A flip side of this analysis is that the detrimental effects of the aforementioned cognitive distortions might be much higher than is usually supposed or realized, perhaps sometimes causing multi-year/decade delays in important approaches and conclusions, and can’t be overcome by others even with significant IQ advantages over me. This may be a crucial strategic consideration, e.g., implying that the effort to reduce x-risks by genetically enhancing human intelligence may be insufficient without other concomitant efforts to reduce such distortions.
This is non-researched speculation, but my guesses would be:
There are many cognitive dimensions that importantly affect performance in one or another important domain.
Most of these effects are substantively, though far from completely, fungible with more IQ. In other words, to make up a totally fictional example, you could have someone with IQ 130 and a lot of calm-spacious-attuned-nimble-empathy, who is able to follow along with another person as they struggle though conflicting mental elements, and to help that person untangle themselves by inserting relevant tricks, tools, perceptions, etc., while being sensitive to things that might be upsetting, etc. etc. On the other hand you could have someone with IQ 155, and only somewhat of this calm-spacious-attuned-nimble-empathy; and they basically perform as well as the first therapist at the overall task of helping a client come out of the therapy session with more thriving, on a better cognitive trajectory by their own lights, etc. Even thought Therapist 2 has somewhat less intuitive following-along with the client as does Therapist 1, Therapist 2 is able to make up for that by being able to generate more varied hypotheses quicker and “manually” updating quicker and thinking of better tools and communicating more clearly.
If you get a lot more people with really high IQs, you also get a bunch more people who are [high on other important cognitive traits, and also high IQ]. (How relevant this argument is, depends on what the numbers look like—how quick is the uptake of, say, reprogenetics technology, how high is the threshold of IQ and of other cognitive dimensions for a given performance, etc.)
Anyway, I definitely would want to genomically vector for these other traits, e.g. wisdom, but it’s harder. I do think that argues in favor of working on psychometrics for personality traits as a higher marginal priority than IQ; I think that argument goes through pretty strongly. (Though some people have expressed special worry about personality traits—some of which, e.g. obedience/agreeability, might be targets for oppressive regimes. IDK what to think of that; it feels “far” / unlikely / outlandish, but I don’t want to be dismissive and haven’t thought about it enough.) But, I think
The hardest part of any of this is the biotech, not the psychometrics. A crash course to get strong reprogenetics would be really hard and expensive and might not work; a crash course on psychometrics would probably somewhat work, well enough to get significant chunks of benefit. (But, not confident of any of that.)
Even if you can just vector for IQ, that’s still very positive in EV (though my belief here has substantial “instability”, i.e. EV>0 has cruxes with high volatility on their probabilities, or something).
This is non-researched speculation, but my guesses would be:
There are many cognitive dimensions that importantly affect performance in one or another important domain.
Most of these effects are substantively, though far from completely, fungible with more IQ. In other words, to make up a totally fictional example, you could have someone with IQ 130 and a lot of calm-spacious-attuned-nimble-empathy, who is able to follow along with another person as they struggle though conflicting mental elements, and to help that person untangle themselves by inserting relevant tricks, tools, perceptions, etc., while being sensitive to things that might be upsetting, etc. etc. On the other hand you could have someone with IQ 155, and only somewhat of this calm-spacious-attuned-nimble-empathy; and they basically perform as well as the first therapist at the overall task of helping a client come out of the therapy session with more thriving, on a better cognitive trajectory by their own lights, etc. Even thought Therapist 2 has somewhat less intuitive following-along with the client as does Therapist 1, Therapist 2 is able to make up for that by being able to generate more varied hypotheses quicker and “manually” updating quicker and thinking of better tools and communicating more clearly.
If you get a lot more people with really high IQs, you also get a bunch more people who are [high on other important cognitive traits, and also high IQ]. (How relevant this argument is, depends on what the numbers look like—how quick is the uptake of, say, reprogenetics technology, how high is the threshold of IQ and of other cognitive dimensions for a given performance, etc.)
Anyway, I definitely would want to genomically vector for these other traits, e.g. wisdom, but it’s harder. I do think that argues in favor of working on psychometrics for personality traits as a higher marginal priority than IQ; I think that argument goes through pretty strongly. (Though some people have expressed special worry about personality traits—some of which, e.g. obedience/agreeability, might be targets for oppressive regimes. IDK what to think of that; it feels “far” / unlikely / outlandish, but I don’t want to be dismissive and haven’t thought about it enough.) But, I think
The hardest part of any of this is the biotech, not the psychometrics. A crash course to get strong reprogenetics would be really hard and expensive and might not work; a crash course on psychometrics would probably somewhat work, well enough to get significant chunks of benefit. (But, not confident of any of that.)
Even if you can just vector for IQ, that’s still very positive in EV (though my belief here has substantial “instability”, i.e. EV>0 has cruxes with high volatility on their probabilities, or something).