Maybe I’m mistaken and most of the membership here views Less Wrong as a “super high G” community, but I don’t.
How much time do you spend with normal people? What’s your score on Murray’s high-IQ bubble checklist?
but still, for Ivy Leaguers, who have a high level of clout in our society, to have an average IQ around that level, does not address the question of whether additional IQ above that level has diminishing impact.
No, but the original claim was clearly wrong. Society is dominated by high-IQ people. Diminishing returns seems to be weirdly interpreted as ‘no returns’ in a lot of people’s minds.
It may help if I quote a bit of what I’ve written on a similar issue before about diminishing returns to research:
The Long Stagnation thesis can be summarized as: “Western civilization is experiencing a general decline in marginal returns to investment”. That is, every $1 or other resource (such as ‘trained scientist’) buys less in human well-being or technology than before, aggregated over the entire economy.
This does not imply any of the following:
No exponential curves exist (rather, they are exponential curves which are part of sigmoids which have yet to level off; Moore’s law and stagnation can co-exist)
Sudden dramatic curves can exist even amid an economy of diminishing marginal returns; to overturn the overall curve, such a spike would have to be a massive society-wide revolution that can make up for huge shortfalls in output.
Any metrics in absolute numbers have ceased to increase or have begun to fall (patents can continue growing each year if the amount invested in R&D or number of researchers increases)
We cannot achieve meaningful increases in standards of living or capabilities (the Internet is a major accomplishment)
Specific scientific or technological will not be achieved (eg. AI or nanotech) or be achieved by certain dates
The stagnation will be visible in a dramatic way (eg. barbarians looting New York City)
Similarly, arguing over diminishing returns to IQ is building in a rather strange premise to the argument: that the entities in discussion will be within a few standard deviations of current people. It may be true that people with IQs of 150 are only somewhat more likely to be billionaires ruling the world than 140, but how much does that help when you’re considering the actions of people with IQs much much higher? The returns can really add up.
To take an example I saw today: Hsu posted slides from an April talk, which on pg10 points out that the estimates of the additive genetic influence on intelligence (the kind we can most easily identify and do stuff like embryo selection with) & estimates of number of minor alleles imply a potential upper bound of +25 SD if you can select all beneficial variants, or in more familiar notation, IQs of 475 (100 + 15 * 25). Suppose I completely totally grant all assumptions about diminishing marginal returns to IQ based on the small samples we have available of 130+; what happens when someone with an IQ of 475 gets turned loose? Who the heck knows; they’ll probably rule the world, if they want.
One of the problems with discussing this is that IQ scores and all research based on it is purely an ordinal scale based on comparing existing humans, while what we really want is to measures of intelligence on a cardinal scale which lets us compare not just humans but potential future humans and AIs too.
For all we know, diminishing returns in IQ is purely an artifact of human biology: maybe each standard deviation represents less and less ‘objective intelligence’, and the true gains to objective intelligence don’t diminish at all or in some cases increase (chimps vs humans)!
(Hsu likes to cite a maize experiment where “over 100 generations of selection
have produced a difference in oil content between the high and low selected strains of 32 times the original standard deviation!”; so when we’re dealing with something that’s clearly on a cardinal scale—oil content—the promised increases can be quite literal. Intelligence is not a fluid, so we’re not going to get 25x more ‘brain fluid’, but that doesn’t help us calculate the consequences: an intelligent agent is competing against humans and other software, and small absolute edges may have large consequences. A hedge fund trader who can be right 1% more of the time than his competition may be able to make a huge freaking fortune. Or, a researcher 1% better at all aspects of research may, under the log-normal model of research productivity proposed by Shockley, be much more than 1% more productive than his peers.)
We know ‘human’ is not a inherent limit on possible cognition or a good measurement of all activities/problems: eg chess programs didn’t stagnate in strength after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, having hit the ceiling on possible performance but they kept getting better. Human performance turned out to not run the gamut from worst to best-possible but rather marked out a fairly narrow window that the chess programs were in for a few decades but passed out of, on their trajectory upwards on whatever ‘objective chess intelligence’ metric there may be.
(I think this may help explain why some events surprise a lot of observers: when we look at entities below the human performance window, we just see it as a uniform ‘bad’ level of performance, we can’t see any meaningful differences and can’t see any trends, so our predictions tend to be hilariously optimistic or pessimistic based on our prior views; then, when they finally enter the human performance window, we can finally apply our existing expertise and become surprised and optimistic, and then the entities can with small objective increases in performance move out of the human window entirely and it becomes an activity humans are now uncompetitive at like chess but may still contribute a bit on the margin in things like advanced chess, and eventually becomes truly superhuman as computer chess will likely soon be.
One of the problems with discussing this is that IQ scores and all research based on it is purely an ordinal scale based on comparing existing humans, while what we really want is to measures of intelligence on a cardinal scale which lets us compare not just humans but potential future humans and AIs too.
For this reason, it seems to me that conjectures about people with no negative variants getting a 25 SD IQ gain are untestable. How would one distinguish such people from someone with a gain of only(!) 15 SD or 10 SD or even 7 SD, when the population available to norm IQ tests consists of only 7 billion people?
Create enough people at 15SD to test the 25SD subjects. :)
More seriously, this may be practically untestable but I think it’s also the sort of thing which doesn’t need to be tested—if we’re ever in a position that the answer might matter, we have bigger fish to fry.
I never argued that intelligence beyond the range accessible by human deviation is impossible, or that differences beyond that range would not be highly determinative, but this is still not the same as increasing marginal returns on intelligence. If an individual had hundreds of trillions of dollars at their disposal, there would be numerous problems that they could resolve that people with fortunes in the mere tens of billions could not, but that doesn’t mean that personal fortunes have increasing marginal returns. It seems to me that you are looking for reasons to object to my comments that are not provided in their content.
but this is still not the same as increasing marginal returns on intelligence.
Half my comment was pointing out why, if there were increasing returns, that was consistent with our observations and supported by non-human examples.
It seems to me that you are looking for reasons to object to my comments that are not provided in their content.
No. I am objecting to your same line of thought that I have been objecting to quite from the start:
The world doesn’t seem to be dominated by super high g people.
To repeat myself: this is empirically false, the domination is as we would expect for both increasing & decreasing marginal returns, and more broadly does not help us in putting anything but a lower bound on future developments such as selected humans or AIs.
And yet, NYC is still there, and unlike Rome post-barbarians, has only grown in population.
EDIT: and to expand on my point with Rome, disturbances are very common in great metropolises and imperial capitals; pointing to a blackout from over a third of a century ago as indicating the decline of America is like pointing to the Marian or Gracchian riots in Rome as indicating the fall of the Roman empire. (What, you don’t remember either? Exactly.)
As it happens I am familiar with the Gracchian riots, they certainly weren’t indicative of the fall of the Roman Empire as the Roman Empire didn’t exist then; however, the riots were most definitely indicative of the collapse of the Roman Republic.
however, the riots were most definitely indicative of the collapse of the Roman Republic.
The ‘collapse’ of the Roman Republic didn’t involve barbarians. Which was the point of the observation. Should America one day ‘collapse’, may God send us a collapse as dire and apocalyptic and with terrible outcomes as the collapse of the Roman Republic...
How much time do you spend with normal people? What’s your score on Murray’s high-IQ bubble checklist?
No, but the original claim was clearly wrong. Society is dominated by high-IQ people. Diminishing returns seems to be weirdly interpreted as ‘no returns’ in a lot of people’s minds.
It may help if I quote a bit of what I’ve written on a similar issue before about diminishing returns to research:
Similarly, arguing over diminishing returns to IQ is building in a rather strange premise to the argument: that the entities in discussion will be within a few standard deviations of current people. It may be true that people with IQs of 150 are only somewhat more likely to be billionaires ruling the world than 140, but how much does that help when you’re considering the actions of people with IQs much much higher? The returns can really add up.
To take an example I saw today: Hsu posted slides from an April talk, which on pg10 points out that the estimates of the additive genetic influence on intelligence (the kind we can most easily identify and do stuff like embryo selection with) & estimates of number of minor alleles imply a potential upper bound of +25 SD if you can select all beneficial variants, or in more familiar notation, IQs of 475 (100 + 15 * 25). Suppose I completely totally grant all assumptions about diminishing marginal returns to IQ based on the small samples we have available of 130+; what happens when someone with an IQ of 475 gets turned loose? Who the heck knows; they’ll probably rule the world, if they want.
One of the problems with discussing this is that IQ scores and all research based on it is purely an ordinal scale based on comparing existing humans, while what we really want is to measures of intelligence on a cardinal scale which lets us compare not just humans but potential future humans and AIs too.
For all we know, diminishing returns in IQ is purely an artifact of human biology: maybe each standard deviation represents less and less ‘objective intelligence’, and the true gains to objective intelligence don’t diminish at all or in some cases increase (chimps vs humans)!
(Hsu likes to cite a maize experiment where “over 100 generations of selection have produced a difference in oil content between the high and low selected strains of 32 times the original standard deviation!”; so when we’re dealing with something that’s clearly on a cardinal scale—oil content—the promised increases can be quite literal. Intelligence is not a fluid, so we’re not going to get 25x more ‘brain fluid’, but that doesn’t help us calculate the consequences: an intelligent agent is competing against humans and other software, and small absolute edges may have large consequences. A hedge fund trader who can be right 1% more of the time than his competition may be able to make a huge freaking fortune. Or, a researcher 1% better at all aspects of research may, under the log-normal model of research productivity proposed by Shockley, be much more than 1% more productive than his peers.)
We know ‘human’ is not a inherent limit on possible cognition or a good measurement of all activities/problems: eg chess programs didn’t stagnate in strength after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, having hit the ceiling on possible performance but they kept getting better. Human performance turned out to not run the gamut from worst to best-possible but rather marked out a fairly narrow window that the chess programs were in for a few decades but passed out of, on their trajectory upwards on whatever ‘objective chess intelligence’ metric there may be.
(I think this may help explain why some events surprise a lot of observers: when we look at entities below the human performance window, we just see it as a uniform ‘bad’ level of performance, we can’t see any meaningful differences and can’t see any trends, so our predictions tend to be hilariously optimistic or pessimistic based on our prior views; then, when they finally enter the human performance window, we can finally apply our existing expertise and become surprised and optimistic, and then the entities can with small objective increases in performance move out of the human window entirely and it becomes an activity humans are now uncompetitive at like chess but may still contribute a bit on the margin in things like advanced chess, and eventually becomes truly superhuman as computer chess will likely soon be.
This bubble quiz, I assume.
For this reason, it seems to me that conjectures about people with no negative variants getting a 25 SD IQ gain are untestable. How would one distinguish such people from someone with a gain of only(!) 15 SD or 10 SD or even 7 SD, when the population available to norm IQ tests consists of only 7 billion people?
Create enough people at 15SD to test the 25SD subjects. :)
More seriously, this may be practically untestable but I think it’s also the sort of thing which doesn’t need to be tested—if we’re ever in a position that the answer might matter, we have bigger fish to fry.
I never argued that intelligence beyond the range accessible by human deviation is impossible, or that differences beyond that range would not be highly determinative, but this is still not the same as increasing marginal returns on intelligence. If an individual had hundreds of trillions of dollars at their disposal, there would be numerous problems that they could resolve that people with fortunes in the mere tens of billions could not, but that doesn’t mean that personal fortunes have increasing marginal returns. It seems to me that you are looking for reasons to object to my comments that are not provided in their content.
Half my comment was pointing out why, if there were increasing returns, that was consistent with our observations and supported by non-human examples.
No. I am objecting to your same line of thought that I have been objecting to quite from the start:
To repeat myself: this is empirically false, the domination is as we would expect for both increasing & decreasing marginal returns, and more broadly does not help us in putting anything but a lower bound on future developments such as selected humans or AIs.
That happened a while ago.
And yet, NYC is still there, and unlike Rome post-barbarians, has only grown in population.
EDIT: and to expand on my point with Rome, disturbances are very common in great metropolises and imperial capitals; pointing to a blackout from over a third of a century ago as indicating the decline of America is like pointing to the Marian or Gracchian riots in Rome as indicating the fall of the Roman empire. (What, you don’t remember either? Exactly.)
As it happens I am familiar with the Gracchian riots, they certainly weren’t indicative of the fall of the Roman Empire as the Roman Empire didn’t exist then; however, the riots were most definitely indicative of the collapse of the Roman Republic.
The ‘collapse’ of the Roman Republic didn’t involve barbarians. Which was the point of the observation. Should America one day ‘collapse’, may God send us a collapse as dire and apocalyptic and with terrible outcomes as the collapse of the Roman Republic...