Curious if you have any thoughts on combining this with ideas of collective intelligence?
I do wonder whether individual intelligence is the thing to aim for but it likely won’t hurt.
Yeah, I don’t have much of a thought beyond “that sounds great”. Hopefully these sorts of things would stack, i.e. add up or even synergize.
I’ve read that intelligence genetically seems quite well selected for and that it might be hard (at least with random variation) to hit the right type of genes due to the optimisation pressure already applied there.
Where did you read this? Curious to take a look. We almost know for a fact that one could nudge IQ in the region around the mean (say, within 2 SDs of the mean) for fairly small nudges (say, up to +.8 SD on IQ). There are causally (sibling) validated PGSes for IQ with hundreds of variants, and there’s no visible non-linearity up to about 2 SDs on the trait (see fig 2 in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10516-5).
So it becomes more of a remove the negative genes rather than improve the positive genes type of thing.
I’ve probably floated this as what might be going on in the past, but it doesn’t especially seem to actually be the case. IQ-positive variants have a broad spread of allele frequencies.
listening ability and the ability to understand other people
trait openness or conscientiousness seems like quite good targets in terms of general throughput.
Yeah these seem great. In general though, there’s two problems with reprogenetics for personality:
The PGSes (and underlying trait measurements) are bad for now.
Personality seems like a somewhat more abusable trait to affect.
I think that these aren’t, in the end, dealbreaker obstacles, but they are problems. It would also be great if we had a good understanding of non-abusable personality traits that would help out the child and humanity.
So I had read Kevin Mitchell’s Innate and then followed up by looking at some of the papers back in 2023 or so.
It seems that some of these things are turning out to be false/not replicating? E.g the mutational load hypothesis so I think it’s more about going to the extremes, it might be hard to get 200 IQ geniuses all over the place. I think increasing the general populations IQ by 30-50 points remains quite feasible and that it would be great boon.
My certainty here is not that high fwiw.
I did a chat with fable about this and here’s the sources it looked at:
Sources on the “mutational load / asymmetry” view of intelligence genetics (the claim in Kevin Mitchell’s *Innate*), plus the newer work that bounds it:
**Theory**
- [Keller & Miller 2006, *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17094843/) — Why harmful, heritable mental disorders persist: new mutations arrive faster than selection removes them (polygenic mutation-selection balance). The theoretical backbone of the load argument.
**Evidence that intelligence was selected upward and that random variation skews negative**
- [Joshi et al. 2015, *Nature*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26131930/) — 354k people: more homozygous DNA (children of related parents) → lower cognition. Directional dominance is the signature of a trait under past directional selection. - [Ganna et al. 2016, *Nature Neuroscience*](https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4404) — In the general population, each ultra-rare disruptive mutation ≈ 3 months less education; ≈ 6.5 months if it hits a constrained, brain-expressed gene. - [Kingdom et al. 2024, *Nature Genetics*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01710-0) — UK Biobank: rare damaging variants in developmental-disorder genes additively lower cognitive and socioeconomic outcomes; partially offset by a higher EA polygenic score.
**Evidence that bounds the strong version (“most heritable variance is load”)**
- [Common and rare variant associations with cognitive performance across development, *Nature Human Behaviour*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02491-8) — Common variants explain ~20% of variance; all rare coding variants exome-wide only ~1%. - [Distinct genetic architecture in the tails of complex traits, *Nature* 2026](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10516-5) — Middle of the distribution (~±2 SD) is common-variant, linear-PGS territory; the tails are dominated by rare large-effect variants. Reconciles the two views.
I think it’s more about going to the extremes, it might be hard to get 200 IQ geniuses all over the place.
I think of my target as being something like: make it be the case that, for parents who want to, they can safely give their kid an average expected IQ of 175 or so. My guess is that this is both feasible and safe (given a bunch of work), but I’m currently investigating how likely we should expect this to be feasible for different numbers (e.g. what’s the genetic architecture of intelligence at the high tail).
(The following is garbled / maybe wrong because it’s unfinished thinking.) It’s also plausible that IQ is just not a good description of things at the high tail. We just mean something like “can do thinky stuff at the level of 1-in-a-million geniuses” (which corresponds to a bit less than 5 SDs, i.e. a bit less than 175 IQ). Such people definitionally exist, so we don’t need to worry about “IQ”. One question is then something like “For 1-in-a-million geniuses, is their genius explained by non-direct-genetic effects to an unusually large extent compared to average?”. If not, then we’re implicitly saying that direct genetic effects aren’t hitting diminishing returns faster than non-direct-genetic effects. That in turn suggests we can push the direct genetic effects a bit further than that. If yes on the other hand, then we’re saying that genetic effects strongly co-saturate with each other right around the 2 or 3 SD mark, but not at all before (because we can observe them not doing that in the normal range), and somehow don’t cosaturate with environment / other non-genetic things. Which seems weird.
Personality seems like a somewhat more abusable trait to affect.
How is increasing intelligence not going to lead to changes in personality? E.g, I think there are good reasons to think that higher intelligence leads to higher degrees of rumination due to predictive processing reasons. If you’re better able to create an accurate model then it can be harder to break out of it as you’re already quite certain that the world works as you think it does.
There seems to be correlation between IQ and depression, this might be caused by the neuroticism connection but then the question of why the IQ and neuroticism connection exists is still there.
I probably woul be more fine with increasing traits that increases the possiblity of an individual being able to change their mind on things and come to their own conclusions about the world, some sort of empowerment thing. I think this is likely to involve an increasing in IQ but also conscientiousness, openness and a decrease in neuroticism at least some sort of clamping on neuroticism.
By “personality trait” I mean things like the Big Five, Dark Tetrad, and intuitive things like obedience, creativity, wisdom, etc.
I say they are “somewhat more abusable” because for some of these personality traits:
Plausibly some bad actors would want to push hard on that trait.
It would be pretty bad for the child if the child had an extreme version of that trait, even if it’s within the bounds of biological safety.
For intelligence, within bounds of safety, it seems fine / good for the child to be really smart; and it seems unlikely that many actors would want to make a child have very low intelligence.
But for obedience, for example, you could imagine an authoritarian regime that wants its subjects to be obedient / submissive; and this could get locked in. I don’t think that’s super likely to happen, but it would be a bad outcome.
I think there are good reasons to think that higher intelligence leads to higher degrees of rumination due to predictive processing reasons
Maybe? IDK what claims in this genre I’d want to put stock in, unless there’s scientific data.
I probably woul be more fine with increasing traits that increases the possiblity of an individual being able to change their mind on things and come to their own conclusions about the world, some sort of empowerment thing.
I think this is likely to involve an increasing in IQ but also conscientiousness, openness and a decrease in neuroticism at least some sort of clamping on neuroticism.
Maybe? At a wild guess, I’d expect that we’d have to make whole new psychometric constructs, but IDK.
Unclear to me why you put creativity and wisdom in the personality traits bucket. To me they seem to be as much “cognitive capacities” (or generators thereof), as g/intelligence.
On the g->personality thing, IIUC there’s strong support for high IQ correlating significantly with some facets of Opennesss to Experience, especially stuff like willingness to entertain new ideas (very unsurprising), although one can ask here whether it’s about high g influencing personality (or the other way around or a causal fork from some latent...) VS about the cognitive capacity allowing a latent trait of interest in ideas to manifest, where on lower levels of g there would be too much friction.
Yeah, I don’t personally have a principled distinction. What we have, by my lay understanding, is that
Intuitively, there’s things that increase one’s capability in general, and then there’s things that steer / shape what one is interested in / tends to do (extraversion, interests, adventurousness, sadisticness, …).
Intuitively, there’s lots of dimensions of capabilities and somewhat-general factors of capabilities (such as wisdom, empathy, creativity, determination, sanity, cleverness...), which may kinda overlap / shade into being more like steering, especially e.g. curiosity.
But in fact when psychometricians try, mainly what they find is one big blob, g; the subfactorizations they’ve tried don’t explain much more than just g.
g is pretty robust (measurable, transferrable between measurements, test-retest, correlates with life outcomes); other psychometrics are not very robust and not very explanatory of other things.
But I’d like to improve psychometrics for those other things.
Yeah, I don’t have much of a thought beyond “that sounds great”. Hopefully these sorts of things would stack, i.e. add up or even synergize.
Where did you read this? Curious to take a look. We almost know for a fact that one could nudge IQ in the region around the mean (say, within 2 SDs of the mean) for fairly small nudges (say, up to +.8 SD on IQ). There are causally (sibling) validated PGSes for IQ with hundreds of variants, and there’s no visible non-linearity up to about 2 SDs on the trait (see fig 2 in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10516-5).
I’ve probably floated this as what might be going on in the past, but it doesn’t especially seem to actually be the case. IQ-positive variants have a broad spread of allele frequencies.
Yeah these seem great. In general though, there’s two problems with reprogenetics for personality:
The PGSes (and underlying trait measurements) are bad for now.
Personality seems like a somewhat more abusable trait to affect.
I think that these aren’t, in the end, dealbreaker obstacles, but they are problems. It would also be great if we had a good understanding of non-abusable personality traits that would help out the child and humanity.
So I had read Kevin Mitchell’s Innate and then followed up by looking at some of the papers back in 2023 or so.
It seems that some of these things are turning out to be false/not replicating? E.g the mutational load hypothesis so I think it’s more about going to the extremes, it might be hard to get 200 IQ geniuses all over the place. I think increasing the general populations IQ by 30-50 points remains quite feasible and that it would be great boon.
My certainty here is not that high fwiw.
I did a chat with fable about this and here’s the sources it looked at:
Sources on the “mutational load / asymmetry” view of intelligence genetics (the claim in Kevin Mitchell’s *Innate*), plus the newer work that bounds it:
**Theory**
- [Keller & Miller 2006, *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17094843/) — Why harmful, heritable mental disorders persist: new mutations arrive faster than selection removes them (polygenic mutation-selection balance). The theoretical backbone of the load argument.
**Evidence that intelligence was selected upward and that random variation skews negative**
- [Joshi et al. 2015, *Nature*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26131930/) — 354k people: more homozygous DNA (children of related parents) → lower cognition. Directional dominance is the signature of a trait under past directional selection.
- [Ganna et al. 2016, *Nature Neuroscience*](https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4404) — In the general population, each ultra-rare disruptive mutation ≈ 3 months less education; ≈ 6.5 months if it hits a constrained, brain-expressed gene.
- [Kingdom et al. 2024, *Nature Genetics*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01710-0) — UK Biobank: rare damaging variants in developmental-disorder genes additively lower cognitive and socioeconomic outcomes; partially offset by a higher EA polygenic score.
**Evidence that bounds the strong version (“most heritable variance is load”)**
- [Common and rare variant associations with cognitive performance across development, *Nature Human Behaviour*](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02491-8) — Common variants explain ~20% of variance; all rare coding variants exome-wide only ~1%.
- [Distinct genetic architecture in the tails of complex traits, *Nature* 2026](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10516-5) — Middle of the distribution (~±2 SD) is common-variant, linear-PGS territory; the tails are dominated by rare large-effect variants. Reconciles the two views.
**Background / provenance of the idea**
- [West Hunter, “The genetics of stupidity” (2012)](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/the-genetics-of-stupidity/) — Cochran’s version of the same load argument.
- [Yeo et al. 2011](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3027642/) — Early small study (n≈200) linking rare CNV deletions to IQ; the effect size didn’t hold up in larger samples.
I think of my target as being something like: make it be the case that, for parents who want to, they can safely give their kid an average expected IQ of 175 or so. My guess is that this is both feasible and safe (given a bunch of work), but I’m currently investigating how likely we should expect this to be feasible for different numbers (e.g. what’s the genetic architecture of intelligence at the high tail).
(The following is garbled / maybe wrong because it’s unfinished thinking.) It’s also plausible that IQ is just not a good description of things at the high tail. We just mean something like “can do thinky stuff at the level of 1-in-a-million geniuses” (which corresponds to a bit less than 5 SDs, i.e. a bit less than 175 IQ). Such people definitionally exist, so we don’t need to worry about “IQ”. One question is then something like “For 1-in-a-million geniuses, is their genius explained by non-direct-genetic effects to an unusually large extent compared to average?”. If not, then we’re implicitly saying that direct genetic effects aren’t hitting diminishing returns faster than non-direct-genetic effects. That in turn suggests we can push the direct genetic effects a bit further than that. If yes on the other hand, then we’re saying that genetic effects strongly co-saturate with each other right around the 2 or 3 SD mark, but not at all before (because we can observe them not doing that in the normal range), and somehow don’t cosaturate with environment / other non-genetic things. Which seems weird.
How is increasing intelligence not going to lead to changes in personality? E.g, I think there are good reasons to think that higher intelligence leads to higher degrees of rumination due to predictive processing reasons. If you’re better able to create an accurate model then it can be harder to break out of it as you’re already quite certain that the world works as you think it does.
There seems to be correlation between IQ and depression, this might be caused by the neuroticism connection but then the question of why the IQ and neuroticism connection exists is still there.
I probably woul be more fine with increasing traits that increases the possiblity of an individual being able to change their mind on things and come to their own conclusions about the world, some sort of empowerment thing. I think this is likely to involve an increasing in IQ but also conscientiousness, openness and a decrease in neuroticism at least some sort of clamping on neuroticism.
By “personality trait” I mean things like the Big Five, Dark Tetrad, and intuitive things like obedience, creativity, wisdom, etc.
I say they are “somewhat more abusable” because for some of these personality traits:
Plausibly some bad actors would want to push hard on that trait.
It would be pretty bad for the child if the child had an extreme version of that trait, even if it’s within the bounds of biological safety.
For intelligence, within bounds of safety, it seems fine / good for the child to be really smart; and it seems unlikely that many actors would want to make a child have very low intelligence.
But for obedience, for example, you could imagine an authoritarian regime that wants its subjects to be obedient / submissive; and this could get locked in. I don’t think that’s super likely to happen, but it would be a bad outcome.
Maybe? IDK what claims in this genre I’d want to put stock in, unless there’s scientific data.
Yeah totally, this sounds great. (Cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fzKfzXWEBaENJXDGP/what-is-wisdom-1 )
Maybe? At a wild guess, I’d expect that we’d have to make whole new psychometric constructs, but IDK.
Unclear to me why you put creativity and wisdom in the personality traits bucket. To me they seem to be as much “cognitive capacities” (or generators thereof), as g/intelligence.
On the g->personality thing, IIUC there’s strong support for high IQ correlating significantly with some facets of Opennesss to Experience, especially stuff like willingness to entertain new ideas (very unsurprising), although one can ask here whether it’s about high g influencing personality (or the other way around or a causal fork from some latent...) VS about the cognitive capacity allowing a latent trait of interest in ideas to manifest, where on lower levels of g there would be too much friction.
Agreed on both points.
Yeah, I don’t personally have a principled distinction. What we have, by my lay understanding, is that
Intuitively, there’s things that increase one’s capability in general, and then there’s things that steer / shape what one is interested in / tends to do (extraversion, interests, adventurousness, sadisticness, …).
Intuitively, there’s lots of dimensions of capabilities and somewhat-general factors of capabilities (such as wisdom, empathy, creativity, determination, sanity, cleverness...), which may kinda overlap / shade into being more like steering, especially e.g. curiosity.
But in fact when psychometricians try, mainly what they find is one big blob, g; the subfactorizations they’ve tried don’t explain much more than just g.
g is pretty robust (measurable, transferrable between measurements, test-retest, correlates with life outcomes); other psychometrics are not very robust and not very explanatory of other things.
But I’d like to improve psychometrics for those other things.