“FAQ: Why not develop weak human intelligence amplification first?” by TsviBT

(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 [...] --- Outline: (00:45) Summary (02:02) Context (02:06) Why not weak HIA rather than strong HIA? (03:06) Weak vs. strong HIA methods (05:36) Main statement (07:32) Why weak HIA attempts don't seem so promising (07:37) Unpromising properties (17:16) More reasons (19:39) Aside: polygenic embryo selection (21:07) Caveats (21:19) Caveat: Any specific argument could easily be wrong (22:38) Caveat: Weak HIA would be great! (23:43) Caveat: Weak HIA may have surprising beneficial effects (24:21) Caveat: Flimsy foundations (25:24) Caveat: Scaling a working weak method is a medium priority (30:10) Conclusion The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 27th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpWfAHsnHjrtYhpiQ/faq-why-not-develop-weak-human-intelligence-amplification --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.