Algernon's Law

http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics?2

by gwern • 13 years ago

128 128 13 years ago

DennisP• 13 years ago

Seems to me a flaw in this argument is that much smarter humans do show up from time to time, without apparent ill effect. It's conceivable that we could at least enhance intelligence to John von Neumann's level.

jameskilton• 13 years ago

That's not the argument. The argument is that it's impossible to artificially improve a person's intelligence.

oh_sigh4• 13 years ago

Does studying count as "artificially improving a person's intelligence"? Because that works, and it seems quite artificial.

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

Not "impossible", but merely "impossible now".

NotOscarWilde• 13 years ago

I concur. In my opinion the "impossibility of improving IQ" in gwern's first sentence should be understood as "impossibility of improving IQ through supplementation at the current level".

I think the source of the problem is rather our very limited understanding of maintaining and improving the brain functions. As far as my limited knowledge goes, we still cannot reverse many dementia-inducing illnesses; once we see deeper into them, maybe better supplementation will appear. It's understandable that various "trivial" methods at increasing IQ fail.

(Heck, we don't know much about benefit/hazard of many chemicals that enter our body; and even when we do -- smoking, obesity -- people tend to disregard the advice.)

gverri• 13 years ago

While you can't improove your IQ overall (in controlled tests), it's completely possible do get better at logical games, thus increasing you score at IQ tests.

I know it because I have trained a bit for some IQ tests and the results improve the more you train for it. That's something everyone should be capable of.

gwern20• 13 years ago

It's conceivable, but it's not going to be easy or simple. Think of how many billions of humans existed simultaneously with John von Neumann without being anywhere near his level. If we figure that Neumann was mostly due to a stellar combination of alleles, then that implies he got lucky on a very large number of alleles (imagine a bunch of alleles which can be on or off, and Neumann got all of them 'on'; then because he was 1 out of 5 billion or whatever, he got log_2 5,000,000,000 = 32. This is not 1 variation, which is easy to select on, or 2, but 32. The current state of the art, using n=100,000 is around 3 SNPs. (I apologize in advance to the geneticists for my reasoning here.))

And I would note that Neumann, despite being happily married, a gifted negotiator, lady's man, and party-goer, never had children.

So Neumann might violate either the simple or reproductive fitness requirements: to the extent we can hope to manufacture Neumanns through genetic engineering, it's not going to be easy; and to the extent we can judge from n=1, the reproductive fitness penalties may be large.

Gravityloss• 13 years ago

He also died from pancreatic or bone cancer at age 51

thromeaway34• 13 years ago

fyi, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_von_Neumann_Whitman

pallandt4• 13 years ago

I haven't read the whole article, but there is at least one inaccuracy I spotted. Piracetam's primary mechanism of action is glutamatergic, not cholinergic. This is why the known side-effects include anxiety, headaches, insomnia or irritability. The cholinergic impact is less pronounced.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

googles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid

so wait, the natural protein that correlates with being a fast learner and thinker also causes anxiety, insomnia, and irritability?

I am so not surprised in the slightest.

mistercow2• 13 years ago

Citation?

pallandt4• 13 years ago

I don't have much time right now to sift through so many papers, but see these for instance:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10583700 , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1372342

I haven't stated anything outrageous, it's been known for a long time that piracetam is a positive modulator of glutamate receptors.

a3voices• 13 years ago

Let's say you have a dog, and you want to make it as smart as a person. How would you do that? Giving it drugs won't work. The dog is limited by the brain structures that make it distinct from a human. Regardless of whatever drugs or supplements you give it, the dog will always act like a dog. Maybe it will be slightly smarter, but not in any truly astonishing way. Maybe with the right drug, it could learn 100 words instead of 20. But the dog won't be able to do everything a person can do.

The same goes for people. There's no way you'd be able to make a person meaningfully smarter through supplementation or drugs.

msane3• 13 years ago

Essentially you just said:

Supplementation could hypothetically improve the cognitive ability of dogs. But it could never make them as smart as humans.
The same goes for humans. Supplementation could never improve their cognitive abilities.

I suppose maybe this shoddy little syllogism would be forgivable if you haven't had your coffee yet this morning.

judk• 13 years ago

coffee would help, if supplements can improve cognitive ability.

gwern20• 13 years ago

I suppose maybe this shoddy little syllogism would be forgivable if you haven't had your coffee yet this morning.

Caffeine may not be improving his intelligence, but removing damage ie. withdrawal. (And so about as surprising as 'lack of sleep deprivation increases intelligence!' or 'lack of iodine deficiency increases intelligence!') This is one of the challenges of studying addictive stimulants: how do you know whether, for experienced tolerant users, the apparent benefits are genuine benefits or just treating withdrawal?

oh_sigh4• 13 years ago

The problem with your logic is that improving a humans intelligence by as much as the difference between a dog and a human is a HUGE leap in intelligence. There are far smaller jumps in intelligence that are still meaningful that fit into the span of dog to human intelligence.

tocomment• 13 years ago

I don't think you can know that. What if the drug turns on genes responsible for building more "brain structures"?

Or what if the human brain is currently artificially limited say to conserve energy and a drug could remove that limitation.

jerf• 13 years ago

I can't help but feel you did not bother to read the linked article, since the whole thing is about wondering why you can't make a person smarter, and with not just one, but a number of arguments all far more sophisticated and grounded in science than what you just tried.

maaku• 13 years ago

Gwern, this whole subject is sloppy. It is trivially simple to improve IQ scores by practicing the types of questions IQ tests make. There is no reliable way to measure IQ, therefore it's not clear that IQ is measuring anything reliably. What, exactly, are you talking about then?

selmnoo• 13 years ago

I improved my IQ by 20 pts in an year's time. It was pretty simple: study SAT/GRE words, and do a lot of arithmetic exercises.

I know that it increased by 20 pts. because I underwent an IQ test conducted by a licensed psychologist twice.

eloff• 13 years ago

Exactly, my logic professor always used to say that studying logic improves your IQ (btw, so does programming.) Well it does, because a bunch of the questions on an IQ test are logical riddles. Math and vocabulary have the same effect.

viggity• 13 years ago

it was always my understanding that "good" IQ tests should have almost zero variance based on your vocabulary, or hell, even your mathematical abilities. A "good" IQ test simply tests your logic facilities.

Example "good" questions would show a sequence of 6 shapes and ask you what the next one in the series should look like. or perhaps a question like "given that all boogles are quinks and some quinks are flets, are all flets boogles?".

A question on a "bullshit" IQ test would be: "'Daring' is an appropriate adjective for: A. Rocks. B. Planets. C. Humans.". Another would be "x^2 = 36, solve for x"

Now, I know that some standardized tests (ACT, SAT, IBTS), will sometimes try to estimate your IQ by correlating your scores, but that is fraught with problems and shouldn't be taken as gospel.

btilly• 13 years ago

My mother told me the story of a girl whose IQ she increased by 30 points in one day!

After observing the first IQ test, my mother recommended that the severely abused girl be tested by a woman instead of a man. Voila! Magic! The IQ increased.

(Both IQ tests would have been administered at Stanford back in the 1950s.)

gwern20• 13 years ago

Indeed. Studying vocab is even the example I've used for years on the dual n-back mailing list to explain how a previously valid measure can be rendered meaningless by training: just memorize vocab and boost your scores on the vocab subtest. Of course, if you took a bunch of people who studied SAT/GRE words and looked at the factorization on a battery of tests, you'd find that the g-loading of the vocab subtest had gone way down, but that can't be done in this sort of case and so all you're left with is a meaningless measure.

this was in relation to Moody's critique of the original n-back study: he thought that all the n-back training, which involved tracking moving squares in a grid, was effectively training you to be able to manipulate shapes on a grid better than you would normally, and destroying part of the validity of the matrix tests. And indeed, in the later studies which used more than just matrix tests, the n-back training tends to show more limited gains. It's not officially out yet, but an example of this would be "Adaptive n‐back training does not improve fluid intelligence at the construct level; gains on individual tests suggest training may enhance visuospatial processing", Colom et al 2013.

Jormundir• 13 years ago

Agreed, I don't think the conclusion is reliable because we have yet to understand what exactly IQ is. If you don't know what you're measuring, how do you know IQ can or can't be improved?

My layman's prediction is we will be able to measure IQ in the future by some means of scanning the brain's process of building connections and nerves. An aptitude test is simply measuring the side effects of IQ.

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

I think that the idea of intelligence as a single number is similarly flawed as comparing cars just by speed.

gwern20• 13 years ago

My layman's prediction is we will be able to measure IQ in the future by some means of scanning the brain's process of building connections and nerves.

There's some interesting imaging research over the past decade or two suggesting that if you want to reify IQ as something physical, it might wind up being something along the lines of global connectivity - how well and efficiently distant brain regions can communicate and coordinate activities.

Strilanc• 13 years ago

Gwern actually qualified what was meant, exactly:

if you are a bright healthy young man or woman gifted with an IQ in the 130s, there is nothing you can do to increase your underlying intelligence 20 points.

That is to say, you want to make a significant improvement despite already doing really well as a baseline. The higher baseline affects how effective practicing IQ questions is, and how difficult it is to go up each additional point.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I think it's more malleable than people give it credit for. Over time my performance on IQ tests changed from being much higher on math to much higher on verbal. (I largely stopped reading for pleasure in high school, and didn't pick it up again until after college)

I do agree with one point in the article - there is diminishing returns. I've heard Warren Buffett say that after someone is 130 IQ, it all comes down to character. I'm inclined to agree. If I interview someone with 130 IQ, I'd much rather they have integrity and good social skills than another 5 IQ points.

hotpockets• 13 years ago

He addresses this: "New methods like dual n-back or nootropics are ... years later discovered to ... be tantamount to training on IQ tests themselves"

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

But if IQ tests are trainable, what are they actually measuring?

gwern20• 13 years ago

It is trivially simple to show that your objection is worthless. 'A thermometer measures temperature when placed in your armpit. But I can take a thermometer and put it in hot water and the temperature goes up! There is no reliable way to measure temperature, therefore, it's not clear the temperature is measuring anything reliably. What, exactly, are you talking about then?'

mikeash6• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the surefire way to totally cheat on your tests and always get a great score and never, ever get caught. All you have to do is spend a bunch of time beforehand going over all the material until you understand it.

Ygg23• 13 years ago

IQ tests are notoriously hard to make. And they don't measure IQ, so much as what the tester considers IQ.

An amusing story. There was an IQ comparisson between rural and urban areas and the finding was that people in rural areas do worse on IQ test. But one psychologist thought that this can't be true.

So he went back to test and realized that IQ test that were given to rural/urban areas were same. The people from rural areas did worse on the written part of exams, because the rural areas lacked schools and children started learning/reading much later. Once he went back and revised the tests, removing most of test that had to do with reading and generally type of thought that rural children have less encounter.

Conclusion - the old IQ test didn't measure intelligence, unless you can increase intelligence by going to a better school, in which case, that isn't intelligence but knowledge.

phaus3• 13 years ago

It's a well established fact that thermometers measure temperature. It doesn't matter if its a person's temperature or an object's, it is still going to measure temperature.

It is a highly contested assertion that IQ tests accurately measure I.Q. It's completely possible that if you take a reasonably smart person and make them study for a specific type of I.Q. test, that he will score higher than he would have otherwise, even though his intellectual ability would remain unchanged over a broader spectrum of skills than the test involves. Therefore, it may not be a reliable measurement of I.Q.

Your example makes no sense whatsoever, and you should have already known that before you typed it out.

lmm2• 13 years ago

If IQ doesn't measure anything then why is it correlated with job performance across a wide range of jobs (and pretty much the only property for which this is the case)?

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

You remind me of an issue that sort of weighs at the back of my mind.

Scientists hate the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, mostly for perfectly good reasons. But I see a lot of claims that, with the exception of the introversion-extraversion axis, which was widely accepted, its dimensions are uninformative to the point of worthlessness. I've also read that along its T-F axis, 75% of men score T and 75% of women score F. To me, that seems to indicate that it's measuring something that's really there (if the T-F axis were meaningless, shouldn't all groups split 50-50?).

I guess in summary, a lot of people don't seem to agree that just because you can extract information from a test item, the test item must be informative. I'm with you though.

Houshalter4• 13 years ago

Just because they are trainable doesn't mean they aren't measuring anything or aren't useful. Besides his arguments aren't for increasing IQ tests, but increasing intelligence in general. IQ being a rough measure of it.

oh_sigh4• 13 years ago

Another day, another gwern.net post.

_exec• 13 years ago

Not a fan?

oh_sigh4• 13 years ago

It's not that I am not a fan, but it's just strange that we've been seeing so many posts from gwern.net, considering he's been writing for many years. This article, for example, is from 2010.

tachyonbeam3• 13 years ago

He talks about MDMA and how it reduces anxiety near the end. When I first tried it, I found it quite amazing how a pill could completely eliminate my social anxiety for a few hours. I'd never felt so comfortable in my own skin and surrounding environment. I'd never realized that at every waking moment, even when alone, even when I think I'm pretty relaxed, I always feel some amount of background anxiety. This drug was able to take the anxiety down to zero. I was no longer afraid to go talk to strangers, I could really have fun at parties.

The downsides, though, are pretty obvious. For one, MDMA causes a crash. Sometimes, I'd be down for 2, even 3 days afterwards, which would be quite unpleasant and kill my productivity. Another thing is that well, anxiety and fear are sometimes useful. If you're too trusting of people around you, you might eventually get yourself in risky situations. You might trust people you really shouldn't.

There's also been a study on MDMA that showed that it changes the way you interpret signs of rejection given off by people. You interpret people's response to you more positively, even if it isn't all that positive. MDMA can help you approach people, but it can also make you a little delusional (over optimistic) about the way people perceive you.

My personal opinion is that people with less baseline anxiety are probably still generally better off in the modern world. They're less stressed, they're more open to approaching and being approached by people, they end up having more friends because of this. They might have a tendency to be more trusting and not notice as much when they annoy people, but it probably generally works in their favor. I probably worry too much about displeasing other people.

bitwize• 13 years ago

MDMA sounds to humans what Toxoplasma gondii infection is to rats.

tachyonbeam3• 13 years ago

With the difference that you're presumably much more intelligent than a rat. Even if you don't feel anxious, you can reason on a purely logical basis as to what might be a bad idea. Even if you stopped feeling fear, you'd probably still be intelligent enough to look on both sides before crossing the street. I do agree that it can, and probably will increase risk taking, though. The risks I took on MDMA were social risks, things I don't actually deem to be dangerous, things my fear stops me from doing but that I should probably be attempting more often.

I find that MDMA makes it very easy to "open up" to people and tell them what you think. This is probably one of the reasons why people are looking into using it as a therapeutic aid for PTSD and rape victims. In the context of a party though, this can translate in you being very comfortable telling your friends what you really think about them, even if it isn't a good idea. I found I'm still able to ask myself rationally "is this something I should be telling this person?", "could this be hurtful to this person?" and stop myself from saying stupid things. This is different from alcohol, which makes you both less anxious and less intelligent. I can tell you that on MDMA, I actually feel extremely sharp, more than normal (better recall, better verbal fluency, etc).

I can tell you that people have said stupid and offensive things to me while high on MDMA, however. One girl told me that she disliked my new hairstyle (thanks, I like it just fine), and also told me that she frequently had sex dreams about me, but that nothing could come of it since she had a boyfriend. Both of these were things I didn't want to know. I will say though that this same girl has said more offensive and annoying things to me while sober.

flanbiscuit• 13 years ago

wow this all sounds so familiar and I wonder if this explains certain parts of my personality. I did Ecstasy A LOT for the summer of 2000, and then randomly here and there after that (now it has been a couple years since my last time). I was already generally easygoing and a people pleaser before then but it probably enhanced it.

Ygg23• 13 years ago

I didn't read the articles, but sample of one (a.k.a. ancedotes) don't pique my interest - Root beer can take away your social anxieties if you think it's alcohol.

tachyonbeam3• 13 years ago

You probably don't experience much anxiety if you say that. Strong adrenalin-induced responses, or panic attacks even, are pretty much impossible to ignore. Try being social when you're shaky, sweating, and have shifty focus (i.e.: fight-or-flight response, your brain is looking for threats in your environment). It's hard slash impossible to will these kinds of symptoms away. Usually, this kind of social anxiety is only amplified by jumping into a social situation.

Furthermore, being even slightly inebriated from alcohol has a very noticeable feel to it. If I went to a party that only had non-alcoholic beverages but pretended these had alcohol, I'm quite sure that I'd be able to tell.

stiff4• 13 years ago

If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?

This is completely misguided, because evolution does not necessarily "progress" in any sense. Here is a good explanation:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq....

This looks like a typical example of what happens when people from mathematical fields or philosophers take up evolution and A) view it as some sort of simple optimization procedure and B) use it as some all-pervading philosophical principle from which things can be derived and don't have to be proven.

Symmetry• 13 years ago

I think that the author covered most of the same objections in his essay that the FAQ you link does, missing only that evolution doesn't necessarily work well in small populations.

stiff4• 13 years ago

He nevertheless proceeds as if this is something that is generally true, with it only being false in exceptional situations. There is no reason to suppose that this is generally true, which makes the heuristic useless, and hence his reasoning gets very shaky, for example:

How about opiates? Morphine and other painkillers can easily be justified as evolution not knowing when a knife cut is by a murderous enemy and when it’s by a kindly surgeon (which didn’t exist way back when), and choosing to make us err on the side of always feeling pain. But recreational drug abuse?

#1 doesn’t seem too plausible - what about modern society would favor opiate consumption outside of medicinal use? If one wishes to deaden the despair and ennui of living in a degenerate atheistic material culture, we have beer for that.57

#3 doesn’t work either; opioids have been around for ages and work via the standard brain machinery.

#2 might work here as well, but this dumps us straight into the debate about the War on Drugs and what harm drug use does to the user & society.

He completely misses here what he wrote himself earlier for example about there not existing a simple mutation from the current state to the "desired" one.

Houshalter4• 13 years ago

If you would read the entire thing, most of it is about addressing that (that is explaining the reasons why evolution doesn't always produce the optimal result.) There are also a lot of links in the text to related material.

I'm not sure why you think this disputes anything he actually said.

SoftwarePatent• 13 years ago

it’s not too surprising that human medicine may be largely wasted effort or harmful 13 (although most - especially doctors - would strenuously deny this).

This claim requires evidence, but the citation is to a blog post about nutrition, not medicine.

gwern20• 13 years ago

This claim requires evidence, but the citation is to a blog post about nutrition, not medicine.

I didn't realize nutrition had nothing to do with medicine. And actually, the citation is to a list of 24 posts by Hanson covering various aspects of the negative case for medicine, including but not limited to nutrition.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

Human brain is stupid - fit to the wrong environment. I was thinking the other day: Babies are afraid of strangers, any new people, especially if those are a little scary. But that makes no sense in modern countries - nobody ever threatens this child, and if on off-change somebody does, he'll try to be as "friendly" as possible when doing so. Children scares make no sense! Adult anxiety makes no sense either!

codex2• 13 years ago

I think that should civilization collapse a lot of behaviors will begin to make a lot of sense. Hopefully that never occurs.

mumbi• 13 years ago

I believe that gwern is a little too obsessed about IQ.

tedks5• 13 years ago

It's common on less wrong to be very pro-IQ. I think this is a mix of contrarianism and desperately wanting to be superior at something, since most people on less wrong don't seem to be terribly well-off in other respects.

That said, it does seem like IQ correlates well with various other measures of success, unless all of the articles Gwern cites are wrong in some way (which is fairly probable), so you'd expect something to be there.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Previous discussion (of an earlier version of this article?) 461 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4201233

Readers who are interested in following up on the professional literature on human intelligence and IQ testing are invited to dig into the "Intelligence Citations" bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellig...

in Wikipedia user space.

SnacksOnAPlane• 13 years ago

Intelligence is not an unalloyed good as the article claims. An excess of intelligence without some outlet for it produces frustration and, in extreme cases, depression.

Anderkent3• 13 years ago

So it has a cost, exactly as the article claims?

The very point of the article is that there is no free lunch. Intelligence improvements are bound to be trade-offs, because otherwise they'd have evolved already. Frustration and depression may be some of these costs.

notahacker• 13 years ago

The article opens with a claim that (i) an individual's brain is wired in a way which makes change in IQ difficult for a set of healthy humans with IQ over a certain threshold which is basically orthogonal to the main thrust of the article (ii) that higher [potential] IQ has an evolutionary disadvantage Sure, one can posit that (i) occurs because of (ii): i.e. (iii) to mitigate against the risk of people harming their reproductive ability by training up their IQ, the evolutionary process selects for immutable IQ

But that seems like a hypothesis with little to recommend it against the alternate hypothesis that mutability of IQ is neutral with respect to evolution but evolving brain structures whose performance in certain tasks can be radically improved in adulthood is difficult, period. Especially when one considers that high IQ at birth isn't eliminated from the gene pool, and marked increases in 1930-normalised IQ between generations doesn't appear to markedly disadvantage modern Westerners.

Similarly, it seems simpler to accept that the phenotype "potential 140 IQ" is the consequence of specific, rare combinations of certain genes which overall aren't correlated with survival, without positing side effects of IQ-linked genes. Ubermensch can't be bred because their kids aren't clones rather than because they're necessarily deficient in other ways.

I'd see the incidence of Tay Sachs disease as a counterexample to the theory that high performance in a specific brain function necessarily has evolutionary tradeoffs. Ashkenazi Jews on average test with higher verbal and mathematical intelligence and lower spatial intelligence than other ethnic groups, which could imply that human brains naturally-selected for optimal function in one area are punished in other areas. Ashkenazi Jews are also more likely to carry the recessive gene for the very rare and very debilitating Tay-Sachs disease. But since 26 out of 27 Ashkenazi Jews don't have that recessive gene, which afaik is uncorrelated with IQ amongst Ashkenazi Jews, it suggests the common factor between Askhenazi intelligence and Ashkenazi Tay-Sachs incidence is inbreeding. Reduced average spatial intelligence could, like Tay-Sachs, be the unfortunate effect of a restricted gene pool rather than an "tradeoff" which must inevitably be caused by higher scores in other tests.

Anderkent3• 13 years ago

alternate hypothesis that mutability of IQ is neutral with respect to evolution but evolving brain structures whose performance in certain tasks can be radically improved in adulthood is difficult, period.

Merely 'difficult' is not much of a counter-argument - almost every component of a human being is at least 'difficult' to design. There doesn't seem to be reason to believe creating higher intelligence is especially more costly, in comparison to the already achieved intelligence.

tedks5• 13 years ago

Gwern has some very good essays; I don't think this is one of them, because it's about 'laws' created on less wrong rather than anything actionable.

It seems possible to dismiss this entire article with another less wrong catechism: "life isn't fair."

gwern20• 13 years ago

It seems possible to dismiss this entire article with another less wrong catechism: "life isn't fair."

I don't see how that's remotely relevant.

tedks5• 13 years ago

Well, it's a bit of a fully general counterargument, but then, so is "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?

Life isn't fair.

Drugs seem to make you think faster/stay up later/be happier? Evolution didn't get it right the first time? Life isn't fair.

codex2• 13 years ago

To me, a related supposition is more interesting: if you put a human in an environment which minics closely their recent evolutionary history, will previously-missing environmental triggers boost intelligence (or any other bodily function?) to their optimum, perhaps via hormesis? Such an environment would include:

- higher amounts of exercise - periodic fasting and/or malnutrition - lower carb intake (sugars, grains) - higher plant intake - higher sunlight exposure - sleep/wake cycle dictated by the Sun - less sitting

... but might also include:

- exposure to rotted food and disease - increased bodily injury - increased exposure to the elements

scythe2• 13 years ago

I find the overall argument to be rather weak. The most relevant problem is that it starts on a premise that might as well be this: "Intelligence is a substance, and a nootropic is a drug that makes the brain produce more of it."

Of course I've intentionally phrased this as to make it seem ludicrous, but throughout the article he talks of "more" or "less" intelligence as though it were a fungible sort of thing. Really, though, intelligence is just a way that human beings interpret each other's behavior, related to performance on various tasks (mathematics, etc). There's no particular reason to assume that evolution would have optimized for, e.g., skill in mathematical analysis, and therefore there isn't any particular reason to assume that even the silliest of low-hanging fruit wouldn't have been picked, for instance an elderly and distinguished analyst, such as Paul Erdos, may benefit from taking amphetamine.

There are also radical differences in what we measure as "IQ", which is mostly performance on a battery of strange tasks, and the sort of mental performance that leads to evolutionary success. There are, for example, arguments to the evolutionary sufficiency of ADHD[1], OCD[2].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocd#Causes

More critically, though, is that this represents yet another article on the basis of "I-think-it-oughta" evolutionary reasoning. You think "intellectual low-hanging fruit" ought to be selected for, but you don't have empirical evidence. The claim is based almost entirely on hand-waving and citations of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is not in any case an authoritative source [3], and whose claims have not been in general accepted by contemporary neuroscientists [4].

3: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.se/2010/09/eliezer-yudkow...

4: notably absent here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence and here: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=evolution+intelligence+a...

Meanwhile, experimental evidence is contradicted. For instance, amphetamine is correlated with improvements in IQ, not to the tune of 20 points, more like four[5]. In fact, things as random -- and ostensibly detrimental -- as mescaline[6] can improve certain aspects of mental functioning, albeit at the cost of others. That what are essentially shots in the dark can produce noticeable improvements in certain qualities bodes well for rational drug design, which has been a success in other fields e.g. cisplatin vs. imatinib.

5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphetamine#Medical

6: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Addictions/2070

Another thing that is important to keep in mind is that the workings of the body can be highly counterintuitive. For instance, one might expect choline supplementation to increase the level of brain acetylcholine. It seems natural, right? But it's not true[7]. Furthermore, while piracetam's effects are commonly considered to be affected (and side-effects reduced) by choline supplementation[8], it is now generally believed to act primarily as an allosteric modulator on ion channels linked to AMPA-sensitive glutamate receptors[9]. Facile reasoning of the sort "what negative effects might have prevented evolution from doing this" thus cannot, itself, tell us very much.

7: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrm.1910390619/fu...

9: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jm901905j

The most immediately difficult claim to me is the advocacy of spaced repetition, when it is not clear why the claims of the article necessarily apply to drugs but not to techniques such as this -- could we not evolve to use it instinctively?

For all this, there is a little useful data in the article. It is indeed widely suspected that choline is underrepresented in modern diets[10], possibly because major dietary sources of choline include eggs and fatty meats, which have been discouraged in Western diets due to a now-controversial belief that cholesterol and saturated fats are antinutrients. There are indeed large differences between WEIRD[11] and historical environments, many of which go without mention -- socializing is much easier, our lives demand much less energy, the risk of malnutrition has been all but eliminated, etc.

10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choline

11: http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/jvt002/BrainMind/Readings/H...

The general thrust of my post is that "evolution" is not an argument that computer scientists can throw around in order to do biology without actually studying it[12], and that evolutionary psychology is often subject to epistemological problems, cf. The Emperor's New Paradigm[13].

12: http://www.amazon.com/Behavioral-Genetics-Robert-Plomin/dp/1...

13: http://commons.lib.niu.edu/bitstream/10843/13182/1/BullerTiC...

gwern20• 13 years ago

I find the overall argument to be rather weak. The most relevant problem is that it starts on a premise that might as well be this: "Intelligence is a substance, and a nootropic is a drug that makes the brain produce more of it."

Which of course it is not. Some supplements work on a deficiency principle, but many do not.

Of course I've intentionally phrased this as to make it seem ludicrous, but throughout the article he talks of "more" or "less" intelligence as though it were a fungible sort of thing.

Performance is a measurable thing. It is measured all the time. There didn't have to be a positive manifold to cognitive performance, we could live in a world where there are two kinds of mental performance which are zero-sum - but nevertheless, there is a _g_.

There's no particular reason to assume that evolution would have optimized for, e.g., skill in mathematical analysis, and therefore there isn't any particular reason to assume that even the silliest of low-hanging fruit wouldn't have been picked, for instance an elderly and distinguished analyst, such as Paul Erdos, may benefit from taking amphetamine.

Of course there's no reason to expect evolution to optimize human intelligence for humans' culturally-based and idiosyncratic desires. It optimizes for reproductive fitness. Hence if we optimize ourselves for our own desires, we are probably incurring a fitness cost, and satisfying one of the loopholes.

(I swear, I am amazed at how every time this essay shows up somewhere, I can reliably count on someone to take one of the loopholes - and no matter how repeatedly, clearly, explicitly, in bulleted or enumerated lists, I have stated them - someone will proudly take a loophole and offer it as a refutation: 'ah, what if we optimize thousands of genes simultaneously? ah, what if nature optimizes for reproduction and not our desires? ah, what about the latest self-improvement fad like dual n-back which might add an IQ point or two?')

There are also radical differences in what we measure as "IQ", which is mostly performance on a battery of strange tasks, and the sort of mental performance that leads to evolutionary success. There are, for example, arguments to the evolutionary sufficiency of ADHD[1], OCD[2]. > 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocd#Causes

Those are cute examples, I'll borrow those.

More critically, though, is that this represents yet another article on the basis of "I-think-it-oughta" evolutionary reasoning.

No, it follows from straightforward reasoning about natural selection. How could intelligence be selected for if it does not have a fitness advantage? If it has a fitness advantage, why has it not reached fixation? And so on.

You think "intellectual low-hanging fruit" ought to be selected for, but you don't have empirical evidence. The claim is based almost entirely on hand-waving and citations of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is not in any case an authoritative source [3], and whose claims have not been in general accepted by contemporary neuroscientists [4].

You are badly mistaken here. I am not citing Yudkowsky because his authority 'makes it so', and it's interesting that you immediately jump to thinking that. I quote him because he formulated the idea well, and I think in some respects better than Bostrom's later paper, and his formulation makes a good jumping off point for all the other material I discuss, which is heavily referenced and generally to as standard authorities as one could wish for.

Meanwhile, experimental evidence is contradicted. For instance, amphetamine is correlated with improvements in IQ, not to the tune of 20 points, more like four[5]. In fact, things as random -- and ostensibly detrimental -- as mescaline[6] can improve certain aspects of mental functioning, albeit at the cost of others. That what are essentially shots in the dark can produce noticeable improvements in certain qualities bodes well for rational drug design, which has been a success in other fields e.g. cisplatin vs. imatinib.

There is nothing 'random' about your choice of those substances and it is dishonest to describe it as so. You chose ampehtamines and mescaline because they are some of the very few substances which can claim to improve mental functioning as opposed to be inert or poisons. (Is a random pharmaceutical drug a random drug? No, because it has been through a rigorous selection process which may have examined hundreds of thousands of millions of chemicals in the pharmacorp or university's search for new drugs.) And as you point out, the benefits are offset by costs: mescaline has some famous effects, but amphetamines in the experiments also damage performance on some tasks. Finally, you do not show how these substances are completely free lunches, and so your entire paragraph is a non sequitur.

Another thing that is important to keep in mind is that the workings of the body can be highly counterintuitive. For instance, one might expect choline supplementation to increase the level of brain acetylcholine. It seems natural, right? But it's not true[7].

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092549270... "Oral choline increases choline metabolites in human brain"

it is now generally believed to act primarily as an allosteric modulator on ion channels linked to AMPA-sensitive glutamate receptors[9].

Could you elaborate on how your reference supports your assertion? It seems to be about discovering (half a century later) that piracetam also affects some other receptor, but I see nothing in it to support your claims about 'it is now generally believed' to act 'primarily' on this receptor.

The most immediately difficult claim to me is the advocacy of spaced repetition, when it is not clear why the claims of the article necessarily apply to drugs but not to techniques such as this -- could we not evolve to use it instinctively?

We do use it by default. That's what it is: multiple presentations over long time periods form strong memories. The presence of the spacing effect in many differing species (http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#generality-of-spaci...) and different kinds of memories suggests that it's a heuristic for recognizing important regularly-repeating features of one's environment, rather than expanding substantial resources memorizing noise and regularly refreshing the synapses (see the Tononi papers for more discussion of the metabolic costs of sleep & memory). Spaced repetition itself is about faking this repeating regularity by a practice involving flash cards.

The general thrust of my post is that "evolution" is not an argument that computer scientists can throw around in order to do biology without actually studying it[12], and that evolutionary psychology is often subject to epistemological problems, cf. The Emperor's New Paradigm[13].

I am not a computer scientist. As for the rest, readers can make up their own minds.

scythe2• 13 years ago

I feel most of what you said simply contradicts me. That you have not bothered to do basic research here is evident:

No, it follows from straightforward reasoning about natural selection. How could intelligence be selected for if it does not have a fitness advantage? If it has a fitness advantage, why has it not reached fixation? And so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence

This is why. It should be the first goddamn thing you look up. Or, you know, a systematic review of some sort. Not your intuition. If something doesn't serve the primary drivers of the evolution of intelligence --which by no means must select for general intelligence as measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices Test, then it need not be selected for! This isn't, of course something you should take from me. Read something. By someone who actually studies biology. u.u

trendoid• 13 years ago

I wonder how many people thoroughly read these gwern articles before jumping to comment their opposing views. There is a lot of information inside. It may take me 5-6 hours to properly go through it before concluding that gwern didnt take X into account. Idea : On HN, even if I save long articles for later and read a week after, my posted views will not be read by anyone since the discussion is already over. Maybe HN can provide a service where everyone gets update whenever a new comment is posted on such articles. I get to choose which posts I want updates from(and most will be ones having lots of words since updates will be few and far between). That way even if someone comments after a week, she atleast knows few people are getting aware of it.

mietek• 13 years ago

I wish there was a service like this.

jmmcd3• 13 years ago

I've been collecting examples of the abuse and misunderstanding of the no-free-lunch theorems, and this is a pretty flagrant one:

"Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage." The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Houshalter4• 13 years ago

Why do you think that is wrong?

jmmcd3• 13 years ago

The NFL theorem (for search and optimisation) states that all algorithms for searching a fixed problem space perform the same, in expectation, when you don't know anything about the fitness (cost) structure over that space. There is a tradeoff in a sense: an algorithm can only do better than random search on some instances of the problem if it does worse on others. There's no sense of a tradeoff between multiple objectives on a single instance of a search problem, which is what gwern is talking about.

Algernon's Law

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