Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation

I think that most people who do not have severe cognitive deficiencies are capable of understanding what "efficient charities" are

I have specific empirical evidence against this point from attempting to convince people on facebook causes to instead support more efficient causes. I am considering a top-level post on it.

If a less intelligent person is presented with correct and only correct arguments, they may have a higher probability of voting in accordance with them. But often in reality they will be presented with "fake" arguments, especially by naughty politicians or religious leaders. For example, arguments like "evolution is only a theory" that are specifically designed to be persuasive without being true. Intelligence is required to tell the difference.

Yes, this is the key problem that people don't really want to understand. That is the problem futarchy is intended to solve.

Agree. Or, one might say: the problem is not so much one of intelligence as one of (surprise!) rationality.

Ethanol will waste a lot of money and will still generate as much (or more) pollution than gasoline.

As an aside, given that the pollutant du jour is atmospheric carbon, it's worth noting that burning ethanol is essentially carbon neutral. Ethanol also means not being dependent on foreign nations run by crazy religious whackjobs.

Not that corn ethanol is a good idea overall, but it does have points to recommend it vs. petroleum. It just has... a lot of points to disrecommend it in general.

This is a good point.

Instead of worrying about existential risks, I could join a good startup team/start my own startup and aim to make lots of money.

However, what would happen if the world got through all of these challenges to a positive post singularity world? People would ask questions such as: "why did you not put effort into existential risk mitigation when you knew the dangers?" I would ask that question.

So the answer to the question "is it rational" depends upon your goals.

Yes, in many places nutrition is a low-hanging fruit. My own favorite example is iodine supplementation, http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2008/12/the-perfect-cog.html but vitamins, long-chained fatty acids and simply enough nutrients to allow full development are also pretty good. There is some debate of how much of the Flynn effect of increasing IQ scores is due to nutrition (probably not all, but likely a good chunk). It is an achievable way of enhancing people without triggering the normal anti-enhancement opinions.

The main problem is that it is pretty long-term. The infants we save today will be putting their mark about two or more decades hence - they will not help us much with the problems we face before then. But this is a problem for most kinds of biological enhancement; developing it and getting people to accept it will take time. That is why gadgets are important - they diffuse much more rapidly.

Upvoted for comparing fat Americans with third world destitutes

Software programs for individuals. Oh, maybe when you come across something you think is important while browsing the web you could highlight it and these things would be presented to you occasionally sort of like a "drill" to make sure you don't forget it, or prime association formation at a later time.

Congratulations, you've nearly reinvented spaced repetition! There is a great deal of writing on spaced repetition flashcard systems, so I won't inflict upon you my own writings; but the Wikipedia article will link you to the main programs (Anki, Mnemosyne, and SuperMemo) and some writeups of the topic. SR is a great technique; I love it dearly.

Or some short-term memory aid that works better than scratch paper.

Well, you could just improve your working memory. Unusually, working memory is plastic enough to be trainable by WM tasks. The WM exercise I'm most familiar with is Dual n-back. I practice it, but while I have noticed improvements, I'm unsure whether they repay the time I've put into it; SR systems have proven themselves as far as I'm concerned, but the jury is still out on dual n-back.

Or taking a cutting-edge knowledge representation framework like Novamente's PLN and trying to enter stuff into it as an "active" note-taking system.

Now that sounds interesting. But looking at this OpenCog link doesn't give me a good idea as to what PLN might do for note-taking (or really, in general); did you have any use-cases or examples?

Software programs for individuals.... prime association formation at a later time.... some short-term memory aid that works better than scratch paper

I have been obsessively researching this idea for several years. One of my conclusions is that an intelligence-amplification tool must be "incestuously" user-modifiable ("turtles all the way down", possessing what programming language designers call reflectivity) in order to be of any profound use, at least to me personally.

Or just biting the bullet and learning Mathematica to an expert level instead of complaining about its UI

About six months ago, I resolved to do exactly that. While I would not yet claim "black belt" competence in it, Mathematica has already enabled me to perform feats which I would not have previously dared to contemplate, despite having worked in Common Lisp. Mathematica is famously proprietary and the runtime is bog-slow, but the language and development environment are currently are in a class of their own (at least from the standpoint of exploratory programming in search of solutions to ultra-hard problems.)

The problem with all of these is that they are all likely to be adopted mostly by the minority of people who are already very smart, whereas this post is aiming at something for the average intelligence people who comprise the majority of the population.

There are many traits that would be useful for research and other fields, such as energy, better time management, social ability etc. Intelligence is important for problem-solving in domains where standard rules have not been defined, which might be particularly true in some reasearch. However, it is hard to measure the impact of such ability directly.

David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth After 35 Years, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1,316-343 www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/DoingPsychScience2006.pdf has some intriguing data. They followed up the top percent scorers and compared the uppermost and lowest quartile of this already elite group. Unsurprisingly they were on average doing great, and the top group also earned more and had about six times the rate of tenure at top US universities. But that could just be pure competitive ability rather than any individually or socially useful outcome. The interesting result was that the number of doctorates and percent earning patents was about twice in the top quartile. Doctorates and patents are after all a form of measure of actually having achieved something, and presumably a society is better off if bright people produce more patentable ideas. This IMHO strengthens the idea that we would see gains from cognition enhancement even among the brightest.

However, I think the biggest economic and social impact will be due to intelligence among the great mass of people - reduction of costs and friction due to stupidity, short term thinking, mistakes and other limitations, increased benefits from better cooperation (smart people do better on iterated prisoners dilemma games and have longer time horizons) and ability to manage more complex systems.

A "emotional intelligence enhancer" might be socially beneficial too - there is no reason to think "pure" cognitive function is the end of things we might rationally want to see others enhance.

If you think increased IQ doesn't lead to better research, just ask a few Nobel prize winners what their IQ is.

A gold star will be awarded to anyone who finds some data on Nobel prize winners and IQ.

There are many studies - 1 to 2 dozen - showing that producing a gallon of corn ethanol takes more energy than is contained in a gallon of corn ethanol. Usually, the conclusion is that it takes n=1 to 1.4 times as much energy. There are other studies claiming the opposite; they fail to take into account factors such as irrigation and transportation costs.

I wrote to Wired magazine and to somewhere else (I forget where) to correct their outrageously-incorrect assertions about corn ethanol. (Wired underreported n by 2 orders of magnitude, which is disturbing because this wasn't like ordinary irresponsible journalism where someone took one "expert's" numbers uncritically. The figure they gave for corn ethanol efficiency was AFAIK much, much higher than those of even the most biased ethanol advocates.) My responses were unpublished. It's even worse journalism when you make an extreme error on a point important to public policy, and then someone points it out to you, and gives you a dozen literature citations, and you don't correct it.

The crux of the argument is that it costs energy to harvest the corn and process it. When you look at the numbers you see that it just doesn't add up.

Furthermore, if you compare corn ethanol to solar power you see why the low conversion efficiency is so damning, especially when you do the math for how much land you'd have to cover with corn to serve US energy needs. Going off the top of my head, this area is greater than the whole of the US.

Plants are also much better at converting sunlight into chemical energy than any system we can build.

But the issue isn't how well they store energy, but at how efficiently we can use the energy they store. You can't efficiently fuel an electricity-generating plant with corn - trying to use plant energy to power our civilization is hopeless.

Yes, but not quickly enough; we want a SUPER-FLYNN effect.

Do you think that current levels of intelligence are precisely optimal for reducing existential risks, where my definition of "existential risk" is the one given by Bostrom? What reason would there be for this remarkable co-incidence?

If not, then presumably you think we should start deliberately making people have lower IQ?

So the question, if you're interested in decreasing existential risk, is whether we can reduce bias without raising the level of intelligence.

It seems that you should also be asking how we can reduce the level of intelligence.

All other things being equal, increasing IQ will make people better at telling the difference between rational argument and sophistry, and at understanding marginally more complex arguments.

Decreasing akrasia for the general population is a different issue; the first thought that comes to mind is that increasing people's IQ with fixed motivation ought to improve things.

IQ is positively correlated with sharing economists' views on economic policy Therefore it seems likely people would vote differently and that this would translate into policy changes. I would expect other belief changes would be likely if IQ were increased.

Here is a simple model. Assume you need a certain intelligence to understand a crucial, policy-affecting idea (we can make this a fuzzy border and talk about this in distribution to make it more realistic later). If you are below this level your policy choices will depend on taking up plausible-sounding arguments from others, but it will be uncorrelated to the truth. Left alone such a population will describe some form of random walk with amplification, ending up with a random decision. If you are above the critical level your views will be somewhat correlated with the truth. Since you are affecting others when you engage in political discourse, whether over the breakfast table or on TV, you will have an impact on other people, increasing their chance of agreeing with you. This biases the random walk of public opinion slightly in favour of truth.

From most models of political agreement formation I have seen, even a pretty small minority that get biased in a certain direction can sway a large group that just picks views based on neighbours. This would suggest that increasing the set of people smart enough to get the truth would substantially increase the likelihood of a correct group decision.

My rebuttal to

imagine how much saner the political process would look

is to point at the work of Tullock and Buchanon on Public Choice theory. Basically, the take away is that politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives. If the voting public were smarter, politicians' behavior would be different during elections, and the politicians would try to make their behavior in office look different. But they would still have an incentive to look like they were addressing problems rather than an incentive to actually solve them. It's much harder than 10 IQ points to align those outcomes.

And bureaucrats and middle managers in government would still face the same incentives about obfuscating results, multiplying staffing and budgets, and ensuring that projects and bureaucracies have staying power.

It's highly non-obvious that it would have significant effects

The effects may well be profound if sufficiently increased intelligence will produce changes in an individual's values and goal system, as I suspect it might.

At the risk of "argument from fictional evidence", I would like to bring up Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, an exploration of this idea (among others.)

If more intelligence is bad, is less good? Do you think current levels of intelligence are optimal? If so, that would be an amazing coincidence.

More intelligence means bigger scope for action, and more ability to get desired outcomes. Whether more intelligence increases risk depends on the distribution of accidentally bad outcomes in the new scope (and how many old bad outcomes can be avoided), and whether people will do malign things. On average very few people seem to be malign, so the main issue is likely more the issue of new risks.

Looking at the great deliberate human-made disasters of the past suggests that they were often more of a systemic nature (societies allowing nasty people or social processes to run their course; e.g. democides and genocides) than due to individuals or groups successfully breaking rules (e.g. terrorism). This is actually a reason to support cognitive enhancement if it can produce more resilient societies less prone to systemic risks.

It does seem to me like the anti-risk effect from intelligence enhancement would somewhat outweigh the pro-risk effect, but I'm not sure.

It is a hard subject to argue about. If I wanted to criticize you, I could say that higher IQs make uploads less economically attractive as they will start off with a smaller advantage, and higher IQs likely would make uploads intrinsically more difficult. And if I wanted to criticize my criticism, I could say that by making people in general smarter, we increase the cost of labor, which makes mechanical substitution ever more attractive (and mechanical substitution for reasonably complicated tasks implies development of AI/uploads).

Yes, increasing intelligence would increase the variance of quality of outcomes for humanity. And the hope is that intelligence would also increase the mean quality of outcome, such that the expected value would be higher.

It'd be better to first do rationality enhancement and then intelligence enhancement. Of course that's also much harder to implement but who said it would be easy?

All things considered, it seems that giving rationality training is much less likely to work than just telling people that if they take a pill it will make them smarter (and therefore richer).

then what you propose is mathematically impossible.

um, well ok, if you want to be a pedant about it, replace it with:

"if we could improve the intelligence of everyone in our society such that (scored on the current IQ scale) the average score was 110"

Why is that? Of course we all know that the average IQ can't be 10 points higher than the average IQ, but that would be a silly way to interpret what he said, and I can't think of any mathematical reason why the new average couldn't become, say, 110 instead of 100... (I can think of lots of practical reasons, though) (EDIT: and of course I mean on today's scale, as others have pointed out)

The charitable interpretation makes perfect sense: improve the intelligence of the electorate until their average score on the IQ test normalized for today would be 10 points greater than the norm.

not helpful, but not worth negative ten points either. negative five at worst. upvoted.

Was the massive downvote here because I didn't include enough information about how this is mathematically impossible, or because people don't agree that one should speak with precision, or because people don't like me pointing out that one should speak with precision?