These sound like interesting thoughts! What would be great, is one or more people holding the ball on this sort of investigation. That means, spending many hours, longitudinally, investigating the possibilities; and doing so strategically, e.g. building up conceptual and factual foundations, doing deep lit searches, thinking of tests to run, etc.; and doing this without having someone else "hold the agentic CEO ball" of, like, remembering / being motivated to keep pushing on all the doors to find one that opens. My worry is that kinda-promising ideas are just not actually useful, UNLESS they are ideas that someone has in a context where the idea will get investigated a bunch. In other words, I'd love to see a lot of iterative babble and prune on this subject. [...] I'm not sure what ten-fold means here, but what I'm aiming at is something like "anyone who wants could be about as smart as the smartest human alive", which we know is physically and biologically feasible because it exists. [...] Fair; but the point of neuroplasticity in particular wouldn't mainly be more intelligence in general, but a bit more specifically, child-like brain states. E.g. faster / deeper learning, more creativity, more curiosity. (I have no idea what kinds of plasticity are relevant for that, what else you would need, and what developmental windows have closed shut, such as long-range connections permanently pruned.) [...] It's a reasonable fear, which I have quite substantial (at least 20%, say) probability on. On the other hand, I think that confident short timelines don't make that much sense; see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5tqFT3bcTekvico4d/do-confident-short-timelines-make-sense. Non-reprogenetics methods don't seem to have a clear case for them being feasible--like, how would they actually increase intelligence greatly (like, +50 IQ points, say), and how do we know that