Is any EA group funding adult human intelligence augmentation? It seems broadly useful for lots of cause areas, especially research-bottlenecked ones like AI alignment.
Why hasn't e.g. OpenPhil funded this project?: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing
A number of global health and development achieve some significant part of their benefits through higher adult IQ. This is especially true of deworming, somewhat true of anti-malaria projects, and possibly true of childhood vaccinations
Yeah I get that, I mean specifically the weird risky hardcore projects. (Hence specifying "adult", since that's both harder and potentially more necessary under e.g. short/medium AI timelines.)
Looking at the linked post, this paragraph jumps out at me:
I’ve now talked to some pretty well-qualified bio PHDs with expertise in stem cells, gene therapy, and genetics. While many of them were skeptical, none of them could point to any part of the proposed treatment process that definitely won’t work. The two areas they were most skeptical of was the ability to deliver an editing vector to the brain and the ability to perform many edits in the same cell. But both seem addressable. Delivery for one, may be solved by other scientists trying to deliver gene editors to the brain to target monogenic conditions like Huntington’s.
Ignoring the spin, what this paragraph actually says is "I sent this proposal to a bunch of experts and they said it probably wouldn't work". So my guess is to why nobody is funding this is that it probably wouldn't work.
Here's a point in favor of reference class skepticism. (see top comment)
Skepticism of things in the reference class of "genetic interventions".