Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Predicting Polygenic Selection for IQ, published by Metaculus on March 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a linkpost for an essay by Ryan Beck appearing in the Metaculus Journal. Readers are encouraged to read the essay in the Journal where they can engage directly with the author and make their own forecasts. Creating embryos in a petri dish, examining the genes of the resulting embryos, and then implanting the embryo with the highest probability of creating the most intelligent child sounds like something out of science fiction. But it's closer to becoming scientific reality than some might expect. A Metaculus question asks whether genetic engineering techniques will be commercially available by 2050 that can raise IQ by 10 points. Polygenic embryo selection seems to be the most promising technology with a chance of achieving this by far. In the following essay I review the current state of the art of polygenic embryo selection and use this information to provide a forecast for this question. By 2050, will genetic engineering techniques be available which can raise IQ by 10 points? Disclaimers and Acknowledgements This analysis is informed by a fairly superficial literature review. I've spent a decent amount of time trying to understand the information I present below, but I have no background in genetics or biology and my understanding of the following information is still pretty weak, and I've only read some of the papers I've linked, while skimming others. While I tried to cover the general consensus and differing views related to these topics, it's possible the following information is not representative of the current state of the art and consensus of the field. Critiques and corrections are welcome. This originated as a Metaculus comment which was motivated by the Impactful Forecasting Prize, a really cool initiative to incentivize sharing forecasting rationales on a set of Metaculus questions judged to be impactful. This Metaculus Journal post is an updated version of the original comment and corrects at least one error that significantly impacts my forecast. See the footnote at the end for a description of the error and see my original comment to see the prior version of this analysis with the error included.¹ I've also updated this analysis to incorporate feedback from @alwaysrinse and @gene_smith. Thanks to both of them for sharing their thoughts. I recommend checking out the original comment thread for their thoughts and perspectives. My Priors Before digging into the literature my forecast on the above question was 25% based on a skepticism of high heritability estimates for IQ, a general impression that polygenic scores are still far off from having strong predictive power, and the general view that it was too optimistic to expect things to develop so rapidly. The following analysis may be biased toward these priors. Background and Primers This section provides primers that I think are the most helpful for anyone without previous exposure or with limited previous exposure to the topic wanting to understand the background information more thoroughly. This can be skipped for anyone who is already familiar with the subject or is primarily interested in the broader takeaways. IQ, explained in 9 charts - If you're not sure how important IQ really is or whether it measures something meaningful this is a great article to start with. The takeaway is that higher IQs are linked with many other positive life outcomes, such as increased wealth and reduced mortality. Polygenic Selection of Embryos - A nice Metaculus Journal post by @galaga which gives a valuable overview of the process of selecting embryos based on polygenic scores and its use for reducing disease risk, as well as potential for increased adoption of this technology in the future. Twi...