The reason why we want editing for IQ is because we want something unusual like “+1SD above von Neumann”, I’m not sure we want something beyond statistical range of human personality traits. Why do not select outliers from population using personality testing and give them high intelligence?
I’m not sure we want something beyond statistical range of human personality traits
Obviously it is untrue that editing is useless if it ‘only’ gives you a von Neumann. Similarly for personality. We don’t reify sets of personality traits as much as IQ, which is more obvious, but there are definitely many people who achieved remarkable things through force of personality. (Think figures like Lee Kuan Yew or Napoleon or Elon Musk come to mind as an example: they were smart, and lucky, and made good choices, but there is clearly still a lot left over to explain.) And because personality is many things and there seems to be a pipeline model of output, you quickly get very few people at the tails who assemble all the right components. (Gignac has a paper making this point more explicitly.)
Why do not select outliers from population using personality testing and give them high intelligence?
You’re acting like it’s uncontroversially true that you have unlimited edits and can change any property at any time in development. I don’t think that is the case.* There is going to be an editing budget and limits to editing. One might as well ask the opposite question: why not select intelligence outliers from the population and give them high personality traits? (Well, to know you don’t want to do that, you would have to have some idea of how well personality editing would work—which we don’t. That’s my point!)
* Actually, the whole adult thing is a bit of a red herring. I believe even OP has largely abandoned the idea of adult editing and gone back to embryo-based approaches...? This is just a convenient place to drop my comment about uses of editing which could matter more over the next 30 years.
I probably overindexed on “we should enhance intelligence to solve alignment problem”. In general, yes, improving towards von Neumann level gets you many benefits, just not benefits that I consider enough for problems I care about.
why not select intelligence outliers from the population and give them high personality traits
I think it’s also intuition that you can imagine coherent notion of “yourself but smarter”, even if being smarter changes your personality, but “yourself but with different personality traits” is much tricker and at some point you run into “what is ‘personality trait modification’ vs ‘killing person and replacing it with another’”.
The reason why we want editing for IQ is because we want something unusual like “+1SD above von Neumann”, I’m not sure we want something beyond statistical range of human personality traits. Why do not select outliers from population using personality testing and give them high intelligence?
Obviously it is untrue that editing is useless if it ‘only’ gives you a von Neumann. Similarly for personality. We don’t reify sets of personality traits as much as IQ, which is more obvious, but there are definitely many people who achieved remarkable things through force of personality. (Think figures like Lee Kuan Yew or Napoleon or Elon Musk come to mind as an example: they were smart, and lucky, and made good choices, but there is clearly still a lot left over to explain.) And because personality is many things and there seems to be a pipeline model of output, you quickly get very few people at the tails who assemble all the right components. (Gignac has a paper making this point more explicitly.)
You’re acting like it’s uncontroversially true that you have unlimited edits and can change any property at any time in development. I don’t think that is the case.* There is going to be an editing budget and limits to editing. One might as well ask the opposite question: why not select intelligence outliers from the population and give them high personality traits? (Well, to know you don’t want to do that, you would have to have some idea of how well personality editing would work—which we don’t. That’s my point!)
* Actually, the whole adult thing is a bit of a red herring. I believe even OP has largely abandoned the idea of adult editing and gone back to embryo-based approaches...? This is just a convenient place to drop my comment about uses of editing which could matter more over the next 30 years.
I probably overindexed on “we should enhance intelligence to solve alignment problem”. In general, yes, improving towards von Neumann level gets you many benefits, just not benefits that I consider enough for problems I care about.
I think it’s also intuition that you can imagine coherent notion of “yourself but smarter”, even if being smarter changes your personality, but “yourself but with different personality traits” is much tricker and at some point you run into “what is ‘personality trait modification’ vs ‘killing person and replacing it with another’”.
Where has OP said that he has “largely abandoned the idea of adult editing”?