LW: CRISPR Will Make Me A Genius - "I don’t have a formal background in biology. And though I learn fairly quickly and have great resources like SciHub and GPT4,"

This is quite a grandiose plan for someone writing a LessWrong blog post. And there’s a decent chance it won’t work out for either technical reasons or because I can't find the resources and talent to help me solve all the technical challenges.

The phrase "technical reasons" is doing an absolutely majestic amount of work in this sentence.

I’ve now talked to some pretty well-qualified bio PHDs with expertise in stem cells, gene therapy, and genetics. While many of them were skeptical, none of them could point to any part of the proposed treatment process that definitely won’t work.

absolutely classic crank shit

In the course of my life, there have been a handful of times I discovered an idea that changed the way I thought about the world. The first occurred when I picked up Nick Bostr

Alright thank you that's enough.

Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present

Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?

Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won't take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. "Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!"

Hmm, how significant are we talking

predicted IQ of about 900

lol

LOL -- looking at the comments: "can somebody open a manifold market so I can get a sense of the probabilities?"

the cell’s ribosomes will transcribe mRNA into a protein. It’s a little bit like an executable file for biology.

Also, because mRNA basically has root level access to your cells, your body doesn’t just shuttle it around and deliver it like the postal service. That would be a major security hazard.

I am not saying plieotropy doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not as big of a deal as most people in the field assume it is.

Genes determine a brain's architectural prior just as a small amount of python code determines an ANN's architectural prior, but the capabilities come only from scaling with compute and data (quantity and quality).

When you're entirely shameless about your Engineer's Disease

From the comments:

Effects of genes are complex. Knowing a gene is involved in intelligence doesn't tell us what it does and what other effects it has. I wouldn't accept any edits to my genome without the consequences being very well understood (or in a last-ditch effort to save my life). ... Source: research career as a computational cognitive neuroscientist.

OP:

You don't need to understand the causal mechanism of genes. Evolution has no clue what effects a gene is going to have, yet it can still optimize reproductive fitness. The entire field of machine learning works on black box optimization.

Very casually putting evolution in the same category as modifying my own genes one at a time until I become Jimmy Neutron.

Such a weird, myopic way of looking at everything. OP didn't appear to consider the downsides brought up by the commenter at all, and just plowed straight on through to "evolution did without understanding so we can too."

starts reading

looks at the scrollbar size

nope

If not for that pesky FDA, rats would develop the most bizzare case of liver failure that medicine has ever seen and took over the world with their superior intellect, any day now, you'll see

LLM's are great you doubters, look this guy even used it to get unshadowbanned on twitter.

Re the subject at hand 250+ upvotes oof. And once I again I feel the desire to write a 'gene editing to improve intelligence is immoral because of the higher depression risk that correlates with higher intelligence. But that would backfire very quickly (esp if we hook into other reasons why very smart people with no economic resources might even be extra depressed and poof we are back at eugenics and keeping the Morlocks poor away from intelligence improvements).

Vague association with eugenics make some academics shy away

This guys profile:

currently doing independent research on gene therapy with an emphasis on intelligence enhancement.

Gosh. (I honestly had not noticed these 2 quotes before I mentioned my trollpost + risk).

Credit where it's due, I appreciate them leading with a TL;DR link to a summary. Unfortunately the summary was also too long and I didn't read it. I'm happy for you though. Or sorry it happened.

I clicked the original LW link (not the archive link) and got a malware warning.

@dgerard god almighty there's *so much of it*

I mean personally I would fix things that are broken first. The last thing I might want to edit is anything nerve related and even then problems before enhancements. Im pretty happy with my intellect level and could not see messing with that unless it clearly was needed in the sense that I fell below one standard deviation of average intellect.