Idea that you can select against intelligence would lead to an idea that eugenics == good and that is a taboo. It is a can of worms in the High Status Discussion to bring up the idea that intelligence can be measured and inherited by offspring.
According to many even ITT, intelligence is some transcendental category which can only be divined by Nurture and Education.
No the issue is not about whether intelligence exists but whether it can be captured by such crude and simplistic models.
Let’s say I want to measure the potential of someone to be a software engineer. I ask them to solve algorithm questions under time pressure. Those who do them faster and better have an LQ. The leet code quotient.
I have reams of data that show that the higher your leet code quotient the more you earn in salary , the more successful the companies you work in tend to be.
I’m sure many on HN would rail against “LQ” being used to drive policy. Like saying we need to make sure we hire and train more high LQ engineers. Yet this is exactly the tone on discussions about IQ.
The more we believe in hiring based on Leet code the better it makes it look. The same is happening with our education system. What if we measured peoples eye sight and then discriminated against people with low VQ ? You don’t need to do that you can invent glasses so everyone has the same VQ.
All of IQ testing is based on a comically simple assumption. Your score on an IQ test is G + S + N. Where G is the general factor , S is the subject specific factor and N is noise.
Who even said there are only 3 factors ? Modern models add a few more but intelligence may not even be a scalar or a low dimensional vector. It might be a vector with thousands of quantities.
And to those who think that IQ is “real” ponder the following - I give an IQ test to Albert Einstein and a Bedouin from the Sahara desert. Afterwards I drop both of them alone in the desert to survive. Who is more likely to live ?
People need to stop putting faith in crude statistical models that have very weak causal basis. I’m not denying that some people are better at some things than others. But assuming that solving a few puzzles and doing crude statistics allows you to predict that is comical.
IQ is a very crude general prediction. It’s completely possible for a 100 IQ to beat a 140 IQ on many different tasks. Like seducing women or playing football or rapping. We have a very narrow definition of intelligence.
We are barely able to manage our own economies without destroying the entire ecosystem, every country is a mess but we believe that we are able to shape evolution itself towards positive goals when such a process requires tens of thousands of years to even work. The last time this was tried we got one of the worst things in human history. Some people thought they were the “master race” only to get steamrolled by the “inferior” slavs.
The parent did a partner selection before the breeding took place, unless there was rape involved; and I doubt a parent that wants a kid that turns out right goes to: "hmm today I will breed with the disabled person to make for great offspring", no they will select for a mate that they think is good and this choice is implicitly eugenic: they will not declare to be august masters of eugenics but they will look for a good partner to provide healthy offspring.
Yes and that choice is ideally made freely and without coercion. Not following the diktat of some geek bearing equations. It’s very arrogant to assume that some central planning can replace the distributed computation of millions of people making free choices. Free markets everywhere except here ?
The reality is that psychology has been used, is being used, as a vehicle for racism rather than legitimate science. In lieu of real science, nothing at all is better.
Going beyond that, is intelligence == good worth debating? To the extent that the increase of mental health issues across the population seems to be happening irrespective of IQ. Or perhaps it isn't- does high IQ correlate with certain mental disorders? And are there other, less quantified measures worth improving for the well-being of society, such as EI.
But the question is if intelligence is the primary determinant. The current social and political crises affecting society seem to do with emotional issues that may be linked to intelligence but not necessarily driven by (only) it. And the seemingly rapid increase in mental health disorders is concerning. How does intelligence correlate with sanity, one wonders.
Intelligence is the primary determinant in the sense that you need intelligence to make the innovations which drive society forward. But of course, social factors are important and to be such as to allow intelligent people to achieve their potential.
It would seem that whenever you engage in any endeavor that involves more than one person, social intelligence immediately becomes relevant. I'm not at all convinced that the solutions to current problems will be solved by intelligence alone. Social factors, group dynamics, teamwork are all vital. There was no single genius behind the Manhattan Project.
Advancements in technology can be detrimental to the environment, lethal, make us dumber, worsen quality of life in several ways, help control and imprison us, and any combination of the previous.
And "expansion into the universe" means little if it's for some lucky few. Why should the rest care, just because if Earth is whiped out those few get to "continue"?
That's even assuming it's doable without something like generation ships - which even at the solar system level is a big if.
Intelligence has trade-offs, costs and other limitations or we would have maxed it out hard (ie. an "intelligence explosion" would have occurred).
Increased mental illness might be one, other one is the brain size being limited by the hips of mother. Brains / intelligence also has energy costs which we might not have been able to optimize for yet.
As such, I would say that intelligence is a cost that you run. It allowed for reproduction and survival for humans when they moved towards colder regions for example, but there's little to no reason to maintain that intelligence if you don't need to adapt anymore. I think you need harsh material constraints (I don't know, space faring) to keep it from shaving itself off in order to optimize the human machine.
it's a pretty funny taboo honestly, nobody questions that genetics contribute to height and it's not controversial at all
the good news is that China is doubling down on research into the genetic basis of intelligence. The West will either adjust their worldview or be left behind
Who are these people who claim that Joe the Plumber is of equal intelligence to Albert Einstein? They sound suspiciously like straw people, what with their belief which falls over if you blow upon it combined with shadowy ability to hijack entire cultures, almost as if they might have been saying "all men were created equal", Gettysburg Address style, not "all men have equal intelligence".
> How many Stanford graduates marry burger flippers?
That isn't necessarily Eugenics. If they think that "burger flippers" will produce inferior offspring, it's eugenics. But I suspect that if there is a low incidence of Stanford grads and "burger flippers" coupling it's due to other factors, for one thing the fact that they are two relatively small populations that likely have minimal interaction in a dating environment.
There are better ways of wording that idea. There is also value in wording it better. I basically get your point, but the delivery here is not welcoming and is also not really on par with the enthusiasm that bio-scientists have for the field of genetics and the potential to steer the species towards ever improving health and intelligence.
"Joe the Plumber" is a phrase from American political dialogue. It is a phrase that means, politically, a perfectly average dude.
In my comment, it is to be understood that an exceptional individual like Einstein is worth more to the species than an average person. It is not to imply average people are worthless, but rather that exceptional people are rare and the species values them.
Einstein is a good example of a rare genius that helped push the species forward. Not sure what you are even hinting at here? Do you hate his hair or something?
We ban accounts that post flamebait like this, and/or take HN threads further into flamewar (which you did a ton of in this thread). Would you please stop doing those things?
We also ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're for or against, because that destroys the curious conversation this place is supposed to exist for.
I agree with your message and the purpose of it. There was no intention of conflict. I made some attempts to clarify that in the various responses, which mostly concluded with agreements.
I have read a few books that talk of eugenics in the way that I am describing it. Matt Ridley for example (genome book covers it on a chapter).
Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. It is only online that I encounter a sort of political extremism in opposition to the idea of leveraging what we know (of DNA) to make the world better.
> Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity.
I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that most experts would happily claim, even among friends, that what they're doing relates to "eugenics", which isn't just a sequence of letters that you can find in a dictionary. It's inextricably bound up with a very dark history. Consider why the Wikipedia article for eugenics isn't just a short one-sentence statement that eugenics is about increasing the occurrence of positive hereditable traits.
I understand your words, but that is not consistent with my experiences literally anywhere outside of social media where people are self censoring to conform to the puritanical zeitgeist of the moment.
In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc.
On a separate note but still in response -- Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political and is outright banned in classrooms (and some countries due to the politicized nature of the content).
> In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc.
And that's fine for China. This may even become the norm in North America and Europe at some point in the future. But that doesn't change facts: most people speaking in English will not talk positively about the term "eugenics", which has a crap ton of baggage that you're just ignoring.
> Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political
That would be a fine point to make if I were citing Wikipedia as a source for a paper I'm writing. However, what I meant was that eugenics has a history that can't be sharply extricated from what you might believe is the literal meaning of the term. Words are more complicated than that.
As an example of what I'm talking about, no reasonable person would prominently display a swastika even though it's technically an Indian symbol of divinity. That's because it has an immense amount of baggage now almost inextricably bound up with its original definition; if you display a swastika people (at least in the west) will immediately connect it to Nazism.
Similarly, if I went on TV and proudly claimed that we should be doing eugenics, many would assume that I want to forcibly sterilize an underclass using unscientific ideas about heritability, and that I'm probably racist, too. I would have to do a lot of work to convince people that, no, all I really mean is that we should be able to do genetic testing to see if babies-to-be have the correct number of chromosomes (and so on), and decide to bring them to term based on that information.
Maybe you want to rehabilitate the term, which, OK, fine. But it's a mistake to assume that you can take the original definition of something and assume that's all the word "means" to people.
I don't think what I am talking about is quite the same thing. Perhaps it would be more diplomatic to call my stance here to be in favor of applied genetics. DNA the molecule of genetics was not yet discovered. I do think there is a lot of potential in the idea of, say, cloning someone like Einstein from samples that have been preserved. It would be very interesting to me if a nation state cloned such people and set them to work on modern problems of quantum physics. What could such people accomplish in their lifetime starting in the present with our current knowledge and proofs and technologies.
well Einstein was against this idea of, you know, German pseudoscience, where they had these men going through mountains in the Middle East and measuring skulls and what have you, I do think applied genetics is a very different science.
You keep evoking Einstein in contexts that would have him rolling in his grave. Imagine raising Einstein from the dead to tell him that he's the standard bearer of eugenics and a version of quantum mechanics that was not in his image. It's humorous.
You seem to know very little about science or its history but are quick to evoke scientism in defense of ideas that in actuality have very little to do with science.
Einstein the person, the history of his life, etc are fully separate from contributions to science. Science is, generally, not about cults of personality, history, or any of that.
I have a great appreciation, respect, gratefulness, passion, and enthusiasm for science, progress, and advancement of the species.
One does not have to study the trivialities of how Einstein took his coffee or tea in 1938 in order to appreciate the genius and scientific contributions.
>>You
This side thread with you seems fallacious in a way, but that is okay. I respect you and think there is definitely a place in the world for people who do well in their careers and also worship their idols from history.
You know, all of that said, don't you think it would be cool and maybe beneficial to the species if cloning technologies were perfected and experiments were done where genes like those responsible for the entity you know as Einstein were cloned, given new names, new lives, and such? I wonder what would happen. It would seem such experiments are indeed coming in the future, and I do not think the historical trivialities of one's life have much to do with this scientific curiousity that many a biologist wants to explore.
This entire thread is an aside about an anecdote about how one guy's wife decided not to have kids and therefore there's a Great Replacement of the Mensa Members By The Non-Mensa Members.
As he is a hero of sorts to you, here is EINSTEIN on the, to him, obvious difference in value between the stupid and the brilliant:
>>In 1918 he was asked by the mother of a brilliant German biology student to dissuade her son from joining the front in the First World War. Einstein complied and wrote: “Can this post of yours out there not be filled by an unimaginative average person of the type that come 12 to the dozen? Is it not more important than all that big scuffle out there that valuable people stay alive?”
>>And in 1922, Einstein told his close friend, the physicist Paul Ehrenfest, whose 4-year-old son had recently been diagnosed with Down syndrome, that he agreed with his decision to institutionalize his son rather than care for him himself, because “valuable people should not be sacrificed for causes without any prospects, not even in this case.”
Einstein can be seen above quoted as saying things that are very similar to my own writings. Regardless, I just found this interesting today and thought you'd enjoy it.
There's nothing similar between those quotes and your writing about how Einstein should be cloned and then made to work on quantum physics.
As an aside, those quotes come from earlier in his life. It's uncertain if he held the same opinions as he grew older and matured. People's views do change over time, as we can see with Einstein's rueful feelings over the a-bomb.
No not at all. Every single parent choosing to breed sociopaths can lead to an unstable society that eats itself. There are many ways such ideas can end in total catastrophe.
Being a sociopath is not an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Prisons have many violent sociopaths. Studies on this are pretty clear.
There is, however, the weird outliers. There are those people with similar brain patterns that are not of the violent variety. They seem to succeed in business, for example.
I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Linus Torvalds (essentially the tech greats) were all sociopathic in some way.
FWIW, I am not a trained psychiatrist and am only speaking from the sort of popular psychology news articles and documentaries and TED talks I have seen on this particular topic.
Well the suggestion here is that everyone uses eugenics to turn everyone into sociopaths. It’s cooperation that keeps the world going with periodic oscillations around it.
> I do think you will be on the wrong side of history on this.
Is he or she on the wrong side of history in claiming that the value of human life does not lie in intelligence, or in saying that it would be better to weed out sociopaths? Because you haven't addressed either of those (which seem pretty self-evident to me, but YMMV).
Applied genetics will be the future of the species if there is one, and it is a bit wrong to take a hostile stance that "advocates for AG are <insert demeaning term>." which is how I took the comment.
The point of total nuclear war is not to declare a victor anyways. States that can ensure MAD have a nuclear deterrence based on irrationality, of which you cannot exactly reason rationally like this.
FWIW. if your city has blast doors at 100m+ depth you are for sure joining the nuclear exchange.
Installing this in Ubuntu is a PITA and I always just give up. No I'm not going to start """symlink this and that""" when my aim is to save references for myself.
My unironic recommendation for any nation state is to block American social media companies and then proceed to restrict or outright ban R&D work on 'ads' and other such trinkets. Exactly because of: ".. a tragedy for ... that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley." Just looking at the sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking is insane.
Perhaps a less heavy-handed approach would be to actually enforce existing anti-trust laws against Big Tech so that they're not able to monopolize America's best and brightest?
Also, as a Physics PhD holder myself, I dislike that Physics PhDs are held up as the archetypal smart people to be allocated in society's best interest. My opinion is that most of them, myself included, were foolish to go that far in their education and would have better served themselves, and society, if they had stopped at a BS. We could unlock a large economic gain if we went back to fairly matching job responsibilities with the minimum required education.
> Just looking at the sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking is insane.
It's circular -- while I think ads are absurd and am actively trying to remove as many of them from my life as possible, it's not like technologies that have been subsidized by optimizing ad clicking haven't come back around to help science out.
I hear this kind of thing repeated here a lot, but I have to ask - what percentage of the engineering staff at Google and Facebook directly work on advertising? I would be shocked if it was as high as 10%. "The sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking" is pretty damn small compared to the tech economy, let alone the whole economy.
It may be funded by advertising, but Search is incredibly useful. And Facebook keeps me in touch with my extended friend circle, which as far as I'm concerned is an unconditional social good. Most of the people working on those products aren't working on the advertising part. And if a small percentage are, well, you can't fully optimize every system of humans.
Why does the distinction of direct vs indirect matter when the question is about opportunity costs of deploying talent to potentially more fruitful endeavors?
Because a search engine that almost always finds what you are looking for is a fruitful endeavor. A website that lets me keep up with my extended friend circle is a fruitful endeavor. A website full of educational videos (and yes, a lot of mindless entertainment) is a fruitful endeavor.
By focusing on how they are funded, you're losing track of the fact that these companies provide incredibly valuable services.
Tokyo has so many people, it couldn’t avoid being one of the most diverse cities in the world. I guess the stereotype is that all 40M people are salaryman drones and housewives, but clearly that’s not true. If even half are something else, that still leaves tens of millions of people to fill out all the other varieties of people.
Whatever your culture or interest is, there will be a place you can find that in Tokyo, probably more so then any other city on Earth.
Au contraire. You'll find all sorts of people with different ideas, interests, curiosities, tastes, desires, opinions, vices and virtues; the full gamut of humanity, as you might expect in a metropolis of near 40 million.
Yes, certain traits predominate as they do in any culture but if you go looking I'm pretty sure you'll find what you're looking for in Tokyo.
How do C++ programs / programmers enforce and manage modularity in the general sense if they don't even have simplest module system? I'm not even talking of having module functors like Ocaml, but something like Rust has. It seems to be one of the most obvious steps to reduce complexity and compose program of smaller parts.
Mostly we rely on the system package manager. If I'm trying to compile a C++ program and I need somelib I `sudo apt install libsomelib-dev`
Works about 80% of the time. The other 20% I gotta go digging through either github or sourceforge or someone's personal website that hasn't been updated in 15 years.
It's not "enforced;" it is managed through various means including namespaces, header includes, and prefixes. For example, SQLite is a library whose functions all start with 'sqlite3'. In practice it works well enough: name collisions are uncommon and can be managed.
Somewhat incredible that all of .PDF reading software is just bad. There is not a single .PDF reader that I think of as "This is a good program" when I open it. Maybe the spec (PDF) is just fucked, I don't know. That's my experience over the years as someone that consumes a lot of .PDFs.
This is pretty funny though, if I've understood this correctly. People in the West always seem to think that a properly democratic government made by the chinese people (be it those in Taiwan or those in China) would be "peaceful", but to me if I look at a map and observe the lands Taiwan claims for herself, it seems quite a lot (if they do actually claim the rights to governing the China-China too, and not just Taiwan the Island)
> This is pretty funny though, if I've understood this correctly. People in the West always seem to think that a properly democratic government made by the chinese people (be it those in Taiwan or those in China) would be "peaceful", but to me if I look at a map and observe the lands Taiwan claims for herself, it seems quite a lot (if they do actually claim the rights to governing the China-China too, and not just Taiwan the Island)
Are you making the claim that Taiwan's official historical claims somehow make the current country not peaceful? How exactly? Exactly what belligerent actions has Taiwan engaged in recently?
