It seems plausible to me that some portion of iq-enhancing genes work through pathways outside the brain (blood flow, faster metabolism, nutrient delivery, stimulant-like effects, etc.). If that is the case and even just a small portion of the edits don’t need to make it to the brain, couldn’t you get huge iq increases without ever crossing the blood-brain barrier?
If timelines are short, it seems worthwhile to do that first and use the gains to bootstrap from there. Would that give significant returns fast enough to be worth doing? Is this something you’re already trying to do?
It’s a good question. This question is hard to answer because we don’t have great data on which genes matter in which tissues.
But we do have decent proxies; for example we have OK RNA sequencing data from different bodily tissues, and we could probably use that to figure out in which tissues proteins associated with genetic variants known to affect intelligence are most heavily expressed.
I haven’t thought this to be a huge priority yet because some early data I saw indicated that most of the genetic variants acted primarily through the brain. And given that we probably couldn’t yet raise IQ more than a standard deviation even if we had both great brain delivery and better gene editors, it just didn’t seem like a high priority yet.
Very late followup question: how much additional effort do you think would be neccessary to try to do this for something like stamina/energy? It seems like some people (eg. Eliezer) are bottlenecked more on that than intelligence, and just in general alignment researchers having more energy than their capabilities counterparts seems very useful.
It seems plausible to me that some portion of iq-enhancing genes work through pathways outside the brain (blood flow, faster metabolism, nutrient delivery, stimulant-like effects, etc.). If that is the case and even just a small portion of the edits don’t need to make it to the brain, couldn’t you get huge iq increases without ever crossing the blood-brain barrier?
If timelines are short, it seems worthwhile to do that first and use the gains to bootstrap from there. Would that give significant returns fast enough to be worth doing? Is this something you’re already trying to do?
It’s a good question. This question is hard to answer because we don’t have great data on which genes matter in which tissues.
But we do have decent proxies; for example we have OK RNA sequencing data from different bodily tissues, and we could probably use that to figure out in which tissues proteins associated with genetic variants known to affect intelligence are most heavily expressed.
I haven’t thought this to be a huge priority yet because some early data I saw indicated that most of the genetic variants acted primarily through the brain. And given that we probably couldn’t yet raise IQ more than a standard deviation even if we had both great brain delivery and better gene editors, it just didn’t seem like a high priority yet.
Very late followup question: how much additional effort do you think would be neccessary to try to do this for something like stamina/energy? It seems like some people (eg. Eliezer) are bottlenecked more on that than intelligence, and just in general alignment researchers having more energy than their capabilities counterparts seems very useful.