Reflecting on this has in fact made me more pessimistic about a small group of cognitively enhanced humans as an alternative to figuring out alignment or optimizing the universe more generally. I think raising the waterline (increasing average cognitive ability and also reducing variance. “Intelligence Equity”) and fixing diseases etc. are just straightforward pareto improvements. The more pareto improvements we make, the more obvious it is going to be what else is holding civilization back. Changing things too quickly at once is also bad. It’s a tricky problem.
Wei Dai has twoposts on how having higher intelligence than others has social costs. So fixing that through engineering seems like one way to fix some problems. You could brand it as affirmative action that actually works. Though I doubt that branding is my comparative advantage.
Reflecting on this has in fact made me more pessimistic about a small group of cognitively enhanced humans as an alternative to figuring out alignment or optimizing the universe more generally. I think raising the waterline (increasing average cognitive ability and also reducing variance. “Intelligence Equity”) and fixing diseases etc. are just straightforward pareto improvements. The more pareto improvements we make, the more obvious it is going to be what else is holding civilization back. Changing things too quickly at once is also bad. It’s a tricky problem.
Wei Dai has two posts on how having higher intelligence than others has social costs. So fixing that through engineering seems like one way to fix some problems. You could brand it as affirmative action that actually works. Though I doubt that branding is my comparative advantage.