If you could see your fleshbag as a higher intelligence could see it, just once - you would never live another day the same. We are tottering bladder-sacs of barely cohesive slime. We are so, so far from what is possible.
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Science, as we now understand it, has only existed for a handful of generations. It’s only relatively recently — an evolutionary eye-blink — that we’ve understood the extent to which the human being himself can be made the subject of empirical study and practical improvement.
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The first cult, political or religious movement of sufficient size (say, 70,000) whose members give full-throated endorsement to scientifically grounded eugenic principles could easily come to dominate the species in relatively short order — provided they held together.
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You could raise the average IQ of a population by ~15pts per generation if you sterilized 99% of the men, 50% of the women, and knocked up the remaining women with 4 kids sired by the top 1% of men. Draconian? Sure. But, people have done worse — and to significantly less gain.
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Well my hypothesis is that beings that intelligent can't be managed, motivated or organised. As you say, careful selection could certainly increase IQ significantly. But natural selection has not done so, maybe because 120+ IQ is not adaptive.
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Perhaps we can find new ways to motivate them?
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The engineering problem is how to get beings dumb enough to follow some goal consistently to be able to direct beings smart enough to do unimaginable new things. a.k.a "The AI Alignment Problem"
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I don’t think that’s a problem. In the military, in my civilian job, and in academia there’s no shortage of smart, capable, people who respond to normal incentives and normal forms of social control. There’s simply no will to disrupt existing power structures for long term gains.
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Well one possible engineering solution is to embed a small proportion of highly intelligent individuals in a larger population with a "safe" intelligence level. That also accounts for your other point about distribution of benefits.
End of conversation
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