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.
Since I have been working on germline engineering, I have been thinking about the same thing. My intuition is that if I could magically just increase everyone’s IQ by 5 points that would result in a marginally saner world. But creating a few babies with ~160+ IQs doesn’t seem obviously beneficial. Even if 3⁄4 get coordination problems etc. what if the fourth one decides to work at OpenAI or Anthropic on capabilities, because working on capabilities is just so much more exciting.
If GWAS for personality were working better I’d be more optimistic about selecting for something like capacity to gather wisdom? With editing, you could also go for cognitively enhanced clones of people we consider wise (Main bottleneck with this option would be PR). Problem is that I am going to disagree with people whom we consider wise. Although perhaps we can all agree, we would not like to clone the CEOs of the AGI labs.
Perhaps really good education would also help. Not an expert on education.
Since I have been working on germline engineering, I have been thinking about the same thing. My intuition is that if I could magically just increase everyone’s IQ by 5 points that would result in a marginally saner world. But creating a few babies with ~160+ IQs doesn’t seem obviously beneficial. Even if 3⁄4 get coordination problems etc. what if the fourth one decides to work at OpenAI or Anthropic on capabilities, because working on capabilities is just so much more exciting. If GWAS for personality were working better I’d be more optimistic about selecting for something like capacity to gather wisdom? With editing, you could also go for cognitively enhanced clones of people we consider wise (Main bottleneck with this option would be PR). Problem is that I am going to disagree with people whom we consider wise. Although perhaps we can all agree, we would not like to clone the CEOs of the AGI labs. Perhaps really good education would also help. Not an expert on education.