FAQ: Why not develop weak human intelligence amplification first?

(Note: I was unsatisfied with a draft of this, heavily edited it, and I'm still unsatisfied. The notion of "weak HIA method" here is muddled, maybe conflating multiple things that shouldn't be conflated here. It may be used a bit inconsistently, and may make some arguments tautological or contradictory depending on local interpretation of the notion. I think most of the reasoning is still useful, so it's better to publish, but beware, and please critique. Or more importantly, please investigate HIA.) Summary People sometimes ask: Why not prioritize human intelligence amplification methods that will provide small increases in intelligence, over stronger methods? They'll be easier to develop. The two main reasons to prioritize strong HIA methods are: There are increasing returns to higher intelligence, so strong methods unlock much more value. Empirically, weak HIA methods don't seem that much easier than strong HIA methods. There are other structural issues with weak methods. For example, they seem likely to be hard to make legible, and therefore hard to test and to scale up to lots of people; and they tend to provide a way to avoid the hard problem of strong HIA without much benefit. A key challenge is simply to have a good reason to think a method will genuinely increase general intelligence at all; once you have that, you probably have a method that can be developed into a strong HIA method anyway. That said, weak HIA methods would be fantastic. I mainly want to suggest that someone who wants to pursue weak HIA methods should keep in mind the pitfalls described in this article. Context Why not weak HIA rather than strong HIA? A promising idea is human intelligence amplification (HIA), i.e. enabling people to be smarter if they want. I generally focus on HIA methods that would have large effects on intelligence; see e.g. this overview of strong HIA methods. A question people sometimes ask is: Wouldn't it be strategically better to develop weak HIA methods first rather than strong HIA methods? Since we're asking for less, it would be easier to develop, and therefore faster and more impactful. This argument does hold some water. In particular, it partially successfully argues that if you actually have a weak HIA method, scaling that method up quickly is valuable. But, this article will explain why efforts aimed at developing new strong HIA methods are generally more promising than efforts aimed at new weak HIA methods. Weak vs. strong HIA methods These terms are vague, but to give some arbitrary cutoff points: weak HIA: add <1 SD of intelligence. medium HIA: add 1—2.5 SDs of intelligence. strong HIA: add >2.5 SDs of intelligence. (This article leaves aside the important question of: What other aspects of cognition, besides general intelligence, would it be good if people were enabled to amplify in themselves?) An HIA method is some core technological principle. (Analogously, the core technological principles of a jet engine are "propulsion via Newtonian reaction" and "combustion under high pressure".) Examples include "adult brain gene editing", "BCIs to massively increase internal connectivity", "BCIs to network people together", "signaling molecules to induce fast learning", and so on. An HIA method could be developed into a body of technoscientific knowledge, protocols, and institutions which can give people weakly or strongly amplified intelligence. I'm not totally sure what I mean by "research specifically aimed at a weak HIA method". I mean to point at a cluster including: Plans that come from a theory of HIA that visibly couldn't extend to strong HIA. Or more generally, plans that don't have a good theory for how they could extend to strong HIA. Plans that don't have a good justification for why we should expect them to produce genuine increases in general intelligence. (It may seem strange to call this "research aimed at a weak method", but I think in fact people often make this substitution—they say they want to pursue a weak method, and then settle for weak motivating evidence.) Plans where the justification is that we're intervening on some aspect of the brain that's probably related to intelligence somehow; and therefore it's plausible we can slightly increase intelligence. Plans where the justification is that we have some very weak (noisy, small, based on subjective report, hard to interpret, not clearly general) evidence of an effect of some intervention on intelligence. Plans where the justification is that the intervention does noticeably improve cognitive ability in a group that has a specific impairment, by alleviating the impairment. Main statement In general, relative to investing in strong HIA, I'm somewhat unenthusiastic about investing much in attempts specifically aimed at developing weak methods for human intelligence amplification. The central reasons: There are significantly increasing marginal returns to more intelligence, in terms of benefit to humanity. Someone can