My point was less about the specifics of measuring intelligence or athleticism and more about asking if given the degree of uncertainty, is it really a good idea to run headfirst into embryo IQ selection. There are almost certainly aspects of intelligence not captured by IQ tests that help with mathematics, physics, music, writing, etc. By optimizing so narrowly for IQ we don't know if we could be excluding the regions of gene space that might generate a brain that performs best at those tasks, much like focusing only on triathlon (or vertical leap or sprint) performance would exclude the musculoskeletal parameters that make Messi or Phelps so perfect for their chosen tasks.
Building off the embryo selection discussion below:
What do you think IQ is exactly?
I’ve always thought about a general factor of intelligence as very similar to a general factor of athleticism. In this context, IQ is a measure of the former much like a triathlon time can be a measure of the latter.
In every sport, triathlon time is going to be positively correlated with ability across the whole population. However, the absolute best performers on specific tasks will not be the ones that do the best in triathlon, because each task has room for optimization that has negative tradeoffs for triathlon performance ("no free lunch"). If you single-mindedly select for triathlon performance, you’ll get a generally more athletic population. On the other hand, you’ll funnel away from getting a Bolt, a Phelps, a Messi, a Jordan, a Federer, etc. Contributions to athleticism aren’t necessarily linear. Individually sub-optimal parameters can align just right to produce optimal results.
There are potential unforeseen consequences of restricting available gene-space by widespread adoption of IQ optimization. Traits are notoriously polygenic (each trait is affected by many genes), and virtually every gene is pleiotropic (each gene affects many traits). Our understanding of both intelligence and genetics is rife with unknown unknowns. Would we still get von Neumann, Einstein, etc.? Supposing the technology became widely available and affordable, is that a fence you’d be willing to tear down?
Edit: It seems I didn't communicate my main concern particularly well. There are two issues with a myopic optimization on IQ: one is negative health effects due to pleiotropy of the associated genes. The other, which I am more concerned with here, is the potential for "lost opportunities". This is what I was trying to illustrate with the triathlon analogy. You can get a narrowing of the variations in intelligence types and a potential restriction on the very upper end of ability. We don't know if Newton, Gauss, Einstein, von Neumann, Ramanujan, and Tao all had a similar combination of traits that led to their exceptional abilities, or if they all had different pieces that fit together in unique ways to produce a unique form of genius (what I meant by "not summing linearly"). Analogous to the way that Phelps, Bolt, and Messi have very different body compositions that produce their unique athletic excellence. A population of excellent triathletes would be more athletic, much like a population of people with 115 IQ would be more intelligent, but that kind of optimization may come at the expense of the variation needed to produce those truly exceptional at related but slightly orthogonal tasks.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I think the modal introvert is
1.) high activation energy (in the chemistry sense) for social environments
2.) totally fine with familiar people; utterly exhausted by strangers and loose acquaintances
The popular use of "introvert" seems to be "people who are categorically averse to social interaction" but in my experience such people are quite rare (insert sampling bias disclaimer here).
bonsaii
1mo ago
These traits are notoriously polygenic, and virtually every gene is pleiotropic. It's not hard to imagine that optimizing for IQ specifically can have unforeseen deleterious downstream effects. Genetics as a field is rife with unknown unknowns.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I think it was meant to be a joke on the butterfly effect (I'm pretty weak on history but I vaguely remember lots of causal links between WWI and WWII). It could also just have been someone (and me) mixing up the World Wars.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I can't compare India and Canada, but there are certainly many aspects of living in the US that are noticeably worse than major Chinese cities (where most immigrants will come from).
US food quality is garbage tier for anyone who didn't exclusively grow up on it (on taste, not on safety), our crime rates are high, our public transit is grimy and unreliable. There are many little things about day to day life in the US that grate on those who (perhaps justifiably) expect better. It's easier to notice these major and minor inconveniences than to account for all of the things that are improved.
bonsaii
1mo ago
This vaguely reminded me of one of my favorite memes that went something like:
"When a Serb kills an Austrian in Bosnia so the British send you, an Indian, to Singapore to fight the Japanese."
bonsaii
1mo ago
Funny, in my area pickleball is largely a "tech-bro" meme. I didn't realize it had penetrated the finance scene as well.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Oddly enough, the visual clutter from bullet comments and splashes has never quite bothered me. I find the repeated "oooohhh"s a unique kind of grating to the point I'll actively avoid any unscripted Korean media. I do agree though that shifting away from these sorts of editing styles as a whole would be a net positive for me, even if at the cost of some of the core content.
bonsaii
1mo ago
I'm incredibly biased as someone who plays tennis recreationally, but nothing quite stirs up a feeling of disgust deep in my soul like pickleball.
I've tried out most of the major racquet sports and pickleball is the first time I've felt like a "sport" is Pareto inferior. Racquetball and squash require utilizing wall bounces, table tennis and badminton require quicker reflexes, table tennis also emphasizes more uses of spins, while badminton emphasizes drop shots and overheads.
Pickleball manages to simultaneously de-emphasize speed, strength, reflexes, power, spin, and touch. It's really quite impressive how it can blunt the importance of every aspect of athleticism and skill, all while producing one of the most annoying sounds known to humanity. This type of lowest common denominator slop is effective when you need to get together a group of people of disparate physical ability to play together, but it's largely antithetical my idea of "sport", both for playing and especially for viewing.
bonsaii
1mo ago
Is the editing standard Korean style TV editing, with every "ooooohhhhh" reaction repeated five times over? There's some entertaining stuff coming out of Korean "unscripted" media but I utterly despise their presentation style. Even similar shows from other East Asian countries never seem to do it as obnoxiously.
bonsaii
2mo ago
But is it not useful as a measure of how much I value the right to dog ownership (i.e., not at all)? I imagine a dog-lover would have a much higher number and the difference could be reflected somewhat quantitatively as such.
bonsaii
2mo ago
Higher order effects can and should be taken into account when selecting a Buridan point. For example, I would imagine the Buridan point for car ownership vs motor vehicle deaths would be rather high given the immense benefits/conveniences of car ownerships to people and society at large. I partially chose the dog example because:
-
most people like dogs so they'd probably be willing to tolerate several deaths per year (we already do)
-
dogs provide no net benefit to anyone but the pleasure of the owners (they are completely removed from the food chain and they otherwise are a net detriment given their massive carbon footprint, the daily urine/stool output providing loci for disease spread, and other externalities like barking noise, smell, etc.)
bonsaii
2mo ago
That was only meant to be a simple, illustrative example. I suppose a more relevant real world example would be, say, how many children killed by pitbulls specifically would it take for you to support banning ownership of that breed (see UK). The same framework would still apply.
bonsaii
2mo ago
Me with dogs is a bad example because I deeply hate dog culture, so I wouldn't mind deleting dogs even at zero children (can preserve a couple at zoos, but eliminate the pet culture). There are already leash laws, pick-up-your-dog's-shit laws, noise ordinances, no-dog-zones. At least in my city, dog owners consistently ignore all of these and no one bothers to enforce them. And I'm thoroughly fed up with dodging piles of shit every time I go for a walk, smelling dog piss in every hallway and elevator of my building, seeing dogs licking items at the grocery store, hearing hours long bark sessions, etc. All these negative externalities, coupled with my belief that dogs are essentially a superstimulus for friendship/childrearing and I already find them a net negative to society even before accounting for the kids they maul every year.
bonsaii
2mo ago
This is a good point, I should probably adjust my wording to account for this oversight of mine. However, my main goal was to illustrate there must be a transition point between options A and B. In the discontinuous case, as long as monotonicity still holds, that would just be the value at the point of discontinuity (in your example, effectively 0). It's been more than a decade since I did any proper math, so I can't seem to access the right words to make it rigorous. I suppose I could define the two sets of inputs that yield A vs B, with one set being a closed interval [0,z] and the other being an open interval (z,1] or something of that flavor.
bonsaii
2mo ago
A fun framework I often go to for thinking about policy issues is what I guess I'll call "identifying a Buridan point". The gist is:
Given a binary decision (options A or B) I must make based on a continuous input where:
- there exists a value X of the input where I prefer option A
- there exists a value Y>X of the input where I prefer option B
- my preference for B rises monotonically with the value of the input
there must exist some point C (Y>C>X), where I am perfectly equivocal between options A and B. This point C is the "Buridan point" and gives me a quantification of my stance on a particular issue.
Here is a simple example: Suppose Joe must decide if he supports euthanizing all dogs based on the rate of children killed by dogs:
- If 0% of children are killed by dogs every year, he would not support euthanizing all dogs.
- If 100% of children are killed by dogs every year, he would support euthanizing all dogs.
- Joe's preference for euthanizing all dogs rises monotonically with the rate of children killed by dogs.
Therefore, there must exist some "acceptable" rate of children killed by dogs X at which Joe finds the benefits of dog ownership to exactly offset the lives of killed children.
In an ideal world, people would keep control of their dogs but there will be mistakes and there will be bad actors. The only way to absolutely guarantee that no child is killed by a dog is by eliminating all dogs. The decision to not euthanize all dogs is accepting that the children killed by dogs every year are an acceptable sacrifice for the option of dog ownership.
What is X(dogs) for you?
Control+F replace all, dog -> gun
Control+F replace all, euthaniz -> confiscat
What is X(guns) for you?
Obviously actual policy decisions have a continuous or at least graded set of options, rather than an extreme binary, but I find such questions revealing nevertheless. Despite the absurdity, it makes me ask myself: "How much better/worse do things have to get for me to reverse my position?"
Anyways, any thoughts on whether this has any value for quantifying preferences?
bonsaii
2mo ago
What search engine and browser are you currently using for your default?
I've been using Google and Chrome due to decades of inertia, but the deterioration in result quality and ever escalating frequency of intrusive pop-ups for new nonsense functions I don't want have finally hit activation energy for a switch.
bonsaii
3mo ago
Would that be "easy" though? It seems like political suicide to propose such a policy and coercing private institutions to implement it would be difficult. Then there are all of the perverse incentives toward gaming the system. There would likely need to be carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications from a prior birth or other health concerns, so lots of buying out diagnoses under the table. Some might adopt a strategy of having the threshold number of kids and still hyperinvesting in only one. Etc.
The status competition in East Asia extends to the status of one's children. Even if you were to magically boost the status of women with more children (and even give housing and financial benefits on top), that won't fix the intense status anxiety when it comes to how their children do in life.
In East Asia, status rankings are universal, overt, and familial. And because status is a positional good, it naturally invites full investment of every expendable resource. If you have to divide your resources across n children, they'll lose out to families with m < n children, which reflects badly on your own status.
bonsaii
3mo ago
Are there any other countries like the US where the legal/political center (DC), financial center (NYC), technology center (Bay Area), and entertainment center (LA/NYC) are in separate cities? It seems that for most countries all of these are in the capital, but I'm not well-traveled enough to know.
bonsaii
3mo ago
I always thought Singapore's approach here was at minimum interesting and very in character from what I've read about Lee Kuan Yew. (Quoting from https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-023-00946-5)
Singapore adopts a bifurcated, two-pronged foreign labour policy in which unskilled and low-skilled workers are subject to different labour schemes compared to higher-skilled workers, who are typically better educated and in managerial positions. Under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act (EFMA) that regulates the import of foreign labour into Singapore, unskilled and low-skilled workers (hereafter known as low-wage migrant workers) are employed under the Work Permit (WP) scheme while higher-skilled workers are employed under the Employment Pass (EP) scheme. The Work Permit scheme is a temporary foreign worker programme designed to employ low-wage migrant workers to fulfil labour shortages in Singapore. As such, workers admitted under the WP scheme are subject to stricter state control and differential protections under EFMA. The higher-skilled Employment Pass holders are entitled to minimum salaries (at least $5000 per month) with employment benefits such as paid annual leave and medical insurance. In addition, Employment Pass holders are also allowed to freely change jobs, bring dependents to Singapore and integrate into the community by applying for permanent residency in Singapore.
Migrant workers, employed under the Work Permit scheme, are bound to a restrictive sponsorship system known as “kafala” that prevents them from economic and social mobility unlike their higher skilled counterparts. Work Permit holders are tied to the employer, job type and sector they were hired for and are prohibited from changing their jobs or job sectors freely. Work Permit passes have a limited validity of 2 years, and employers have the power to terminate passes without consequence at any time. Additionally, low-wage migrant workers are not entitled to minimum wages, paid annual leave, or medical benefits and basic salary is determined by their skill level (i.e. median monthly salary of SGD 800. They are also disallowed from applying for permanent residency in Singapore or bringing their dependents to Singapore. As a result, low-wage workers are stuck in a cycle of job precarity and transience as they are prevented from establishing roots in Singapore.
Furthermore, while both Work Permit and Employment Pass holders are excluded from subsidized healthcare and social welfare in Singapore as foreigners, Work Permit holders face significant financial barriers to seeking healthcare due to low wages and job precarity.
I do wonder if the optics of being so open about treating people this differently would chafe too hard with the inclination towards some nebulous notion of equality that is almost instinctual for many Americans, including the politically moderate. We already do such things to some extent, but the people who are rejected entry and die in poverty or who break their backs for poverty wages under the table are largely out-of-sight-out-of-mind for American voters. I think being so obviously confronted with the image would make public support for such a scheme inviable.
bonsaii
3mo ago
I like the concept, but from the 2 episodes I watched it seems too heavy on British-centered celebrity or popular culture for me to fully enjoy. For now University Challenge remains my personal favorite quiz show.
I don't think they would be negatively correlated, I just think there are enough unknowns that the possibility is far from negligible. My priors are that the "no free lunch" theorem applies to intelligence, so if I had to guess I would expect some degree of tradeoff, particularly at the upper ends of performance (whether in intelligence or athleticism). Hence why we never see people elite in both running and swimming events despite both being strongly, positively correlated with "general athleticism".
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