Hmmm, some good points. Clearly if I write something to complex this will take way too long and therefore, the cool voice is good.
Okay, yes humans can be cool but all humans cool?
Maybe some governments not cool? How does AI vs Bio affect if one big cool or many small cool? What if like homo deus we get separate Very Smart group of humans and one not so smart?
Human worse thing done worse than LLM worse thing done? Less control over range of expression? Moral mazes lead to psychopaths in control? Maybe non cool humans take control?
Yet, slow process good point. Coolness better chance if longer to remain cool.
Maybe democracy + debate cool? Totalitarianism not cool? Coolness is not group specific for AI or human? Coolness about how cool the decision process is? What does coolness attractor look like?
What if like homo deus we get separate Very Smart group of humans and one not so smart?
I agree this would most likely be either somewhat bad or quite bad, probably quite bad (depending on the details), both causally and also indicatorily.
I’ll restrict my discussion to reprogenetics, because I think that’s the main way we get smarter humans. My responses would be “this seems quite unlikely in the short run (like, a few generations)” and “this seems pretty unlikely in the longer run, at least assuming it’s in fact bad” and “there’s a lot we can do to make those outcomes less likely (and less bad)”.
Why unlikely in the short run? Some main reasons:
Uptake of reprogenetics is slow (takes clock time), gradual (proceeds by small steps), and fairly visible (science generally isn’t very secretive; and if something is being deployed at scale, that’s easy to notice, e.g. many clinics offering something or some company getting huge investments). These give everyone more room to cope in general, as discussed above, and in particular gives more time for people to notice emerging inequality and such. So humanity in general gets to learn about the tech and its meaning, institute social and governmental regulation, gain access, understand how to use it, etc.
Likewise, the strength of the technology itself will grow gradually (though I hope not too slowly). Further, even as the newest technology gets stronger, the previous medium strength tech gets more uptake. This means there’s a continuum of people using different levels of strength of the technology.
Parents will most likely have quite a range of how much they want to use reprogenetics for various things. Some will only decrease their future children’s disease risks; some will slightly increase IQ; some might want to increase IQ around as much as is available.
IQ, and even more so for other cognitive capacities and traits, is controlled…
partly by genetic effects we can make use of (currently something in the ballpark of 20% or so);
partly by genetic effects we can’t make use of (very many of which might take a long time to make use of because they have small and/or rare effects, or because they have interactions with other genes and/or the environment);
partly by non-genetic causes (unstructured environment such as randomness in fetal development, structured external environment such as culture, structured internal environment such as free self-creation / decisions about what to be or do).
Thus, we cannot control these traits, in the sense of hitting a narrow target; we can only shift them around. We cannot make the distribution of a future child’s traits be narrow. (This is a bad state of affairs in some ways, but has substantive redeeming qualities, which I’m invoking here: people couldn’t firmly separate even if they wanted to (though this may need quantification to have much force).)
Together, I suspect that the above points create, not separated blobs, but a broad continuum:
As mentioned in the post, there are ceilings to human intelligence amplification that would probably be hit fairly quickly, and probably wouldn’t be able to be bypassed quickly. (Who knows how long, but I’m imagining at least some decades—e.g. BCIs might take on that time scale or longer to impact human general intelligence—reprogenetics is the main strategy that takes advantage of evolution’s knowledge about how to make capable brains, and I’m guessing that knowledge is more than we will do in a couple decades but not insanely much in the grand scheme of things.)
What can we do? Without going into detail on how, I’ll just basically say “greatly increase equality of access through innovation and education, and research cultures to support those things”.
Okay, I think the gradual point is a good one and also that it very much helps our institutions to be able to deal with increased intelligence.
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing? Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?
Maybe there’s something here about IQ being hereditary already and thus the point about a more permanent two caste society with smart and stupid people is redundant but somehow I still feel that the economics of private gene editing over long periods of time feels a bit off?
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing?
As a matter of science and technology, reprogenetics should be inexpensive. I’ve analyzed this area quite a bit (though not focused specifically on eventual cost), see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html . My fairly strong guess is that it’s perfectly feasible to have strong reprogenetics that’s pretty inexpensive (on the order of $5k to $25k for a pretty strongly genomically vectored zygote). From a tech and science perspective, I think I see multiple somewhat-disjunctive ways, each of which is pretty plausibly feasible, and each of which doesn’t seem to have any inputs that can’t be made inexpensive.
(As a comparison point, IVF is expensive—something like $8k to $20k—but my guess is that this is largely because of things like regulatory restrictions (needing an MD to supervise egg retrieval, even though NPs can do it well), drug price lock-in (the drugs are easy to manufacture, so are available cheaply on gray markets), and simply economic friction/overhang (CNY is cheaper basically by deciding to be cheaper and giving away some concierge-ness). None of this solves things for IVF today; I’m just saying, it’s not expensive due to the science and tech costing $20k.)
Assuming that it can be technically inexpensive, that cuts out our work for us: make it be inexpensive, by
Both internal to the field, and pressure / support from society and gvt
Don’t patent and then sit on it or keep it proprietary; instead publish science, or patent and license, or at least provide it as a platform service
Avoiding large other costs
Sane regulation
No monopolies
Subsidies
Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?
I definitely think that
as much as possible, gvt should fund related science to be published openly; this helps drive down prices, enables more competitive last-mile industry (clinics, platforms for biological operations, etc.), and signals a societal value of caring about this and not leaving it up to raw market forces
probably gvt should provide subsidies with some kind of general voucher (however, it should be a general voucher only, not a voucher for specific genomic choices—I don’t want the gvt controlling people’s genomic choices according to some centralized criterion, as this is eugenicsy, cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html )
Is that what you mean? I don’t think we can rely on gvt and philanthropic funding to build out a widely-accessible set of clinics / other practical reprogenetics services, so if you meant nationalizing the industry, my guess is no, that would be bad to do.
I meant the basic economy way of defining public good, not necessarily the distribution mchanism, electricity and water are public goods but they aren’t necessarily determined by the government.
I’ve had the semi ironic idea of setting up a “genetic lottery” if supply was capped as it would redistribute things evenly (as long as people sign up evenly which is not true).
Anyways, cool stuff, happy that someone is on top of this!
generally, humans are cool. in fact probably all current humans are intrinsically cool. a few are suffering very badly and say they would rather not exist, and in some cases their lives have been net negative so far. we should try to help these people. some humans are doing bad things to other humans and that’s not cool. some humans are sufficiently bad to others that it would have been better if they were never born. such humans should be rehabilitated and/or contained, and conditions should be maintained/created in which this is disincentivized
Coolness is not group specific for AI or human?
not group specific in principle, but human life is pro tanto strongly cooler. but eg a mind uploaded human society would still be cool. continuing human life is very important. deep friendships with aliens should not be ruled out in principle, but should be approached with great caution. any claim that we should already care deeply about the possible lives of some not-specifically-chosen aliens that we might create, that we haven’t yet created, and so that we have great reason to create them, is prima facie very unlikely. this universe probably only has negentropy for so many beings (if you try to dovetail all possible lives, you won’t even get to running any human for a single step); we should think extremely carefully about which ones we create and befriend
What if like homo deus we get separate Very Smart group of humans and one not so smart?
Human worse thing done worse than LLM worse thing done? Less control over range of expression? Moral mazes lead to psychopaths in control? Maybe non cool humans take control?
i agree these are problems that would need to be handled on the human path
Moral mazes lead to psychopaths in control? Maybe non cool humans take control?
This is a significant worry—but my guess is that having lots more really smart people would make the problem get better in the long run. That stuff is already happening. Figuring out how to avoid it is a very difficult unsolved problem, which is thus likely to be heavily bottlenecked on ideas of various kinds (e.g. ideas for governance, for culture, for technology to implement good journalism, etc etc.).
Hmmm but what if human good not coupled with human wisdom? Maybe more intelligence more power seeking if not carefully implemented?
I think this is just not the case; I’d guess it’s slightly the opposite on average, but in any case, I’ve never heard anyone make an argument for this based on science or statistics. (There could very well be a good such arguments, curious to hear!)
Separately, I’d suggest that humanity is bottlenecked on good ideas—including ideas for how to have good values / behave well / accomplish good things / coordinate on good things / support other people in getting more good. A neutral/average-goodness human, but smart, would I think want to contribute to those problems, and be more able to do so.
I’ll share a paper I remember seeing on the ability to do motivated reasoning and holding onto false views being higher for higher iq people tomorrow (if it actually is statistically significant).
Also maybe the more important things to improve after a certain IQ might be openness and conscientiousness? Thoughts on that?
I do think that it actually is quite possible to do some gene editing on big 5 and ethics tbh but we just gotta actually do it.
more potential for scientifically unknown effects—it’s a complex trait
more potential bad parental decision-making (e.g. not understanding what very high disagreeableness really means)
more potential for parental or even state misuse (e.g. wanting a kid to be very obedient)
more weirdness regarding consent and human dignity and stuff; I think it’s pretty unproblematic to decrease disease risk and increase healthspan and increase capabilities, and only slightly problematic (due to competition effects and possible health issues) to tweak appearance (though I don’t really care about this one); but I think it’s kinda problematic with personality traits because you’re messing with values in ways you don’t understand; not so problematic that it’s ruled out to tweak traits within the quite-normal human range, and I’m probably ultimately pretty in favor of it, but I’d want more sensitivity on these questions
technically more difficult than IQ or disease because conceptually muddled, hard to measure, and maybe genuinely more genetically complex.
I would agree that this is a weird incentive issue and that IQ is probably easier and less thorny than personality traits. With that being said here’s a fun little thought on alternative ways of looking at intelligence:
Okay but why is IQ a lot more important than “personality”?
IQ being measured as G and based on correlational evidence about your ability to progress in education and work life. This is one frame to have on it. I think it correlates a lot of things about personality into a view that is based on a very specific frame from a psychometric perspective?
Okay, let’s look at intelligence from another angle, we use the predictive processing or RL angle that’s more about explore exploit, how does that show up? How do we increase the intelligence of a predictive processing agent? How does the parameters of when to explore and when to exploit and the time horizon of future rewards?
Openness here would be the proclivity to explore and look at new sources of information whilst conscientiousness is about the time horizon of the discouting factor in reward learning. (Correlatively but you could probably define new better measures of this, the big 5 traits are probably not the true names for these objectives.)
I think it is better for a society to be able to talk to each other and integrate information well hence I think we should make openness higher from a collective intelligence perspective. I also think it is better if we imagine that we’re playing longer form games with each other as that generally leads to more cooperative equilibria and hence I think conscientiousness would also be good if it is higher.
(The paper I saw didn’t replicate btw so I walk back the intelligence makes you more ignorant point. )
(Also here’s a paper talking about the ability to be creative having a threshold effect around 120 iq with openness mattering more after that, there’s a bunch more stuff like this if you search for it.)
(Also here’s a paper talking about the ability to be creative having a threshold effect around 120 iq with openness mattering more after that, there’s a bunch more stuff like this if you search for it.)
To speculate, it might be the case that effects like this one are at least to some extent due to the modern society not being well-adapted to empowering very-high-g[1] people, and instead putting more emphasis on “no one being left behind”[2]. Like, maybe you actually need a proper supportive environment (that is relatively scarce in the modern world) to reap the gains from very high g, in most cases.
(Not confident about the size of the effect (though I’m sure it’s at least somewhat true) or about the relevance for the study you’re citing, especially after thinking it through a bit after writing this, but I’m leaving it for the sake of expanding the hypothesis space.)
But, if it’s not that, then the threshold thing is interesting and weird.
I would hypothesise that it is more about the underlying ability to use the engine that is intelligence. If we do the classic eliezer definition (i think it is in the sequences at least) of the ability to hit a target then that is only half of the problem because you have to choose a problem space as well.
Part of intelligence is probably choosing a good problem space but I think the information sampling and the general knowledge level of the people and institutions and general information sources around you is quite important to that sampling process. Hence if you’re better at integrating diverse sources of information then you’re likely better at making progress.
Finally I think there’s something about some weird sort of scientific version of frame control where a lot of science is about asking the right question and getting exposure to more ways of asking questions lead to better ways of asking questions.
So to use your intelligence you need to wield it well and wielding it well partly involves working on the right questions. But if you’re not smart enough to solve the questions in the first place it doesn’t really matter if you ask the right question.
Hmmm, some good points. Clearly if I write something to complex this will take way too long and therefore, the cool voice is good.
Okay, yes humans can be cool but all humans cool?
Maybe some governments not cool? How does AI vs Bio affect if one big cool or many small cool? What if like homo deus we get separate Very Smart group of humans and one not so smart?
Human worse thing done worse than LLM worse thing done? Less control over range of expression? Moral mazes lead to psychopaths in control? Maybe non cool humans take control?
Yet, slow process good point. Coolness better chance if longer to remain cool.
Maybe democracy + debate cool? Totalitarianism not cool? Coolness is not group specific for AI or human? Coolness about how cool the decision process is? What does coolness attractor look like?
Cool.
I agree this would most likely be either somewhat bad or quite bad, probably quite bad (depending on the details), both causally and also indicatorily.
I’ll restrict my discussion to reprogenetics, because I think that’s the main way we get smarter humans. My responses would be “this seems quite unlikely in the short run (like, a few generations)” and “this seems pretty unlikely in the longer run, at least assuming it’s in fact bad” and “there’s a lot we can do to make those outcomes less likely (and less bad)”.
Why unlikely in the short run? Some main reasons:
Uptake of reprogenetics is slow (takes clock time), gradual (proceeds by small steps), and fairly visible (science generally isn’t very secretive; and if something is being deployed at scale, that’s easy to notice, e.g. many clinics offering something or some company getting huge investments). These give everyone more room to cope in general, as discussed above, and in particular gives more time for people to notice emerging inequality and such. So humanity in general gets to learn about the tech and its meaning, institute social and governmental regulation, gain access, understand how to use it, etc.
Likewise, the strength of the technology itself will grow gradually (though I hope not too slowly). Further, even as the newest technology gets stronger, the previous medium strength tech gets more uptake. This means there’s a continuum of people using different levels of strength of the technology.
Parents will most likely have quite a range of how much they want to use reprogenetics for various things. Some will only decrease their future children’s disease risks; some will slightly increase IQ; some might want to increase IQ around as much as is available.
IQ, and even more so for other cognitive capacities and traits, is controlled…
partly by genetic effects we can make use of (currently something in the ballpark of 20% or so);
partly by genetic effects we can’t make use of (very many of which might take a long time to make use of because they have small and/or rare effects, or because they have interactions with other genes and/or the environment);
partly by non-genetic causes (unstructured environment such as randomness in fetal development, structured external environment such as culture, structured internal environment such as free self-creation / decisions about what to be or do).
Thus, we cannot control these traits, in the sense of hitting a narrow target; we can only shift them around. We cannot make the distribution of a future child’s traits be narrow. (This is a bad state of affairs in some ways, but has substantive redeeming qualities, which I’m invoking here: people couldn’t firmly separate even if they wanted to (though this may need quantification to have much force).)
Together, I suspect that the above points create, not separated blobs, but a broad continuum:
As mentioned in the post, there are ceilings to human intelligence amplification that would probably be hit fairly quickly, and probably wouldn’t be able to be bypassed quickly. (Who knows how long, but I’m imagining at least some decades—e.g. BCIs might take on that time scale or longer to impact human general intelligence—reprogenetics is the main strategy that takes advantage of evolution’s knowledge about how to make capable brains, and I’m guessing that knowledge is more than we will do in a couple decades but not insanely much in the grand scheme of things.)
What can we do? Without going into detail on how, I’ll just basically say “greatly increase equality of access through innovation and education, and research cultures to support those things”.
Okay, I think the gradual point is a good one and also that it very much helps our institutions to be able to deal with increased intelligence.
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing? Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?
Maybe there’s something here about IQ being hereditary already and thus the point about a more permanent two caste society with smart and stupid people is redundant but somehow I still feel that the economics of private gene editing over long periods of time feels a bit off?
As a matter of science and technology, reprogenetics should be inexpensive. I’ve analyzed this area quite a bit (though not focused specifically on eventual cost), see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html . My fairly strong guess is that it’s perfectly feasible to have strong reprogenetics that’s pretty inexpensive (on the order of $5k to $25k for a pretty strongly genomically vectored zygote). From a tech and science perspective, I think I see multiple somewhat-disjunctive ways, each of which is pretty plausibly feasible, and each of which doesn’t seem to have any inputs that can’t be made inexpensive.
(As a comparison point, IVF is expensive—something like $8k to $20k—but my guess is that this is largely because of things like regulatory restrictions (needing an MD to supervise egg retrieval, even though NPs can do it well), drug price lock-in (the drugs are easy to manufacture, so are available cheaply on gray markets), and simply economic friction/overhang (CNY is cheaper basically by deciding to be cheaper and giving away some concierge-ness). None of this solves things for IVF today; I’m just saying, it’s not expensive due to the science and tech costing $20k.)
Assuming that it can be technically inexpensive, that cuts out our work for us: make it be inexpensive, by
Making the tech inexpensive
Thinking not just about the current tech, but investing in the stronger tech (stronger → less expensive https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html#strong-gv-and-why-it-matters )
Culture of innovation
Both internal to the field, and pressure / support from society and gvt
Don’t patent and then sit on it or keep it proprietary; instead publish science, or patent and license, or at least provide it as a platform service
Avoiding large other costs
Sane regulation
No monopolies
Subsidies
I definitely think that
as much as possible, gvt should fund related science to be published openly; this helps drive down prices, enables more competitive last-mile industry (clinics, platforms for biological operations, etc.), and signals a societal value of caring about this and not leaving it up to raw market forces
probably gvt should provide subsidies with some kind of general voucher (however, it should be a general voucher only, not a voucher for specific genomic choices—I don’t want the gvt controlling people’s genomic choices according to some centralized criterion, as this is eugenicsy, cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html )
Is that what you mean? I don’t think we can rely on gvt and philanthropic funding to build out a widely-accessible set of clinics / other practical reprogenetics services, so if you meant nationalizing the industry, my guess is no, that would be bad to do.
I meant the basic economy way of defining public good, not necessarily the distribution mchanism, electricity and water are public goods but they aren’t necessarily determined by the government.
I’ve had the semi ironic idea of setting up a “genetic lottery” if supply was capped as it would redistribute things evenly (as long as people sign up evenly which is not true).
Anyways, cool stuff, happy that someone is on top of this!
generally, humans are cool. in fact probably all current humans are intrinsically cool. a few are suffering very badly and say they would rather not exist, and in some cases their lives have been net negative so far. we should try to help these people. some humans are doing bad things to other humans and that’s not cool. some humans are sufficiently bad to others that it would have been better if they were never born. such humans should be rehabilitated and/or contained, and conditions should be maintained/created in which this is disincentivized
not group specific in principle, but human life is pro tanto strongly cooler. but eg a mind uploaded human society would still be cool. continuing human life is very important. deep friendships with aliens should not be ruled out in principle, but should be approached with great caution. any claim that we should already care deeply about the possible lives of some not-specifically-chosen aliens that we might create, that we haven’t yet created, and so that we have great reason to create them, is prima facie very unlikely. this universe probably only has negentropy for so many beings (if you try to dovetail all possible lives, you won’t even get to running any human for a single step); we should think extremely carefully about which ones we create and befriend
i agree these are problems that would need to be handled on the human path
This is a significant worry—but my guess is that having lots more really smart people would make the problem get better in the long run. That stuff is already happening. Figuring out how to avoid it is a very difficult unsolved problem, which is thus likely to be heavily bottlenecked on ideas of various kinds (e.g. ideas for governance, for culture, for technology to implement good journalism, etc etc.).
Hmmm but what if human good not coupled with human wisdom? Maybe more intelligence more power seeking if not carefully implemented?
Probably better than doing the Big AI though.
I think this is just not the case; I’d guess it’s slightly the opposite on average, but in any case, I’ve never heard anyone make an argument for this based on science or statistics. (There could very well be a good such arguments, curious to hear!)
Separately, I’d suggest that humanity is bottlenecked on good ideas—including ideas for how to have good values / behave well / accomplish good things / coordinate on good things / support other people in getting more good. A neutral/average-goodness human, but smart, would I think want to contribute to those problems, and be more able to do so.
I’ll share a paper I remember seeing on the ability to do motivated reasoning and holding onto false views being higher for higher iq people tomorrow (if it actually is statistically significant).
Also maybe the more important things to improve after a certain IQ might be openness and conscientiousness? Thoughts on that?
I do think that it actually is quite possible to do some gene editing on big 5 and ethics tbh but we just gotta actually do it.
Personality is a more difficult issue because
more potential for scientifically unknown effects—it’s a complex trait
more potential bad parental decision-making (e.g. not understanding what very high disagreeableness really means)
more potential for parental or even state misuse (e.g. wanting a kid to be very obedient)
more weirdness regarding consent and human dignity and stuff; I think it’s pretty unproblematic to decrease disease risk and increase healthspan and increase capabilities, and only slightly problematic (due to competition effects and possible health issues) to tweak appearance (though I don’t really care about this one); but I think it’s kinda problematic with personality traits because you’re messing with values in ways you don’t understand; not so problematic that it’s ruled out to tweak traits within the quite-normal human range, and I’m probably ultimately pretty in favor of it, but I’d want more sensitivity on these questions
technically more difficult than IQ or disease because conceptually muddled, hard to measure, and maybe genuinely more genetically complex.
That said, yeah, I’m in favor of working out how to do it well. E.g. I’m interested in understanding and eventually measuring “wisdom” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fzKfzXWEBaENJXDGP/what-is-wisdom-1 .
I would agree that this is a weird incentive issue and that IQ is probably easier and less thorny than personality traits. With that being said here’s a fun little thought on alternative ways of looking at intelligence:
Okay but why is IQ a lot more important than “personality”?
IQ being measured as G and based on correlational evidence about your ability to progress in education and work life. This is one frame to have on it. I think it correlates a lot of things about personality into a view that is based on a very specific frame from a psychometric perspective?
Okay, let’s look at intelligence from another angle, we use the predictive processing or RL angle that’s more about explore exploit, how does that show up? How do we increase the intelligence of a predictive processing agent? How does the parameters of when to explore and when to exploit and the time horizon of future rewards?
Openness here would be the proclivity to explore and look at new sources of information whilst conscientiousness is about the time horizon of the discouting factor in reward learning. (Correlatively but you could probably define new better measures of this, the big 5 traits are probably not the true names for these objectives.)
I think it is better for a society to be able to talk to each other and integrate information well hence I think we should make openness higher from a collective intelligence perspective. I also think it is better if we imagine that we’re playing longer form games with each other as that generally leads to more cooperative equilibria and hence I think conscientiousness would also be good if it is higher.
(The paper I saw didn’t replicate btw so I walk back the intelligence makes you more ignorant point. )
(Also here’s a paper talking about the ability to be creative having a threshold effect around 120 iq with openness mattering more after that, there’s a bunch more stuff like this if you search for it.)
To speculate, it might be the case that effects like this one are at least to some extent due to the modern society not being well-adapted to empowering very-high-g[1] people, and instead putting more emphasis on “no one being left behind”[2]. Like, maybe you actually need a proper supportive environment (that is relatively scarce in the modern world) to reap the gains from very high g, in most cases.
(Not confident about the size of the effect (though I’m sure it’s at least somewhat true) or about the relevance for the study you’re citing, especially after thinking it through a bit after writing this, but I’m leaving it for the sake of expanding the hypothesis space.)
But, if it’s not that, then the threshold thing is interesting and weird.
or more generally high-intelligence
putting aside whether it works for the ones it’s supposed to serve or not
I would hypothesise that it is more about the underlying ability to use the engine that is intelligence. If we do the classic eliezer definition (i think it is in the sequences at least) of the ability to hit a target then that is only half of the problem because you have to choose a problem space as well.
Part of intelligence is probably choosing a good problem space but I think the information sampling and the general knowledge level of the people and institutions and general information sources around you is quite important to that sampling process. Hence if you’re better at integrating diverse sources of information then you’re likely better at making progress.
Finally I think there’s something about some weird sort of scientific version of frame control where a lot of science is about asking the right question and getting exposure to more ways of asking questions lead to better ways of asking questions.
So to use your intelligence you need to wield it well and wielding it well partly involves working on the right questions. But if you’re not smart enough to solve the questions in the first place it doesn’t really matter if you ask the right question.