More McKibben

[ashnistrike]

"If everyone's adding 30 IQ points, then having an IQ of 150 won't get you any closer to Stanford than you were at the outset."

Well, no. But it will get you a population that is, on average, 30 IQ points smarter (positing, for the moment, a single measurable intelligence, which is a separate debate in itself). These would be people better able to solve the problems of everyday life, and better able to solve the problems of the world. True, the competition for the Nobel Prize would be stiffer. This would be bad for the species how?

McKibben's book continually comes back to this obsession with competition. If everyone is improving their kids, how will it be meaningful to say who's best? If you're valedictorian because your parents spent the most on germ-line engineering, who cares? (If you're valedictorian because your parents spent the most on tutoring and prep courses, who cares?) Apparently, transhumanism threatens the very nature of humanity, but will never change our need to make petty comparisons with each other's accomplishments.

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

High IQ people may not be worth it. They might be social disasters. Horrible parents. Miserable team players. Low psych stability. Empathic misfits. Prone to mental disorders. The kind of people you'd kill first for the Good of the Clan. In short, I think there is a trade - high IQ for something else, and it is a bad trade (otherwise humans would be smarter than we are). That's evolution, constant tradeoffs. High IQ might not be worth the tradeoff even in our future.

However, the question is a bit deeper. It is the nature vs nurture debate, and as a non-transhumanist myself I'd put it like this. In a world where your parents gene choice for you decides your opportunity we risk an even more immovable social structure than what we have now. And the rich already have enough advantages, we don't need the Hilton's of the world being able to buy genetic advantage on top of their social and economical advantage. Or for that matter, the affluent West buying genetic advantage over Africa. Nah, I'd rather see a world where chance good traits combined randomly allows people to rise and where chance bad traits can be countered by a lucky break or a dedicated teacher.

Then, in the long run I do not believe in enhancement-genetic-engineering. Sounds more like a recipe for mutational meltdown and inbreeding depression than some sort of evolutionary step "forward". Whatever that is.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I'm actually undecided on the issue. Rather, I think there are a lot of good arguments for, and a lot of good arguments against. The class gap is a big argument against, but on the other hand I'm not sure we as a species can survive at our current intelligence levels.

If there were any automatic trade-offs for intelligence, I think they would have become apparent in the course of natural variation. Obviously, any "enhancements" that lead to mental instability would be a bad idea.

It's also notable that the lower your socio-economic status, the more of a difference environment can make in your IQ scores. Fortunately, there's still a lot more research going into improving education than into gene-line intelligence manipulation. Smart people want to share, not just with their own children.