Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present.
So modeling a continuous trait like intelligence is actually extremely straightforward: you simply add the effects of the IQ-increasing alleles to to those of the IQ-decreasing alleles and then normalize the score relative to some reference group.
If the mechanism of most of these genes is that their variants push something analogous to a hyperparameter in one direction or the other, and the number of parameters is much smaller than the number of genes, then this strategy will greatly underperform the simulated prediction. This is because the cumulative effect of flipping all these genes will be to move hyperparameters towards optimal but then drastically overshoot the optimum.
If you were to flip enough variants to push someone far outside the human range then that’s almost certainly correct. But the linear model holds remarkably well within the current human range, and likely to some degree outside of it.
But I am not too concerned about this because we can do multiples rounds of fewer edits and validate between rounds.
If the mechanism of most of these genes is that their variants push something analogous to a hyperparameter in one direction or the other, and the number of parameters is much smaller than the number of genes, then this strategy will greatly underperform the simulated prediction. This is because the cumulative effect of flipping all these genes will be to move hyperparameters towards optimal but then drastically overshoot the optimum.
If you were to flip enough variants to push someone far outside the human range then that’s almost certainly correct. But the linear model holds remarkably well within the current human range, and likely to some degree outside of it.
But I am not too concerned about this because we can do multiples rounds of fewer edits and validate between rounds.