From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 08:18:43 MST
On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 06:41:36PM -0500, Gary Miller wrote:
> Ander sandberg said:
>
> >> That IQ is heritable doesn't mean you can get the benefits of
> >> intelligence to reproduce across generations easily.
>
> We're not really talking about inheriting IQ as from father to son
> but cloning it. If intelligence is anyway contributed to by
> recessive genes it would be diluted in A statistical study where it
> would not appear every generation. Or maybe genius is a mutation
> in which case cloning would be the only way to reproduce it.
The papers I mentioned demonstrated that even 100% heritability of
intelligence is swamped by the other factors. Cloning doesn't matter
in this respect.
If genius is a mutation, then at least some of the children of great
people should exhibit the same genius. The support for this is shaky;
Irene Curie comes to mind, but few others that can't be ascribed to
enriched upbringing.
> Exactly my point what would these individual have produced if they
> had been given the best training and every advantage? How many
> more geniuses get buried in the school system told they're poor
> students like Einstein and Edison were, and never realize their
> true potential. For every Einstein and Edison we realized we may
> have thrown 10 away!
Yes. And then it becomes a matter of where to place your money. On 20
extremely expensive children or 2000 potential children? Unless you
have good evidence that the clone/super upbringing is at least a 100
times as good as the support for the potential Einsteins, then it is
not cost efficient.
> I agree with with your math at this point. This shows how rare the
> probability would be to have a genious reach his/her maximum
> potential naturally.
>
> Since we are taking a genetic copy though and giving it good
> upbringing and optimal environment.
>
> I say that the probability that the genius will exceed the
> capabilities of the original person from which the DNA was donated
> is 100%.
Evidence, please.
> I agree that we can not anticipate what these individuals would
> choose to contribute. We can only hope that they are disruptive
> technologies and that they would significantly advance us forward.
> With an education that emphasized technology and sciences though
> would be nudging them in the right direction.
Note that you are implicitely assuming that it is technology and
science that is the important areas. How do you know it? If you
accept your own reasoning, then what the super-kids would select
would likely be a better choice, since they are smart enough to see
it, right? On the other hand, maybe they aren't automatically
infallible helpers of humanity and might need guidance. But then they
start to seem like well-educated and gifted people again, and their
potential for saviourship seems less impressive.
> >> You have never heard of Kantian ethics, have you?
>
> While ethics are all well and good. They don't do a lot for us if every
> madman on the block can engineer a doomsday virus or when millions are
> dieing from disease and starvation. We are not dooming the children to
> miserable live on the contrary they will have the best life has to
> offer. If this violates some tenet of transhumanism but helps our
> planet to survive, I will gladly accept that transgression.
Hmm, this is starting to sound like some of the other threads on this
list. "Democracy, peace and freedom are threatened! Let's coerce,
surveil and bomb to save them! The good ends justify the means!" ;-)
Besides, ethics isn't just some garnishing on top of your
rationalisations. It is about what you believe in and will do to
achieve it. Your above argument sounds suspiciously utilitarian to
me, and you should be careful where that road leads when applied to
the creation of humans or the fate of the world (after all,
*anything* is better than the end of the world, isn't it? so you can
do *anything* in good conscience to prevent it).
Sure, cloning kids and trying to raise them to become geniuses is not
something I consider evil, just misguided, from my own
libertarian-humanist neo-aristotelian standpoint. But I'm worried
about the lack of ethical reasoning among transhumanists, since it
makes the movement enormously vulnerable to an ethical attack.
Witness how genetic modification has been made unethical in public
perception - it is the result of a lack of ethical understanding
among its defenders.
> >> The myth of the lone genius as the necessary and sufficient condition
> of
> >> progress is popular. But it isn't very true, and policies based on it
>
> >> can waste much effort and resources on infinitesimal gains.
>
> How can you place a price on five Einsteins or five Teslas? The
> knowledge of math, computer
> science, biotech, and physics it will take to solve the worlds most
> pressing problems disease,
> cheap energy, and protecting ourselves from terrorists may be beyond our
> capability without them.
Actually, you probably could place a price on them. Take the total
amount of wealth made possible through them over time, and compare it
to what amount of money would generate the same wealth if invested.
You would get some huge but finite numbers (some trickery with
discounting of the future may be needed).
Here is another common error: to claim that something is so valuable
that any price is worth it (e.g. the saving the world example above).
A new Einstein would be worth a lot, but would she be worth (say)
halving the standards of living worldwide? Probably not. The value of
such a genius would also depend on who you asked; one could imagine
an investment project that invested money in creating the next
Einstein. That way individual investors could invest as much as they
think it would be worth to them to have an Einstein around.
But my core argument above is simply that Einsteins are not the key
to progress. If you look at the history of science it is fairly clear
that somebody would have found relativity in the early 20th century,
the pieces were all there and Lorentz, Poincare, Hilbert and many
others were working on them. The same goes for the photoelectric
effect and Brownian motion; the step to quantum mechanics required a
leap of faith but it was already felt by many parallel and less
talented researchers. That Einstein managed to bag these three, and
then went on to generalize SR to GR in a highly creative way, shows
his genius. But without him we would likely have talked about
Grossbauer's Theory of Relativity instead.
The same goes for many other breakthroughs. Darwin discovered
evolution in parallel with Wallace, the application of electricity
were greatly speeded by Edison's management and marketing genius but
similar ideas were floating around at the time. Without Pasteur
medicine might have been delayed decades in figuring out the
bacterial origin of infection, but it would have happened. None of
these geniuses were *necessary* for their discoveries. And once made,
they were still rather useless until a lot of second violinists took
them up and made all the important but unglamorous work of applying,
extending and marketing them.
I have noted that this view of the importance of genius is not
particularly popular on this list, since we tend to value
intelligence over almost everything else. But that is just the same
kind of intellectual's fallacy as Hayek criticises when it comes to
central planning (intellectuals often like to think that they could
plan things better than those markets and laypeople). Genius is good,
but it isn't the motor of history. The motor of history is the far
more prosaic but powerful striving of billions of people towards a
better life for themselves as they see it. It is not neat, it is
slow, but it has a massive parallelism and robustness geniuses do not
have.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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