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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

We don't need smarter people, we need better ethics. Many of the monsters from history were highly intelligent. Many of the world's problems have ready solutions which are not applied because people are being clever. Think of intelligence as a force multiplier, if you apply it to a bad person they become a terrible person. It would be disastrous to start genetic engineering for intelligence prior to tackling the ethics problem.

The biggest issue with better ethics is that we can't define them, so we couldn't optimize for them. Nobody agrees on what a good person is because nobody agrees on the meaning of good. But meanwhile the real world outcomes are decidedly not good.

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This is a false choice. Society would almost certainly benefit from a larger proportion of highly intelligent people, and doubly so if they were also engineered with a genetic predisposition toward cooperation and prosocial behavior.

Almost certainly not. That gives us 'politically correct police states'. Put everybody in a rubber room and make sure they are nice to one another. A recipe for the downfall of society, collapse of the economy, end of social evolution.

Its complicated to nation-build. Any that work now, do so because of competition and selection. Remove that with 'intelligent design' and all adaptation stops. Fitness plummets.

I suppose the devil is in the details. I'm not thinking of something like the genetically engineered humans of Brave New World, where docility is hard-wired into the lower classes.

I'm thinking more along the lines of attenuating certain (hypothetical) genetic contributors to antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis, etc.

Not engineering docile perfection, just less of the obviously really bad stuff.

Edit: I do share your concerns about stopping Darwinian selection, though. Choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.

>choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.

lol, that's a great line.

...in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217...

If we don't achieve a technological singularity in the next couple decades, I doubt that an alien invasion will be a worry a couple centuries from now. I say this because of impending ecological collapse, which will end human civilization as we know it... if not humanity in total.

And I'll save for another time a rant about how expensive it is for anything to cross interstellar distances. At most we'll see a self-replicating probe that tries to subsume all matter in the solar system, the "invaders" won't physically travel here.

...unless the probes reconstitute them upon arrival?

That could happen, but I judge it more likely they'd just live as software instead of physically instantiating into something you'd see on a SF TV show.

And even as software, I predict that new colonists would likely arrive by communications laser, well after the local infrastructure has been built. Why bother coming over during the boring building phase?

I disagree, although obviously this kind of manipulation and even ultimately what is being manipulated is going to be complex and fraught with false steps and unknowns.

While you may be right that our current genetic state, attained through generations of ruthless competition and selective pressures, is optimal for some things, it is harmful for others. Notably, the health of biosphere and many millions/billions of other humans. What good does nation-building do if our actions destroy each other through war or create an ecosystem unable to sustain advanced life? I would rather engineer for increased prosocial behavior and take our chances down that route than where we are headed now.

>Society would almost certainly benefit from a larger proportion of highly intelligent people

Why would it? Don't we have enough smart people? Smarts come at a cost. Its usually tied with anxiety disorders, neuroticism, poor ability to develop social skills, limited emotional expression, lack of empathy, autism, etc.

We are also discounting things like emotional intelligence and other types of intelligences we may not fully understand yet or even recognize!

I'm not sure if the world needs a bunch of cold and emotionally stunted people taking the place of more well-rounded people. I think its questionable to think evolution didn't account for the diversity of personality types needed for a successful human society. Claiming "This type one here, this is the only good one, so we'll make everyone like this," seems foolish if not disastrous. Personally, I'd gladly shave off more than a few IQ points to be more empathic and social.

Not to mention, society already tried this with eugenics fairly recently. Its not "smart" to repeat the mistakes of history.

You can have both. Not everyone intelligent is neurotic, and personality traits like baseless anxiety may be things that can be adjusted to some extent as well.

>Not to mention, society already tried this with eugenics fairly recently. Its not "smart" to repeat the mistakes of history.

When did we "try this" with eugenics "fairly recently"?

I'm almost certain you're referring to Nazism. But was Hitler really killing all the Jews for some sort of eugenics experiment? No, I don't think so. Were his actions genuinely scientific at all? Nope. He believed that raw power conquered all and that anyone weak should be murdered. That's different than eugenics.

We need to get past this kneejerk reaction comparing doing anything beneficial within the human genome to Nazi eugenics. It's a completely absurd comparison, especially considering that the average intelligence of Jews is very high.

Hitler was evil because he was a mass murderer, it's as simple as that. I really shouldn't have to clarify this on YC of all places.

The US had eugenics programs up until I think as late as the 60s, as did some other countries. Look up for example Buck vs. Bell. The Nazis were inspired by the existing US eugenics programs, not the other way around.

>I'm almost certain you're referring to Nazism.

No Eugenics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

It seems "smart people" need to start reading some history books.

Elitism needs people to be unequal. That will weaken as an ideology when people can copy each other's genes. Inequality might still be retained by carefully guarding information and knowledge that confers an advantage.

Oh man, I can't wait to go to jail and/or be deleted when I reincarnate with pirated DNA.

Real life rogueli[k|t]e.

I have good news: if we get smarter people, it seems that we may get better ethics too.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_cod...

I see this error so often on hn. You say, "we don't need x, we need y." When in reality we need neither, and both would be highly beneficial.

Being 'bad' is IMO a consequence of two things:

- You can be bad (i.e., lack of consequences)

- You want to be bad (i.e., some sort of reinforcement, often $).

Now both of these are de facto there if you become a high level politician and that's IMO the reason for real world outcomes [...] decidedly not good

Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions.

Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle.

Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time.

Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries.

This is too complex of a concept to limit it to two coinciding factors, IMO we are all all of these things in differing quantities.

Hopefully people learn that the consequences of bad actions are rarely beneficial long term and develop processes to mitigate.

> Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions.

So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it.

> Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle.

Sure, but that's almost exclusively due to mental illness, not "rationality".

> Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time.

Survival is reinforcement.

> Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries.

Mostly because closer to the limit means more reinforcement. Simple risk/reward.

I want to think that being good is non-religiously rewarded (ie. in this life), but I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think it takes effort not to take unethical shortcuts or make profitable but hurtful decisions.

>> Some people are constantly bad even though they know they will have to answer for their actions.

> So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it.

Says Dylann Roof (convicted of mass shootings at a church in South Carolina), "I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry."

Is that not reasonably a case of mental illness though?

How is changing the label from "quirk of psychology" to "mental illness" changing anything? It still exists.

Very intelligent monsters in very intelligent society are still less of a problem, than very intelligent monsters in an average society.

Many of the monsters from history also operated in a world order which rewards monstrous behaviour and kills Ned Stark.

It seems to me that you are arguing for wisdom. Ethics are a product while wisdom is an ability, like intelligence.

It would really be interesting to know if there was a correlation between genes and ethics.

There is. The question is how much. There are various studies regarding this, I haven't read them (any of them):

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+s...

Smarter people will be at least harder to propagandize, brainwash and so on.

Actually, there is a lot of literature that indicates the opposite. Informing people of bias makes them more susceptible to it (by making them better at rationalizing away their bias). And the backfire effect causes people to become more certain of wrong opinions when presented with evidence to the contrary.

The idea that intelligence produces rationality is a myth.

Sure, probably there is a valley.

But it'd be pretty strange that IQ would not correlate with real world adaptation efficiency. After all, intelligence is useless if you can't use it to better navigate the world, because it itself misleads you (then you are better off with just fight-or-flight instincts).

And probably tendency for rationality has a genetic component too.

As you approach the limit of intelligence the danger that you'll realise altruism works for the whole but not the individual must increase, right?

Are you saying that as people get smarter they're less likely to think satisfaction in life comes from being someone who makes the world better? That they're more likely to think that satisfaction in life comes from getting more stuff than the next guy?

I think if you engineer for maximum intelligence, yes.

I want to make the world better but it's a bad use of my time from an individual perspective.

I'd say we need both.

Good thing we can max out all the good genes. I suppose it will have secondary effects but in small steps it should work.

spot on

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