I’m not sure if this objection has been pointed out or is even valid.. I think the argument from approximate linearity is probably wrong, even if we’re talking editing embryos and not adults. In machine learning we make the learning rate small enough that the map of the error over the parameter space appears linear. This means scaling the gradients way down, but my intuition is that it’s minimizing the euclidean distance covered by each step that’s “doing the work” of making everything appear flat. If that’s correct then flipping 20000 genes is a massive step through gene space compared to flipping just a few and linearity would likely break down. I would expect you can beat sexual selection with methods like you describe, since we can use population studies to get a nice accurate estimate of that “gradient”, but getting to IQ 900 or whatever seems a stretch to put it mildly.
I mean, I explicitly state in the post that I don’t think we’ll be able to reach IQs far outside the normal human range by just flipping alleles:
I don’t expect such an IQ to actually result from flipping all IQ-decreasing alleles to their IQ-increasing variants for the same reason I don’t expect to reach the moon by climbing a very tall ladder; at some point, the simple linear model will break down.
I have to confess that I did some skimming, and by ctrl-f it looks like I actually read right up to the first half of that paragraph before I got lazy. Fwiw it was due to mental and time constraints and nothing to do with the quality of writing.
I’m not sure if this objection has been pointed out or is even valid.. I think the argument from approximate linearity is probably wrong, even if we’re talking editing embryos and not adults. In machine learning we make the learning rate small enough that the map of the error over the parameter space appears linear. This means scaling the gradients way down, but my intuition is that it’s minimizing the euclidean distance covered by each step that’s “doing the work” of making everything appear flat. If that’s correct then flipping 20000 genes is a massive step through gene space compared to flipping just a few and linearity would likely break down. I would expect you can beat sexual selection with methods like you describe, since we can use population studies to get a nice accurate estimate of that “gradient”, but getting to IQ 900 or whatever seems a stretch to put it mildly.
I mean, I explicitly state in the post that I don’t think we’ll be able to reach IQs far outside the normal human range by just flipping alleles:
So yes, I agree with you
I have to confess that I did some skimming, and by ctrl-f it looks like I actually read right up to the first half of that paragraph before I got lazy. Fwiw it was due to mental and time constraints and nothing to do with the quality of writing.