that was without the stuff I’d do before trying to think of an actual solution I were really faced with the problem, such as discussing it with people, thinking of it for 5 min, or giving it more introspection that random idle tired though.
I’d certainly be willing to take the risk personally if the numbers came up as it being beneficial to the world thou.
It’s obvious to me. You might as well wish to have Down’s Syndrome. From PubMed:
“Most patients require full-time caregivers and often live in supervised group homes.”
Williams Syndrome is plainly a case of a brain gone wrong. It gives a superficial facility with social interaction but with no substance behind it.
If you watch this video you can hear a 8 year old girl being asked if she wants to be a “helper”. She replies that it feels like an honor to her.
Maybe she just learnt to say that and doesn’t know what it means, but isn’t that some sort of Chinese room argument? It doesn’t seem that they are unhappy helping others or that it is some sort of impulse reaction without any involvement of higher cognition.
And Willians Syndrome is not just marked by disability but, if you read the Wikipedia article you linked to, “has been described as a “cocktail party” type personality, and exhibit a remarkable blend of cognitive strengths and weaknesses.”
You probably don’t mean to imply this, but your comment makes it sound like that you believe the particular friendliness and warmth exhibited by humans with Williams Syndrome to be somehow unworthy compared to the rational choice taken by an high IQ individual that is exhibiting altruism.
But if a paperclip maximizer can be rational and yet not exhibit any amount of friendliness, then this means that it is ultimately a subjective-objective agent-dependent value exhibited by those who happen to feature a utility-function that assigns non-negligible weight to the unconditional well-being of other agents.
I never said anything about rationality, IQ, or altruism, so I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. I’m saying that friendliness is the only thing that people with Williams syndrome have in their favour—as compared with the general public. It doesn’t outweigh the deficits of mental and physical function.
And among the general public, people can be friendly anyway without general brain damage.
I am sorry, it seems I mixed some of the comments I read together. I should avoid reading comments via Google Reader/be more careful.
Doesn’t follow. (TL;DR: use the social model of disability, Luke.) This only proves that either Williams syndrome is bad or society is screwed up.
You have legs (probably), but no wings, and you do fine in everyday life. Things often rest on the assumption you have functioning legs—stairs, narrow doors, curbs, floor coverings, and people with no legs have trouble using them.
Yet imagine a society where everything assumes that people have wings (but not necessarily legs). Most buildings have no doors, because of course you can fly through the window. Things are placed high above your head, because of course you can fly up. There are perches you can’t use if you have legs.
You and I would do horrible in such a society, with exactly the same body configuration. Neither we nor the hypothetical legless winged person are “cases of a body gone wrong”, we just live in societies optimised for body types that may or may not be ours.
Likewise, people with Williams syndrome may only need atypical caregivers and institutions because the type of care they need is abnormal in our society (unlike the type of care that consists of paying other people to make your food and bring it to stores near you). If almost everyone had Williams syndrome, maybe we would need supervisers.
I think that last “would” was supposed to be a “wouldn’t”, but still, I don’t think so. The deficits are just too severe. If everyone had Williams syndrome, we wouldn’t have a civilisation. Not all disabilities are socially constructed.
If average adult height was three feet, or eight feet, we could still have a civilisation like the one we have. Only when you’re a three or eight foot adult in a world of 5 to 6.5 footers does your height make things difficult. But lack of mental capacity is not like that. Mental capacity, not height, is what has given us our civilization, and if we were markedly stupider we would not have the civilization.
Williams Syndrome is not just “increased friendliness”. It is a whole constellation of changes, mostly for the worse. This is the sort of thing that happens when you just hack off a chunk of a chromosome.
If you want the good parts but not the bad, fine, but that isn’t Williams Syndrome any more.
I meant “we, people without Williams syndrome”.
Plausible, but reversal test: there’s a saying among certain autistic groups that if there were no autistics, we’d still be gossiping over a raw mammoth leg in a cave. In the everyone-is-an-autie world, maybe AlternateRichardKennaway is saying “If everyone had neurotypicality, we wouldn’t have a civilisation”. Still, yeah, it’s quite possible that we’re on average just smart enough for civilisation but no smarter. (Also autism isn’t a raw intelligence increase, whereas raw intelligence decreases are common and Williams causes one, so that’s another asymmetry.)
We evolved to this level of intelligence gradually, not in a single hop. Given that the length of time we have had a civilisation for is pretty much nothing in evolutionary terms, I would guess that we are pretty much exactly at the minimum level of intelligence necessary for a civilisation.
Yup, that’s what makes it quite possible. Not drop-dead obvious, though—there’s nonzero selection pressure for intelligence even now, environment has a huge load to do with intelligence so there are possibly big gains between the beginning to civilization and now, maybe civilization-making magic happens with enough geniuses (genii?) or is prevented by too many too stupid people so variance (and maybe population) matters more than average.
I’m not sure how much you’re agreeing or disagreeing there. To me, the mental deficits of Williams Syndrome are the showstopper. There are lots of other ways in which people can and do vary, and where we happen to be on those scales isn’t necessarily the way we would have to be, to have got here at all.
Williams Syndrome isn’t all or nothing, BTW. Some anecdotal data.
I would rather have wings than legs. I think I might even rather this in our society.
Its pretty much a slam dunk in my eyes.
Most people with an IQ of 100 seem to be a net positive for everyone else on the planet. Most people with an IQ of 65, not so much.
With the exception of the proverbial North Korean Space Zombie Hitler Stalin Bad Guy straw man an individualist classiest sexist racist speciest ableist with an IQ of 135 has a higher probability of contributing something to mankind that a selfless person with an IQ of 100 who can’t detect any hostility or ill intention.
But people seem to drop utilitarianism when it can’t help you signal good things. Killing arbitrarily large numbers of certain kinds of people dosen’t seem to be a bad signal in practice. Implicitly violating taboos is. Funny that.
Yea, if you just see to the direct effects that’s fairly obviously the way it is and you shouldn’t take the retrovirus. The main way in which taking the virus would be a good thing is if you’re the only person willing to test it and that it’ll be used for a lot of good on others if you’re willing to test it but not get further if you don’t. I have no idea why my brain picked that very non-standard situation as the default previously.