Edit: Q&A is now closed. Thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks very much to Harpending and Cochran for their responses.
In response to Kaj's review, Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran, the authors of the The 10,000 Year Explosion, have agreed to a Q&A session with the Less Wrong community.
If you have any questions for either Harpending or Cochran, please reply to this post with a question addressed to one or both of them. Material for questions might be derived from their blog for the book which includes stories about hunting animals in Africa with an eye towards evolutionary implications (which rose to Jennifer's attention based on Steve Sailer's prior attention).
Please do not kibitz in this Q&A... instead go to the kibitzing area to talk about the Q&A session itself. Eventually, this post will be edited to note that the process has been closed, at which time there should be no new questions.
I have heard discussion about the singularity on the web but I have never had any idea at all what it is, so I can't say much about that.
I do not think there is much prospect for dramatic IQ elevation without producing somewhat damaged people. We talk a lot in our book about the ever-present deleterious consequences of the strong selection that follows any environmental change. Have a look for example at the whippet homozygous for a dinged version of myostatin. Even a magic pill is likely to do the same thing. OTOH scientists don't have a very good track record at predicting the future. Now, I am going to hop into my flying car and go to the office -:)
I do not think there is much prospect for dramatic IQ elevation without producing somewhat damaged people.
Interesting. Would these people be so damaged that they would be unable to do science? Or would you be expecting super-aspergers types? (Or, to put it more rigorously, what probability would you assign to dead/severely disabled vs. super-aspergers/some other non-showstopping deleterious effect?)
You could contact Anna Salamon or Carl Shulman for a well-written introductory piece on the singularity.
Very short summary: if we humans manage to scientifically understand intelligence, then the consequences would be counter-intuitively extreme. The counter-intuitiveness comes from the fact that humans struggle to see our own intelligence in perspective:
* both how extreme and sudden its effects have been on the biosphere,
* and the fact that it is not the best possible form of intelligence, not the final word, more the like a messy first attempt
If one accepts that intelligence is a naturalistic property of computational systems, then it becomes clear that the range of possible kinds or levels of intelligence probably extends both to much narrower and dumber systems than humans and to much more able, general systems.
Edit: Q&A is now closed. Thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks very much to Harpending and Cochran for their responses.
In response to Kaj's review, Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran, the authors of the The 10,000 Year Explosion, have agreed to a Q&A session with the Less Wrong community.
If you have any questions for either Harpending or Cochran, please reply to this post with a question addressed to one or both of them. Material for questions might be derived from their blog for the book which includes stories about hunting animals in Africa with an eye towards evolutionary implications (which rose to Jennifer's attention based on Steve Sailer's prior attention).
Please do not kibitz in this Q&A... instead go to the kibitzing area to talk about the Q&A session itself. Eventually, this post will be edited to note that the process has been closed, at which time there should be no new questions.