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Notes -
Maybe this is a better fit for the Friday Fun Thread but IMO it’s culture war-y enough for here.
Here’s a thought experiment based on a thread that has popped up in /r/whowouldwin:
Imagine that every single person in Liberia gained a 180 IQ overnight. Also, they were imbued with an extraordinarily strong sense of patriotism such that they never wanted to move away from Liberia for more than a few years for school or special training. Could Liberia reach a GDP of $1 trillion by 2040?
Relevant stats: Liberia has a population of 5.3 million, a GDP of $4 billion, and a GDP per capita of $750.
One trillion would be a dramatic underestimate. Being the smartest person out of the nearest million credibly puts you in millionaire-tier even before network effects. Geniuses competing with geniuses would make massive strides in every concievable theoretical field before the decade is out.
Plus, most societies have to deal with the fundamental constraint that norms have to be designed so that unusually smart people and unusually dumb people can't screw things up for everyone else, which adds a lot of frictional inefficiency to every interaction.
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I think your question breaks down to how many fast-growing gigantic multinational tech-ish companies get founded in Liberia in the next 15 years, because a 42% annualized growth rate is not going to happen for things that depend on building infrastructure or anything else with high upfront capital requirements, but it is something that can happen and has happened with tech-ish companies. I'd expect at least 3 Google-scale tech companies to come out of a nation with 5 million super-geniuses in 15 years, so I'll go with a tentative yes.
If the rest of the world wasn't already rich and networked I think the answer switches to "no".
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Liberia has a population of 5.3 million. If we assume that that’s their working age population in 2040, then they’d need a per capita GDP that has never been seen before. Likewise if we double their population. Even without addressing their unique issues that’s a tall order.
I think "5.3 million people with an IQ of 180" is also pretty fairly covered under "has never been seen before."
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Did you pick Liberia for a specific reason? They have their own history that is unique in Africa, namely having been colonized by richer blacks from America which held onto power for generations of corruption.
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Probably not much. Liberia's political situation has only recently stabilized following decades of chaos and it will take a long time before institutions are robust enough to see any kind of real development. Corruption is still a huge problem, and there's little economic development. These are long-standing problems that don't go away just because everybody suddenly becomes a genius. The incentives that encourage shitty behavior don't disappear.
How much of the corruption would remain with such a huge IQ jump?
IQ and morality/high-trust societies are.... loosely correlated? Graft is easier when nobody is smart enough to design an anti-corruption process or correctly call out falsified invoices. African Corruption is astonishing not just in its persistence but also in how stratified the whole thing is. If everyone under the tip of the pyramid is smart enough to demand more fairness, plan for the long-term, etc., then this level of corruption would surely collapse within 16 years.
A lot of corruption is by dumb people too. If you're smart, usually just being honest produces better outcomes than trying to game the system.
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No, the country collapses because everyone suddenly thinks emptying bins and cleaning toilets is beneath them.
High IQ doesn't lead to fussiness, entitlement does. It's not the founder of a company who refuses to get this hands dirty, it's his fail-son.
These newly-minted Liberian geniuses would be some of the least entitled people on Earth, being raised in abject poverty.
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And they wouldn't build robots or invite guest workers because...?
Nothing in this scenario prevents a Dubai or Singapore style arrangement.
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Do they also have a strong sense of honesty, integrity and work ethics?
It is corruption that fucks up the developing countries. I have yet to see any kind of correlation between IQ and corruptibility. The problem of Africa and LATAM is corruption, wrong ideology - some of the smartest humans of earth were communists, not lack of IQ.
Why would they steal their neightbors and country property. In such case, expect very complicated scams, Nigerian letters on another level, which would profit their country at expense of others.
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There is smart corruption and dumb corruption. Russia is also corrupt, but it's not a complete failed state like the way South Africa is heading, or Zimbabwe went. America is profoundly corrupt, and likewise, it hasn't hit the same rock bottom most African nations plagued with corruption have hit.
You can have corrupt, even nakedly corrupt governments that enrich themselves fabulously, that still understand you don't eat your seedcorn.
This is just the joke about the South Korean and Kenyan development economists. They meet at a conference, both work in government, and agree to visit each other in their home countries. The Kenyan comes to Korea, and he's amazed at how orderly and advanced the city, and his friend has a beautiful home, nice car, gorgeous wife. While they're smoking Cuban cigars after dinner he says to his host: wow you've really done well for yourself. His friend confesses; you know, just between you and me, for every $1,000 in government contracts, I stole $10. And they laugh and say, man, no one ever catches on.
The South Korean goes to visit his Kenyan friend. The airport is a mess, the road is rutted, the city is full of squalor. But then he gets to his friend's house and the place is a palace, a huge spread. And the South Korean says, Wow, you've done REALLY well for yourself. And the Kenyan says: well, you know, for every $1,000 in contracts, I stole $500.
I've heard the same joke, but during the first visit the South Korean official points at a nearby busy highway and says "for every 1000 $ spent on that highway, I took 10%", and during the second visit the African official points at a nearby untrammeled stretch of jungle and says "for every 1000 $ spent on that highway, I took 100%".
I mean, it's even more sophisticated than that.
Like, take Nancy Pelosi. Her family obviously has become fabulously wealthy off corrupt insider trading. And yet, to the best of my knowledge she's never taken money direction out of the public coffers. If anything it's been a "rising tide lifts all boats" type scenario where she knows a company is going to have their regulatory burden eased, possibly by her input, so her husband buys a fuck ton of call options. All the other investors in the company win, the people working for the company win, everyone relying on that company performing a valuable economic function wins, and of course the Pelosi's win. This is night and day from a scenario where the party that's been running South Africa just nakedly loots the funds for maintaining the power grid, and now they risk complete grid collapse after decades of neglect.
Expanding on your thought, Pelosi’s approach is also superior because the victims are far less sympathetic. The press and general public have no particular love for whatever bank or hedge fund sold those calls. Whereas the ANC’s victims are the general public.
I mean, there are downsides. It distorts capital markets, it picks winners and losers, if they do the same shit with shorts (buying tons of puts and then launching a government investigation on a company) it could be incredibly destructive. If part of it is regulatory capture, it basically grants monopoly/duopoly status to chosen companies, and then things gradually get worse.
That said, all that corruption is still better than African corruption. If smart corrupt leaders are constantly trying to figure out what is the most corruption they can get away with, while still performing their ostensible job duties, the system is still "working". If dumb corrupt leaders just go "LOL, what if I stole all of it?" because high time preference, we get the 3rd world.
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The interesting question is if you even need that if everybody has 180 IQ. I propose they would quickly notice their peer's increased intelligence, and then immediately all collectively adopt the Schelling point of "corruption ruins everything for everybody, let's just not do this".
Maybe not as a Schelling point, but at least via mechanism design? I fear there may be no level of intelligence at which everyone independently adopts pro-social individual values because the is-ought problem turned out to not be a thing, but there probably is a level of intelligence at which the creation and support of large-scale anti-corruption institutions is easy enough that corruption simply no longer pays off.
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Tiffany Henyard-style corruption will probably die down. It's just too fucking stupid.
Enron corruption on the other hand...
I suppose the "don't want to move away" stipulation will muddy the waters a lot. A lot of Third World corruption is precisely because people want to buy a lifeboat for themselves and their family in the West. Which makes it a more rational decision than American Henyardism even though it's equally brazen and destructive. But these people don't have that outlet so they'd likely be less corrupt and you can't really attribute it to intelligence.
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99% yes.
Liberia in 2040 is projected to have a population of around 7.6 million, but let's say 7.2 million due to fertility reductions from ultra-high IQ.
That would imply a GDP per capita of $139,000 necessary to reach a GDP of $1 trillion.
I predict a devaluation of USD of around 5% annually between now and 2040. So that would necessitate (in 2024 dollars) a GDP per capita of $67,000.
I think a person with an IQ of 180 would be worth at least $1 million a year per person to a company to like OpenAI or to a quant trading firm.
So just via outsourcing it would seem quite easy to achieve the desired result. And of course on a longer time frame Liberia would probably achieve a sort of singularity that would see it achieve world dominance and settle the stars.
Your calculations need to account for working age population. Of that 7.2 million figure, how many will be too old or too young?
I think the bigger issue is: Does the world know that this sudden IQ transformation has occurred in Liberia? If not, how are hedgies and AI firms going to discover all this talent? I'd imagine only a small amount of the country even has the computer and networking capabilities to begin working remotely for overseas firms.
Looks like internet access is only available to 33% of Liberia, though it's growing fast, and roughly 0% of the country has high-speed internet. This seems like an extremely easy thing to fix in the Starlink era, though.
I'd be more worried about the lack of education. If every Liberian 20 year old was also magically granted the average education of a "typical" 180-IQ 20 year old, then the ensuing economic growth might be trivial, but if they have to acquire the education from scratch (at roughly 1.8x speed, if the ancient "IQ = Intelligence Quotient" and the modern "IQ = 100+16σ" definitions still match so far from the norm?) then that's going to cut a bit deeper into a 16 year timeline; they're starting from a literacy rate around 50%.
that's BS, higher IQ can reach higher level of competence than lower IQ can never reach no matter how much education or time they are given
and your average 180 IQ can already read/write in a foreign language when other kids are only starting to write in their native one
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That's a fairly short timeframe to get the highest gdp per capita on earth. On the other hand it'd be the highest concentration of extremely high iq people.
Realistically they'd need to develop and market a major tech breakthrough like the next Ozempic or something in AI.
That kind of sudden gain in wealth is going to generate blowback regionally and internationally. It'd be difficult to pull off.
Extra smart people have an edge in trading, finance or management.
It just turns into Israel 2 and does diamond cutting and cybersecurity. Makes sense to me.
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I don't think it is that interesting a question because there's so much missing information. I'm on the record as thinking that IQ is a useful metric, but I think it stops being useful past the 150/160 mark - I'm not entirely sure what exactly it means to have an IQ of 180 or how dramatic of an impact it would have. The only individual with an extremely high IQ I'm aware of is Chris Langan, and that extremely high IQ appears to have led him to become an anti-semite and develop a very convoluted theory of everything that was so important that the 9/11 attacks had to be staged by the Bush administration to prevent the public from learning about it (according to his wikipedia article). There's a decent possibility that the human brain experiences diminishing returns from absurdly high levels of IQ that lead to problematic outcomes which we haven't actually developed solutions for.
The second problem is that while IQ is a great metric, it in no way comes close to explaining every difference in outcome between populations. There are countless heritable differences in cognition that aren't directly related to IQ - levels of neuroticism, extraversion, inclination to left/right wing politics... Would those differences be equalised among the various different competing ethnic groups in Liberia by the same magic that uplifted their IQ? It's extremely easy to make the case that the 180 IQ Liberia in the absence of any other changes would be largely equivalent to real world Liberia except with much nastier and more effective violence and ethnic strife - just look at the population breakdown by ethnic group.
I see this stated a lot with the implication that IQ no longer matters above the level of (myself / my smartest friend / the smartest person I can conceive).
But why wouldn't a person's expected accomplishments go up exponentially as IQ increases with no limit. We can certainly observe that pattern up into the top 1 or 0.1%. Why would there be a cutoff beyond that?
Terrance Tao or John von Neumann would seem to fit the bill as well and are much more accomplished.
I'll admit that the number of people with an IQ of 180 is so vanishingly small we can't make concrete statements about them, and that there is not a robust way to test either.
Von Neumann was very accomplished, but didn't he support preemptive strikes against USSR? Lower IQ people disagreed, and history has proven them right. At least, I prefer our timeline to trying out the one where he got his way. Math has a very high IQ skill cap, but in most other fields the cap is much lower.
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Let's not forget Marilyn vos Savant, whose career revolved around answering logic questions in Parade magazine.
Loved her column as a kid.
Her IQ was bullshit though. It was based on having a "mental age" of 22 at age 10, therefore an IQ of 220. This makes no sense.
An IQ of 180 is more than 5 standard deviations above the norm. Fewer than 1 in 10 million people have this. I think it's safe to say that vos Savant was not one of those people, even if she was quite intelligent.
Locating the ~750 people with that IQ should give enough sample size to answer some questions.
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My favorite example for adapting IQ to achievement is comparing raw NFL combine type stats to performance in sports. Obviously strength, speed, endurance are valuable traits in athletes. And obviously if you take two equally skilled or unskilled competitors, the stronger/faster/tougher will have an advantage. But there's a point at which the correlation breaks down, just drafting the guy with the best deadlift will not produce the most athletic team.
Intelligence is non-linear.
Usain Bolt is only like 50% faster than an average 20 year old man. But how many midwits working in concert would it take to come up with the theory of relativity?
So... what if there was a guy who ran a 0.1 second 40 yard dash?
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In this case, John von Neumann didn't just have top tier intelligence, he also had top tier education. Being smart, on its own, doesn't make you study differential calculus at 8.
This hypothetical scenario may end up having a Meiji style dynamic where they invite foreign experts to transfer skills and technology. Though with the internet being a thing, that may be less relevant.
Most effect from education goes from making smart people meet each other. Steve Jobs wouldn't have been what he became without Steve Wozniak. Copying best curriculum to a place with low IQ people would do nothing.
I just do not agree. I think extremely smart people do benefit from a classical education. They also benefit from meeting other smart people, but that is not in contention.
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Comments in this thread make me cringe. Over half of commenters write from point that people are passive receptors of their environment. Meiji Japan borrowed from societies that at that time had higher phenotypic IQ. Eight million people of 180 IQ will reinvent much of 100 IQ world technology quicky and go beyond.
Being super smart doesn't magically translate into knowing how to build turbofans or how to do nuclear reactor metalworks.
If you'd ever worked in the semiconductor industry you'd realize that being surrounded by brilliant people doesn't automatically make you competitive.
I understand the idea is that the number makes these hypothetical people almost magically smart, but intelligence still has to contend with logistics and more than half of them do not know how to read, let alone have a basic education.
In that situation you'd want to catch up as quickly as possible, which is precisely what Meiji was about. What exactly is passive about actively modernizing your country to compete on the world stage?
because you're competing with another team of brilliant people, not with midwits that were somehow sitting on a pile of factories and IP.
Logistics? Do they need to import brand new learning boards (or whatever is in fashion now) from Netherlands to get education? Half of them are illiterate because they are ~65 IQ, not because their soil is poor in education micronutrients and their government refuses to import these education micronutrients. It takes much more effort to hammer literacy into heads of 65 IQ people rather than IQ 180 people. By the way, the younger generation of Liberians has much higher literacy rate, it's shifting even without hypothetical IQ boost. 180 IQ people will build everything needed for literacy quickly, it's not AMSL machine for 3 um fab plants.
Precisely, you handwaived my objection that Meiji Japan imported knowledge from societes whose phenotypic IQ with higher (at the time) rather than 80 points below! Several millions of 180 IQ Liberians won't import knowledge -- they'll steal it faster than you notice. Better pray that conflicts of competing 180 IQ clans don't involve undermining your country or making it to go at war with another.
It reminds me Russia xenophiles who say that Russia never did anything by itself. But then, Sergei Korolev didn't say "USSR needs to wait for a western country, like USA or France to launch sattelite and man into space, and then USSR can license technology from them".
Genghis Khan wasn't literate and were none of his generals, and never sieged any fortified cities. But they found a way to defeat many enemies who had read Sun Tzu and the likes.
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The big question is would their population also gain the neurosis, psychological downsides and social limitations that typically come with being that far outside the norm?
Aren't people with higher IQ's generally more stable?
AFAIK most studies on the benefits of higher intelligence actually just show the benefits of IQ in the range of ~110-130. Past that, results vary wildly since recruitment becomes increasingly difficult, some finding consistent mostly-proportional further improvements, many show diminishing returns, some even claim negative repercussions. Not to mention that most IQ tests have strong ceiling effects, so to even test for ultra-high IQ at all often requires non-standard, mostly unverified/uncalibrated testing methods. 180 is so far beyond the ranges we usually test that it's hard to make any reasonable claims about what a whole population like that might even possibly look like.
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Their culture would become radically different (rationalist community on crack?). Some of the downsides of high IQ such as anxiety, loneliness etc would be mitigated because they would not be 'outside the norm' any more when the norm is 180. TFR would plummet but that probably isn't huge deal over 16 years.
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No, because the normal Liberian is 180 IQ.
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