“I don’t think you’ll need to worry about this stuff until you get really far out of distribution.” I may sound like I’m just commenting for the sake of commenting but I think that’s something you want to be crystal clear on. I’m pessimistic in general and this situation is probably unlikely but I guess one of my worst fears would be creating uberpsychosis. Sounding like every LWer, my relatively out of distribution capabilities made my psychotic delusions hyper-analytic/1000x more terrifying & elaborate than they would have been with worse working memory/analytic abilities (once I started ECT I didn’t have the horsepower to hyperanalyze existence as much). I guess the best way to describe it was that I could feel the terror of just how bad -inf would truly be as opposed to having an abstract/detached view that -inf = bad. And I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through something like that, let alone something much scarier/worse.
I can’t really speak to your specific experience too well other than to simply say I’m sorry you had to go through that. We actually see that in general, mental health prevalence actually declines with increasing IQ. The one exception to this is aspbergers.
I do think it’s going to be very important to address mental health issues as well. Many mental health conditions are reasonably editable; we could reduce the prevalence of some by 50%+ with editing.
That makes sense. This may just be wishful thinking on my part/trying to see a positive that doesn’t exist, but psychotic tendencies might have higher representation among the population you’re interested in than the trend you’ve described might suggest. Taking the very small, subjective sample that is “the best” mathematician of each of the previous four centuries (Newton, Euler, Gauss, and Grothendieck), 50% of them (Newton and Grothendieck) had some major psychotic experiences (admittedly vastly later in life than is typical for men).
Again, I’m probably being too cautious, but I’m just very apprehensive about approaching the creation of sentient life with the attitude that increased iq = increased well-being. If that intution is incorrect, it would have catastrophic consequences.
“I don’t think you’ll need to worry about this stuff until you get really far out of distribution.” I may sound like I’m just commenting for the sake of commenting but I think that’s something you want to be crystal clear on. I’m pessimistic in general and this situation is probably unlikely but I guess one of my worst fears would be creating uberpsychosis. Sounding like every LWer, my relatively out of distribution capabilities made my psychotic delusions hyper-analytic/1000x more terrifying & elaborate than they would have been with worse working memory/analytic abilities (once I started ECT I didn’t have the horsepower to hyperanalyze existence as much). I guess the best way to describe it was that I could feel the terror of just how bad -inf would truly be as opposed to having an abstract/detached view that -inf = bad. And I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through something like that, let alone something much scarier/worse.
I can’t really speak to your specific experience too well other than to simply say I’m sorry you had to go through that. We actually see that in general, mental health prevalence actually declines with increasing IQ. The one exception to this is aspbergers.
I do think it’s going to be very important to address mental health issues as well. Many mental health conditions are reasonably editable; we could reduce the prevalence of some by 50%+ with editing.
That makes sense. This may just be wishful thinking on my part/trying to see a positive that doesn’t exist, but psychotic tendencies might have higher representation among the population you’re interested in than the trend you’ve described might suggest. Taking the very small, subjective sample that is “the best” mathematician of each of the previous four centuries (Newton, Euler, Gauss, and Grothendieck), 50% of them (Newton and Grothendieck) had some major psychotic experiences (admittedly vastly later in life than is typical for men).
Again, I’m probably being too cautious, but I’m just very apprehensive about approaching the creation of sentient life with the attitude that increased iq = increased well-being. If that intution is incorrect, it would have catastrophic consequences.