I'm not sure why people feel so allergic to the idea of a genetic intelligence boost.
Our genes encode the layout of physical race tracks on which marbles of matter and information travel. Some people's bodies have a bunch of muscle tracks, so as they grow, their body benefits from the activity on those. They grow up to find it easier to gain muscle than other people.
For geniuses, I imagine that the brain is a perfectly laid out super highway. Any information that comes in gets to where it needs to go because there's signs and signals and traffic cops patrolling. If some piece of information can't find where to go, well, damned if we don't have a construction worker and a navigator jumping in the passenger seat with you to help out.
Ultimately, I think the brain is so plastic that each of us can one day decide to elect a new mayor to our body town. The new mayor can decide to tear up roads and fix potholes etc. Yeah, it would have been great if we had founded the town with a plan and hadn't had that college riot but here we are. Time to pave some roads.
> I'm not sure why people feel so allergic to the idea of a genetic intelligence boost.
Because it kinda puncture this feel good marketing bull that "you can be anything you want". It could also shut endless flowing money into extra-coaching classes outside normal schools which promise to "help child to reach their fullest potential".
That does make sense. I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. I personally plan on hiring professional tutors for my children when I have them. Hopefully they're born with a lot of moldable clay, but either way, there are additional evidence-based education methods to utilize that promote mastery.
The studies trying to find the link between genetics and IQ are flawed in that they don't have a way to handle the interactions between genes. Instead they are based on correlations.
If you will be good at baseball if you have A and B, OK with neither, but terrible with only one, those genes will be identified in most studies as having nothing to do with baseball, maybe even identified as harmful.
I can offer a concrete example. Autism is more often found in high-IQ families, but itself is associated with decreased IQ. That suggests one case where either A and B alone are harmful, having neither makes you fine (and unlikely to bear children with A or B), and having both makes you smart.
I am not sure if we want people to figure out how to make connections involving specific genes, because a lot of us benefit from living in a world where we can game LeetCode by working longer and harder in a way that's unrelated to what Google is looking for.
Our genes encode the layout of physical race tracks on which marbles of matter and information travel. Some people's bodies have a bunch of muscle tracks, so as they grow, their body benefits from the activity on those. They grow up to find it easier to gain muscle than other people.
For geniuses, I imagine that the brain is a perfectly laid out super highway. Any information that comes in gets to where it needs to go because there's signs and signals and traffic cops patrolling. If some piece of information can't find where to go, well, damned if we don't have a construction worker and a navigator jumping in the passenger seat with you to help out.
Ultimately, I think the brain is so plastic that each of us can one day decide to elect a new mayor to our body town. The new mayor can decide to tear up roads and fix potholes etc. Yeah, it would have been great if we had founded the town with a plan and hadn't had that college riot but here we are. Time to pave some roads.