A huge and fascinating topic. But… I find myself thinking: suppose I wanted to change the color of my eyes. I could figure out how to gene-hack my iris—or I could get colored contact lenses.
If the objective is to make people smarter, to what extent can this be accomplished by being specific about the cognitive skills that are to be enhanced, and then identifying an appropriate set of tools?
I would be very surprised if an “appropriate set of tools” could replicate the effects of a genetic intervention. At least, I would be surprised if you could do so with anything short of AGI or an advanced brain computer interface.
I haven’t spent that much time reading up on non-genetic intelligence interventions (though Gwern has written some pretty good stuff on the topic), but my overall impression is that after you’ve taken care of the basics like having a good diet, exercising, and avoiding lead poisoning you can’t really increase fluid intelligence that much.
Also, any non-genetic interventions that DO work would just stack with the benefits of genetic interventions. So like… why not both?
A huge and fascinating topic. But… I find myself thinking: suppose I wanted to change the color of my eyes. I could figure out how to gene-hack my iris—or I could get colored contact lenses.
If the objective is to make people smarter, to what extent can this be accomplished by being specific about the cognitive skills that are to be enhanced, and then identifying an appropriate set of tools?
I would be very surprised if an “appropriate set of tools” could replicate the effects of a genetic intervention. At least, I would be surprised if you could do so with anything short of AGI or an advanced brain computer interface.
I haven’t spent that much time reading up on non-genetic intelligence interventions (though Gwern has written some pretty good stuff on the topic), but my overall impression is that after you’ve taken care of the basics like having a good diet, exercising, and avoiding lead poisoning you can’t really increase fluid intelligence that much.
Also, any non-genetic interventions that DO work would just stack with the benefits of genetic interventions. So like… why not both?