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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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In the wake of her weakness incredible historic strength among young men, Kamala has a new ad out on IG and SC, "Don't Get Popped":

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1847720298335948932

For those who don't want to view it, I'll transcribe the ad and set the scene: a speed dating scenario where women rate the man.

Trey: Hello ladies, I'm Trey. It's good to be here.

Ladies: Hey, Trey. 😃😃😃

Trey: Hey hey!

Ladies: So what do you do and how much do you make? 😉😉😉

Trey: I work in finance, making six figures.

Ladies: Oooooh. 😍😍😍 How tall are you?

Trey: 6'5".

Ladies: 🥵🥵🥵 [Fat woman asks:] Do you work out?

Trey: I like to stay active, yeah.

Ladies: 💦💦💦 Do you have a plan to vote?

Trey: Uhhh, I didn't plan on it.

Ladies: 🤮🤮🤮 [pop balloons, indicating rejection]

DON'T GET POPPED. VOTE

On the face of it, this seems entirely tone-deaf. The theory seems to be "vote Democratic, or we'll Lysistrata you" but I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to. Most would just roll their eyes, and, if you're a young man frustrated with dating, it would probably provoke outright hostility. So you might write it off as a clueless campaign hiring a couple of rich white women and gay men trying to imagine a way to make young men vote Harris and failing, just another example of the empathetic gap between who the campaign gets ideological inspiration from and the voters she needs to win.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

Interesting is that only the presenter and one or two of the women are with high fuckability score.

Fits with the "power fantasy for women" hypothesis. It's not to convince men that if they vote for Harris they'll get lots of hot women, but to convince the average woman that she can be a top woman too with the pick of the litter if she votes for Harris.

Your description should mention that both the man and a plurality of women in the video likely qualify as black. (You might not care about that, but the target audience will.)

I agree that it the spot does not work targeting men. The message is basically: to get a girlfriend, you need to (1) make 100k$ a year, (2) be tall, (3) be athletic, and (4) vote Harris. The number of men who fit 1-3, but still don't get laid and can be convinced that this is because of their lack of voting should be basically nil.

Also, I find that spot incredibly cringe. I am aware that income and hotness are influential for partner selection, but starting with 'how much do you make?' as an icebreaker question seems incredible vulgar. The way these things normally work (afaik) is that both sides have plausible deniability. There are whole brands surviving wholly on their value as an income signal. If a woman shows interest in a man wearing expensive, tasteful stuff, there is that veneer of deniability: there is always some probability that she does not care about his wealth at all, but just is interested in his charming personality or whatever. If you ask explicitly, that creates common knowledge of the transactional nature of the relationship, at which point the man might ask himself if he would not be better served by an escort. The male version of 'how much do you make?' might be 'I will pay you 500$ for a blowjob', which likewise highlights the transactional nature of the relationship. From my understanding, this is a big no-no when flirting with women who don't consider themselves sex workers.

Even for hotness, some people might feel offended if it is implied that their physical characteristics will get them the relationship. Invert the genders, and instead of height and athleticism, the suitors might ask the woman about her breast size or hotness on a scale of 1-10. The Harris campaign would be the first to decry this as demeaning the woman by reducing her to a sex object. (Aside, the lack of a screen between the man and the women makes the questions about his physique bizarre: presumably, the women can see how he looks.)

Also, there are unfortunate implications about the women who are so interested in their suitor's finances. Are these not supposed to be strong independent women, who have their own six figure jobs, and could well support a stay-at-home dad? The vibes I get from this clip are "I am looking for a hot, rich guy to earn my Mrs degree."

It makes more sense as a power fantasy targeting women ("of course I am so hot/charming that hot rich guys will want to date me, but I can be picky enough to just date Harris voters"). Still, the fact that the ad did apparently well on A/B testing is kind of scathing for the target audience.

Invert the genders, and instead of height and athleticism, the suitors might ask the woman about her breast size or hotness on a scale of 1-10.

"What's your BMI"?

The funniest thing in the world, whenever stuff like this hits, is to parse and put in plain language the assumptions that this ad makes, and by extension, the assumptions that this ad is asking you to make on its behalf.

-Assumption A: Of course black men can work in finance and make six figures.

-Assumption B: Ladies will consider you a mate if you work in finance and make six figures.

-Assumption C: Ladies will consider you a mate if you are tall.

-Assumption D: Ladies will consider you a mate if you work out.

-Assumption E: The disqualifier for a potential mate is that they don't (have a plan to) vote.

-Assumption F: The disqualifier for a potential mate is that they don't share the women's politics.

If you swallow all of this as one whole, poisonous package, the message that the Kamala campaign is sending is thus: broke, short, unhealthy and politically apathetic or unaligned males will not have sex with willing partners.

What are we to take away from this - that Kamala's campaign has a strong interest in eugenics? Or that they're re-enacting, as someone pointed out, the World War 1 white feather campaign? Do they expect black men to respond to this messaging? If this is how they're targeting black men, who is advising them? And if the world is crawling with "incels" like many of their politically aligned ilk believe it to be, what message do they expect these broke, short, and unhealthy politically unaligned men (let's be fair and include broke, short, and unhealthy politically unaligned women and they/thems) to take away from this if they want sex?

There is a further, meta-level set of assumptions that go along with this, if the ad is in fact targeting women. What is a woman going to take away from this ad, if she is already in a relationship with someone who is broke, short, or unhealthy, and doesn't share her politics? Are they counting on women who aren't already in relationships to add an additional qualifier just in case the Republican Evil is hereditary?

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend.

The tweet says it targets about 65% women.

65% is also roughly the portion of single women that identify as Democrats.

I would not be surprised if it is that dumb.

I find the "six figures" part interesting. If you take it to mean 100k, that's...not that impressive.

I'm seeing 80th percentile in the US at age 30. 127/170/300 get you to the 90/95/99th percentile. At age 27, it's 91st percentile; 121/190 get you to 95/99th percentile.

Presumably it's a lower percentile than these for men (but probably higher than that for black men). Downgrade the impressiveness again in blue areas (cities).

This raises the question: what percentile or dollar amount is impressive enough to offset what degree of attractiveness? Or more broadly, what is the marginal utility as you move through those levels?

There have already been some studies on what income is required to ‘make up for’ being a very short man. I don’t know that I believe them, necessarily, but I think they exist.

I think it’s best to model them differently. For women, wealth could make some difference at the margins but not a huge amount; eg. when Adele was fat her ex husband was a schlubby looking also-chubby bearded white guy. Fat female celebrities don’t generally have hot husbands, although exceptions presumably exist. For men, wealth can make a lot of difference, but even so, there are comparatively poor bartenders, line cooks, sound engineers, high school drama teachers and so on who are more successful with more attractive women than many super rich men.

Among the PMC (the truly rich are more heterogenous as a class) assortative mating is now so strong that it largely filters looks-based matching to an intra-class level. The ugly junior banker will marry the ugly junior banker or corporate lawyer or doctor or whatever of the opposite sex. The hot one will do the equivalent. Neither will marry particularly up or down.

high school drama teachers

Checks out!

Among the PMC (the truly rich are more heterogenous as a class) assortive mating is now so strong that it largely filters looks-based matching to an intra-class level.

According to Gregory Clark, it's always been thus. He claims that in the anglosphere, mating has been assortative on socioeconomic status at a correlation of approximately 0.8 for centuries.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

A plausible theory given the "White Guys for Harris" ads. Those also failed to address any real concerns of men and instead cast a bunch of gay men and gay-ish men to talk about womens issues.

If anything, it's women who need to change their political philosophy to improve their dating prospects.

Women are the gatekeepers of sex. But men are the gatekeepers of relationships. It's trivial for men to fake woke beliefs in order to get sex in the urban dating environment. That's why we find so many examples of progressives who act like cads in their personal lives. It turns out that men will lie to have sex.

But women who are batshit liberals are doing themselves a big disservice. They are signalling low quality partner status and will find that, though lots of men are willing to bed them, few are willing to stick around. During my own brief experience with online dating, I swiped left on anyone who had overt political statements in their profile.

Women with unnaturally colored hair, face masks, piercings, tats, and radical beliefs will eliminate many of the highest quality men from their dating pool. They will soon learn that "all men are assholes" as they are used and dumped by a bunch of flaky woke dudes.

This is such a strange take. Those women didn't want to go on a date with men like you (conservative) and you didn't go on a date with them. Sounds like their filtering is working and you just don't like that it's a filter they care about.

Nah. It's not about politics, it's about mental illness.

I'm perfectly happy dating a liberal and they are perfectly happy dating me.

But people who signal far-left political beliefs in their profile are low value mates. (Same for far-right ones probably, although I never saw that).

Maybe these chubby purple-hair women tell themselves they wouldn't date a 6'3 chad in finance, but of course they would. They just don't pull those type of guys. They are deliberately lowering their value on the dating market with their poor signalling. In the end, they will have worse partners and worse life outcomes.

I think many women are lovely enough right up until you hit a hair trigger about Trump, politics, or whatever. And the tragedy of this situation is that this obstacle seems misguidedly imposed from one side of the gender dynamic. To quote a line from a pop song I can't really remember: "You're standing in your own way".

Is this kind of filtering 'working'? I guess you could say it is on an individual level, although I think even that's questionable, as I believe a lot of women are missing out on good catches with this zero-tolerance approach. Is this a good dynamic for dating writ large? Probably not given the endless bitching about it and the metrics getting fairly sloped.

A smaller irritant in the mix is watching the fuse on this behavior run down. I know women now in their late 30s or early 40s who suddenly pine for 'traditionally masculine' types, with their younger and luckier cohorts marrying red-hat yokels that take care of them - after years of setting up razor wire around that type of guy. You wish they'd gotten the act out of their system earlier. By comparison men will swallot a lot from their partners as long you're not screaming in their face or getting nasty about what TikTok has you mad about this week. A moderate 'blue hair' could be entirely dateable to most woke-averse men (assuming decently attractive and yada yada) as long as being political isn't the front and center of their being or a lense everything is seen through.

I used to see more couples in my life argue about politics without it ending in breakup or divorce. It seemed normal to me: you bicker about the 8 PM news a bit, you silently roll your eyes at thing your partner said, then you go to bed together before the next day of life's experiences - you know, the important part. To see this done away with so trivially is sad.

That's even a term for it.

I find it particularly funny because when I was single, I saw a lot of women whose Tinder bios included (or consisted of) "swipe left if you're a Tory/if you voted Leave". You're outright instructing men on which specific beliefs they need to fake to get into your pants!

Approximately no one dates based on politics. Everyone of both sexes looks for someone attractive, and the smarter ones in addition look for someone who they can have a pleasant time with and build a life together with.

Someone who turns their dating profile into a political screed is going to have a harder time forming relationships, but that's because they're revealing themselves to be an unpleasant person, not because of mismatches in political philosophy. A man who raves about Kamala and rants about Trump all the time is going to turn off even the most hardcore Democratic woman, and that's true regardless of the sexes and political valences involved.

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

I think that this is an oversimplification.

I think most Americans would not date a KKK member, a Stalinist or a Taliban. There is a certain (subjective) Overton window. Personally, I would filter less on who a partner supports than on why a partner supports them. There is a big difference between supporting GWB despite gitmo and supporting him because of gitmo.

Some disagreements are more emotionally charged than others. I would totally date an anti-nuclear woman -- I may believe that she is mistaken about what we need to get rid of fossil fuels, but that is hardly a moral failing. (Perhaps being pro-nuclear feels less excusable from the other side, though.)

Other disagreements are the opposite: abortion is always a hot-button topic, "baby murderers" vs "handmaid's tale".

Some beliefs, political or otherwise, indicate an epistemological incompatibility. Or, phrased less politely, I basically consider some beliefs crazy. Believing in Nazism is excusable if you are a kid raised in the third Reich, but if you were raised in post-WW2 USA, it is a red flag. Likewise, if you believe that Trump, once elected, will succeed in turning the US into a Fuehrerstaat, that would be a red flag. Likewise, if you believe that Trump won the 2020 election, and the deep state conspired to steal it from him.

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

"If I get pregnant, will my partner support me in getting an abortion?" is definitely something (some) women consider in their dating prospects. Although, there's certainly some amount of filtering by living in a city/more liberal area and assuming that's sufficient.

I do have friends who are single women in more conservative areas for job reasons who have pretty much given up on dating until they move elsewhere because their possible dating pool of non-conservative men is basically just their coworkers (since any liberal not stuck there by the job moves to a bigger city).

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

A quick Google search will reveal that "couples who support different political parties" is in the 25-30% range, and I've seen as low as 5% for a straight "Republican/Democrat" couple.

Basically everyone LGBT is going to care about politics, for fairly obvious reasons. Only 5% of the population, sure, but I think a smart person could reasonably extrapolate how "someone I can have a pleasant time with" might turn on politics in both directions.

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

Leftists disqualifying potential romantic partners for not being sufficiently leftist is absolutely a thing.

yeah. funnily enough, this scenario has kinda happened to me in real life. I'm not planning to vote because (a) don't live in a swing state and (b) don't have a strong preference either way. But when I say that to single ladies they hate it. they demand that I vote. I wonder what would happen if I was like "ok, i'll go vote for trump then..." maybe they would like that better?

I got dumped a few weeks ago, and while I there where some other issues I don’t think she could see past the fact that I’m not a progressive

Just say you don't talk about politics and/or that it's none of their buisiness. It is socially acceptable to berate people for not voting, and it is socially acceptable to berate people for voting Republican, but it is not (yet) socially acceptable to berate people into telling who they voted for.

Im pretty sure that if i said that, they'd instantly guess that im voting republican (or some weird libertaruan 3rd party)

And in many cases, ‘some weird libertarian third party’ is itself bad enough

I recognize my demographics and interests make it much more visible to me, but as existence proofs go…

Try it and report back. Perhaps this is one of those "shit tests" I hear so much from the Red Pill folks about.

I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to.

Lots of liberal men would react the way the campaign wants them to.

The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.

A lot of advertising works that way. McDonald's commercials aren't designed to get vegans to eat at McDonald's. They're designed to get people who already like McDonald's to think "oh hey, I should get McDonald's for lunch today".

EDIT: I missed the part about the ad spending being targeted at women. That's utterly bizarre and I don't know what the play is there. I watched the ad itself, it says "Don't get popped." at the end. The man is the one who got popped. Men are at risk of being popped, not women. There is no possible coherent way for this ad to be targeted at women.

Maybe the message they're trying to impart to women is "no self-respecting woman would date a man who refuses to vote, no matter how physically attractive or financially viable he was. Be like the women in this ad and don't give politically disengaged fuckbois the time of day." And then if it became common knowledge that women as a group considered voting a rule-in criterion for any prospective partners, single men would adjust their behaviour accordingly.

That seems like the steelman to me, too. And from my experience this actually works, in the sense of a) directly benefitting the left parties through making some men outright change their voting and b) making coordination between members of other parties difficult, since they risk ruining their dating prospects if doing so in public. Though as @jeroboam notices, it usually does not benefit the women themselves.

The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.

Right. I note that they don't ask the man who he's going to vote for - they ask whether he's going to vote. They ask him if he "has a plan" to vote (which sounds weird to me, because you shouldn't need a plan beyond "rock up to a polling place", but maybe it's playing on ideas about voter suppression?). It's turning out the base, not persuading unsure voters.

They ask him if he "has a plan" to vote (which sounds weird to me, because you shouldn't need a plan beyond "rock up to a polling place", but maybe it's playing on ideas about voter suppression?)

It is because when you ask someone about how they plan to vote, it takes them from an abstract vague thought of voting as "I like candidate John and hope he wins" into thinking concretely of how they will commit the physical act of voting. Without that step a lot of people won't actually go vote. I've seen races decided by literally one family going to the polls instead of staying home.

Do they know the correct date? Will they have time to go before work? After? Need to request time off? Be out of town at their cousin's wedding and need to early vote or vote by mail? Where is the voting booth anyway? Can they walk or drive themselves to the polls or will they need a ride?

Imagine if you and a bunch of your boys were like "You know what? We should all go to Yellowstone." If one of you looks at the best month to visit Yellowstone, starts pushing everyone to see if they can take off work during that month, finds some hotels, plans how you will get there, makes sure everybody is saving up and puts their vacation request in, etc it will probably actually happen. Otherwise "we should all go to Yellowstone" is going to just be an idle notion rattling in skulls for decades that never happens.

t. veteran campaigner

If the ad is actually targeted at men, maybe the "has a plan to vote" verbiage is to make it sound meaningful, agentic, and even heroic. You make a plan to found a business, or win a war, or build a home. If you just say "are you going to vote," it makes it sound like all you are doing is filling in a bubble on a sheet that has approximately zero chance of changing anything.

You need a plan to vote if you're an hourly worker who needs to put in for time off in order to get to a polling place at a time when you can vote. Or wake up early. Or go immediately to get in line after you get off work.

That makes sense in the US context - I'm Australian, so here voting is always on Saturday and legally compulsory, so if you work on Saturday, it is very likely that your workplace will make arrangements for everybody to go and vote. Or failing that, early voting is relatively easy here. I understand that voting is usually more of a hassle in America?

Varies wildly depending on where you live.

But the biggest thing in my mind is just that if you're not THAT attached to the idea you just might not get to it. Sleep in so you don't get to it first thing before work, didn't ask off work so you can't go until after, uh oh I have to go to the bank/mechanic/whatever. For some portion of people it might slip through the cracks.

Keep in mind that as of last week 800,000 ballots were already cast in PA. We're watching the strategy in the 8th inning of a baseball game in which neither we as the audience nor the players or the managers know the score or what happened in the earlier innings.

Well voting always happens on weekdays in America for one. Polling places usually stay open until around 8pm, but that still might be cutting it close depending on your work schedule, and unless you're a white collar professional you might have difficulty getting time off from work to go vote. In terms of actual physical access to polling places, most people will have at least one relatively close by, but some people might have to travel longer.

Or you can just do a mail-in.

There's no set closing time, even based on state?

Here, for instance, polls always close at 6 PM, in every state. I believe if you are in the line (the website says "still in the polling place", but since the place may be outside or split between several buildings, e.g. at a school, it is usually interpreted to mean anybody who's present and wishes to vote) at 6 PM they will stay open just long enough to empty the line, but no more will be admitted. In my experience (having worked as a polling official), it is extremely rare for that to matter, and usually at 6 PM there is nobody around any more.

Thus my usual experience of voting, when I'm not working at the polls, is to stroll down the road on Saturday and usually I can be in and out in five minutes.

I believe within a state there’s one set closing time, but different states can have different closing times.

We also have the rule here that if you’re in line before the closing time, they won’t kick you out.

Depends on your state--it's all very decentralized in the US. I received an absentee ballot, and the only real difficult part was getting through the annoyance at having to vote for over a dozen different offices and two dozen different propositions.

Men are at risk of being popped, not women.

If you extend getting 'popped' to the broader concept of social exclusion then women are absolutely susceptible to this. More so they would be more sensitive to the idea too.

To simplify, the message is 'if you don't sign up to vote (for kamala) then you will be socially rejected', but its sugarcoated with 'you have the power to do this to high status men' so it doesn't cause anxiety in the message's recipients.

Edit: There's also an element of 'thinking past the sale' where there is a presumption that the group consensus is already 'its low status not to sign up to vote (for kamala)'

the message is 'if you don't sign up to vote (for kamala) then you will be socially rejected', but its sugarcoated with 'you have the power to do this to high status men' so it doesn't cause anxiety in the message's recipients.

You might be right. That could have been the explicit idea behind the ad. But if so, it's deeply distressing that a candidate (and/or their campaign team) who would come up with an ad like that has a legitimate chance at becoming President, and it's also distressing that people who would be receptive to an ad like that are a large enough percentage of the electorate that their opinion matters.

This just feels like the absolute worst kind of petty high school drama bullshit. All pretense of engaging in actual object-level politics has been dropped. Only overt status games remain.

Funnily enough I find it far more upsetting that they're shoving politics into personal romantic relationships than that they're turning political discourse into a status game.

The second part of the first question is literally "how much do you make?"

As far as the ad is concerned, personal romantic relationships and status games are literally the same thing.

My point isn't about shoving petty status games into romantic relationships (which as you point out were always there), it was about shoving politics there.

it's deeply distressing

It so is, these are the same kind of people who ask for height requirements right in their profiles or judge based on what brand of high-tech-slop your phone is. The worst kind of superficial narcisists, and the trend is for their kind to increase.

I'm surprised no one has commented on the racial angle. The target audience is specifically black women, who are being urged to pressure black men to vote (for Harris, obviously).

Harris is having trouble getting support from black men - she will obviously still get the majority of their votes, but her polling is relatively low for that demographic. A lot of black men seem to be actively turned off by her. Not being a black man, I can only speculate, but I suspect a lot of black men, even liberal ones, find the combination of resembling their wine mom auntie who tells them to pull their pants up, being a woman whose career seems to have mostly advanced by blowing the right men, and being a former prosecutor, is making her a hard sell when her campaign naturally assumed that black men would prefer a black woman to Donald Trump. (There is also the fact that her "blackness" has a bit of an asterisk.)

I remain actually shocked at the tone-deafness of the Harris campaign ads, though. Do they not have any heterosexual men on staff?

Even aside from the laughable cringe of "full-throated endorsement" from guys who "eat carburetors" and... give bear hugs, and fat black women turning down a 6-figure, 3-6s black Chad (as if), it just screams weakness. "Vote for her! No, really, vote for her! Vote for her.... please? VOTE FOR HER GODDAMIT!"

being a woman whose career seems to have mostly advanced by blowing the right men

Got any sort of source for that? I'll admit I live in a liberal bubble, but that's a new one on me.

Her climbing through the patronage of Willie Brown is well known. The rest may be hearsay, but she was certainly part of the celebrity/politician axis in California.

I'm completely flabbergasted by their advertising. It reminds me a bit of Hillary Clinton going to Utah--like, WTF? She's not going to get the votes of stereotypically masculine men, but also she doesn't need the votes of stereotypically masculine men. I get the temptation to try to claim "cross demographic victory" as a mandate to swing for the fences in her presumptive legislative agenda, I understand the culture-building angle of "let's make ideological conservatism extinct." But conservatism is already doing tons of work toward extincting itself, and trying to urge it along only strengthens the perception that partisanship is a fight for ingroup survival rather than a neighborly disagreement over the optimal tax rate.

I don't think Trump can win this, ultimately--but I've been wrong about that before, and if I'm wrong about it again, he will owe Kamala's campaign team a thank-you card.

But conservatism is already doing tons of work toward extincting itself

Huh?

Yeah aren’t American conservatives one of the only non-hyper-religious groups left with an above replacement fertility rate? (only like 2.3 if I remember right but still)

This does not matter as much as you think, because politics is not genetic.

The argument I have heard is that an effective administration requires skilled bureaucrats, i.e. university educated elites, and that the Trump administration had trouble attracting such people.

Well, taken as a realistic depiction of a speed date, it's ludicrous. Certainly my experience dating has been that you don't talk about politics at all, especially not when first impressions are on the table. Occasionally it is worth soberly reminding ourselves that most people find discussion of politics actively unpleasant, and avoid it wherever possible. There are minorities who are interested in politics, and I'm sure that the sorts of people who make and approve political ads are disproportionately drawn from those minorities, but most people don't like politics, and don't bring it up unless they feel they have to.

Aside from the realism of the scenario itself... I suppose I think there's potentially an interesting strategy here, particularly in light of the increasing gender gap on politics. Women do swing a bit more to the left on average, and men a bit more to the right. But men and women usually want to attract each other. "Come over to my side, it'll make you more attractive to the opposite sex" is a crass but perhaps effective strategy. You can see the echo of this strategy in those "don't be weird" ads, portraying right-wing men as repulsive and unattractive to women. Insofar as being attractive to women is something a lot of men value, is it a useful tactical approach? Perhaps.

(One might wonder a bit about the opposite, but I think female attractiveness tends to work differently to male, and certainly is presented or constructed differently socially, so it's not a mirror image. And in general I'd expect to see less of this just because there's less conservative media in general, and significantly less of it aimed at women. Evie is trying her best, but it's a different field, and in general I think women's attractiveness tends to be more self-focused, more you-are-the-belle-of-the-ball, whereas men's attractiveness tends to be more other-focused, look-at-all-the-people-you-can-attract. So strategies have to be different.)

I think the core issue with this ad (at least if intended to target men) is that men typically fall into one of two groups: those who don't struggle with dating (either from great success or being in a monogamous relationship) and those who do and are frustrated. Men in the former category have no real reason to want to shift their political activities for greater sexual access, and the latter might, but they really aren't gonna like a gaggle of women salivating over a tall, fit, (moderately) successful man and then rejecting him for the minor sin of not caring about politics. Going with a short, chubby cashier who suddenly starts getting all the attention would better target the category who cares, but it'd strain realism too much, I guess.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

No no no no no. This is the Order of the White Feather strategy. The target audience for the ad is young women who are already committed to Kamala. The intended outcome is not to get the target audience to vote (they already intend to vote), but to get the target audience to pressure the men in their life to vote for Kamala.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend.

This makes a lot more sense. If directed at men its hamfisted and counterproductive. If (in)directed at women though...

They can't directly attack a woman in the ad (without turning them off), but they can show a very attractive man getting his social status destroyed. The message could be 'if it could happen to HIM, what do you think would happen to YOU?', but it's sufficiently buried under the power fantasy of rejecting a high status man to not get rejected by the women consuming it.

Biggest issue is probably to make sure the ad doesn't get viewed by men, but even if they did see it, were high status 6 figure men going to vote Kamala anyway?

Edit: Some random twitter guy says there are different versions of this ad that they're just ALPHA/BETA testing.

were high status 6 figure men going to vote Kamala anyway?

I imagine probably most people in liberal professions will; I guess COVID might have hurt them a bit, but I'm pretty sure doctors are still high status?

I feel like if the Trump campaign released such an ad, there'd be 18 dozen different articles up by now about how it's completely racist.

I don't think even the Trump campaign would be so crass to have a board of men rating a woman for her weight and cup size, liking her, and then dismissing her when she said she wasn't voting Trump. It's just a really gross image. Somehow, he manages to be classier than that very low bar (or at least knows how wildly counterproductive it would be).

The Trump ad would have the board of men liking her, then she says she wasn't voting Trump, then Trump himself appears and says "But we like her anyway!", possibly making a gesture with his hands indicating her nice body or something.

In a fever dream Trump's ad she-of-the-hack-tuah would be spitting on that thang.

One thing that helps Trump is that he's lazy. He just wouldnl't bother to experiment with weird ads like that, and wouldn't hire the sort of campaign mananagers that would either.

I really enjoyed the use of emojis in that transcription.

Kind of a weird ad. Someone's first in-person questions to a prospective date including "how much money do you earn" is pretty tacky, so despite it obviously being not real the only effect of the video on me was that I judged the female characters quite negatively. Also why would you need to ask how tall someone is when they're standing right in front of you?

I don't watch TV though, so maybe this is just standard for these kinds of dating shows. And I did like popping balloons to indicate when something is a turn-off. I could get into a showwhere the women carry increasingly impractical noise-making devices they trigger when prospective suitors do something unattractive.

"In the evenings I like to unwind by painting Warhammer 40k figurines."

BRAAAAAAAAP

I really enjoyed the use of emojis in that transcription.

The emoji in triplicate really works. Singular is visually small and doesn't leave the same imprint.

"What do you do?" sounds like a very reasonable 'getting to know you question' of the sort that tends to come up early on first dates if not before, but uh, "how much money do you make?" makes her sound like a whore and talking about politics that early is just crass.

This ad is tone deaf, but Kamala's campaign has released a true torrent of tone-deaf effluence recently, see the pre-recorded video for the Al Smith dinner(was there a single person who liked it?) so I'm guessing this is a Kamala problem just generally.

More prediction markets stuff.

On /r/slatestarcodex there's actually a decent discussion of the prediction markets weirdness we've been seeing. It does turn out that there was probably a whale who bought enough Trump shares to increase the price from 50 to 60 over a number of days.

But, far from being an attempt at manipulation, this is actually a savvy trader who saw that the new Trump poll numbers had not yet been reflected in the election odds and took advantage of that. In the days since, Trump's Polymarket odds have crystalized at around 60% as traders have digested the new consensus. But if this was manipulation, it would require a constant influx of new capital to maintain the price of 60.

So what would manipulation look like?

Well, we actually saw it last night, when the price of Trump shares had a flash crash to 55 before quickly recovering to 60. This movement has all the hallmarks of manipulation.

  1. It took place during the wee hours of Sunday morning, the lowest liquidity time of the week

  2. The price immediately rebounded back to 60 as traders took advantage of the mispricing

  3. Odds for individual states did NOT shift in concert with Harris's national odds

My guess is that someone in the vein of Reid Hoffman bought the manipulation story enough to try a counter-manipulation of their own, rapidly lost a few hundred thousand dollars and then bailed.

Takeaway: Polymarket is more robust than many people gave it credit for.

Here's a genuine thought I had about a tactic that is probably illegal but might not have been tried yet:

What is somebody 'gifted' $100 worth of Trump "yes" shares to friends and family who might be on the fence (and residing in swing states), with absolutely ZERO strings attached... but the shares do not vest/aren't directly accessible until after the election (so they can't just sell them and turn right around and buy Harris). You give them no instructions, make no requests, and in fact refuse to state who you support/are voting for if pressed. So while the implication of what you're doing is clear, and they can probably figure out the incentives, you have made no statements which would implicate intentions to buy votes to bring about a particular political outcome.

The chances of getting arrested for trying this must be near 100%. And the strat is easily countered if some other party distributes an equivalent value of Harris shares. But I am genuinely curious if there is some way to structure things to make it financially profitable for an otherwise 'undecided' swing state voter to acquire shares for each candidate and trade them using solely the knowledge that their own vote will have some real chance of impacting the outcome.

Also:

Is it theoretically possible for a prediction market to generate a real life preference cascade in favor of a given candidate? It seems like it could happen as people realize the money is beginning to heavily favor one over the other, and they, too, can turn a profit if they buy in and vote for the apparently-dominant candidate.

If anyone's trying market manipulation, that would be a possible goal... but I don't think prediction markets are relevant enough to have that kind of impact... yet.

Can't wait until the 2026 elections when candidates will have financial analysts on staff to interpret market swings and respond instantly to shifts in their own chances of victory. Pleasing the market will suddenly become more important that merely polling well.

Also can't wait until the first time a candidate gets assassinated solely because someone has a HUGE bet riding on them losing an election.

I will say that a Trump win sitting at 60-66% chances FEELS right to me.

I keep saying that Kamala can't maintain popularity without the media pulling all the weight for her. She is, personally, very unimpressive and can come across as straight up insincere at best, and utterly out of her depth at worst. Bad product, good marketing. But the marketing is starting to crack, indeed some journos seem to be breaking ranks a bit (not in the tank for Trump, mind). The more she does off-script appearances the worse impression she gives off.

I genuinely think she might have had a better chance doing Biden's 2020 strat of hiding in basement most of the time.

So in short, she's got the die-hard Dem base + the anti-Trump brigade on lock, but I think she utterly lacks cross-demographic appeal AND has been boxed in by the dueling demands of demographics they DO have support from, such that any attempts to outreach sincerely to outgroups will be interpreted as defection.

I also expect the markets to narrow in a bit as we come closer to the election and people decide to close out their positions at a marginal profit rather than actually take the dice roll. If somebody bought a bunch of Trump shares at ~45-50% and can sell them for 55-60% that's a decent profit for a short period trade.

If anybody rolls into election night holding substantial Trump Win shares they bought back in late July or even August, I will commend them for having tremendous balls and/or diamond hands.

Polymarket is not legal to trade for USAians. Do we follow it for sport, or do we have "other methods" of participating?

Kalshi currently has 'legal' Election markets available to only U.S. citizens.

Scare quotes are because the case itself is still pending but the courts aren't preventing them from running the markets in the meantime.

If you want to participate in Polymarket specifically, that's just a matter of understanding a few of the technicalities of Crypto.

I saw earlier today when I logged on that IBKR is advertising "Forecast Contracts" on the election. Seems to be a new thing, might toss some cash toward it.

Use crypto, they physically can't stop you.

They can't stop you, as is the case with most laws, but they can punish you afterwards.

https://x.com/IAPolls2022

Latest Nate Silver polls are Trump 55, so it seems that polymarket picks up trends (and is noisier) somewhat faster than the model. Or that Nate Silver has slight Harris bias.

I don't think that polymarket can be manipulated (delusional yes though) - it is too niche to move voters.

What is interesting is that the media is moving slowly against her - I think that this is just a backfire of not giving at least token respect to the journalists/keyfabe. But coronations have risks. I think that Biden's Kamala endorsement was just a brilliant fuck you to obama.

Latest Nate Silver polls are Trump 55, so it seems that polymarket picks up trends (and is noisier) somewhat faster than the model. Or that Nate Silver has slight Harris bias.

55% vs 60% sounds like a pretty normal difference in estimating likelihood of low frequency events that both add up to 'this thing is more likely but not so much so that the other happening would be a shock'. I wouldn't call it evidence of major differences between models or evidence of bias.

Didn't imply anything of the sort - just that nate just made a post about polymarket overestimating Trump and then his trends moved into the same direction, just a day or two later - so lets see if it will get to 60 in next few days.

Yeah, markets are a leading indicator.

If Silver only looks at the current polls without looking at momentum, his predictions are going to be slightly late and wrong. In the era of true betting markets, there is no longer much value to Silver's data aggregation methods. Even though he has one of the best models, the market will do a better job still.

Silver is also a biased Kamala supporter who tends to tweet about positive Kamala polls more than negative ones. But I trust him enough to say that he will ignore his biases and go where the data leads.

Nate Silver's analysis is upstream of the Polymarket prices, in the sense that everyone who trades serious amounts of money on Polymarket is reading Nate Silver and either agrees with him or has a good reason for disagreeing.

Both polls of superforecasters and prediction markets are ways of aggregating a range of information including the opinions of bona fide subject matter experts (which Nate Silver is), not a substitute for subject matter expertise.

I've seen some recent podcasts where Silver is a guest and he seems to think the blue tribe still underestimate Trump. If he is a Democrat, at least he's taken his blinkers off.

Silver is tentatively on my very short "Good Pundits" list in that he seems to honestly eschew bias in his prognostications and is completely willing to tell his own side when they are being utterly stupid.

His willingness to throw down bets on his own arguments is also promising.

Silver is also a biased Kamala supporter who tends to tweet about positive Kamala polls more than negative ones. But I trust him enough to say that he will ignore his biases and go where the data leads.

To his credit, he's open about his bias.

Yes. I see him as a fundamentally honest person who is more resistant to groupthink than the standard Cathedral member. His behavior during the pandemic reinforced this belief in me.

I think that Biden's Kamala endorsement was just a brilliant fuck you to obama.

I'm not really following the happenings, what did he do, and how was it an FU to Obama?

Bident endorsed Kamala instantly. Obama delayed his endorsement almost a week. The rumor mill was that: Bident was threatened with 25th section 4 if he doesn't drop. Eventually he folded. Obama was considering her slightly less charismatic, skilled, electable, and competent than a 2x4 piece of lumber. His plan was to have a mini convention and then someone that is not fucking kamala harris - to come forward. And biden immediate endorsement threw mightily off the rails those plans, so Obama wing were stuck with a candidate that will make their lives harder.

Because someone like Mark Kelly would have wiped the floor with trump without breaking a sweat.

Would Biden really gun for a Trump victory in order to defeat his real enemy, Obama?

He wouldn't be gunning for a Trump victory, he'd be absolving himself of the blame for a Democratic defeat.

Regardless of what Obama may or may not have intended a convention to go, two of the facts that were critical to Kamala's consolidation of being nominee was (1) her head start on all other candidates with her campaign media (some starting the Sunday after the Saturday-ish media covering Biden's step down, meaning all the other main political rivals and their support staff were home for the weekend), and (2) her legal inheritance of the Biden campaign war chest. The later of these was already known and being speculated about even before Biden's resignation, and the former was clearly pre-planned at the time given the dynamics of the surge flooding the media space. Again, no matter what Obama or others might have wanted, these dynamics were already in play and smothered potential for a viable convention.

What a Biden endorsement of Kamala does is flip the script of the pre-stepdown narrative of Biden as the responsible actor with agency (if Biden loses this, he put himself before the Party) to Biden as the non-primary agent (Biden ultimately put the Party before himself). This puts the agency in the actors/leaders of the Party who led the confrontation- namely, Obama and Pelosi among others. Except Pelosi has already largely retired from active politics (and is very old), whereas Obama specifically lives in the DC area to remain engaged in party politics.

Whereas a contested political convention might have produced an absolving 'well, no one's at fault especially not me' dynamic (or, more plausibly, everyone blaming eachother, but not one specific person in general), and Kamala coronation puts the agency/responsibility for the results of that one the part of those who arranged it- which goes back to the Obama wing of the party. Note further that Obama never actually publicly opposed Kamala, so any post-defeat gripings would be significantly undercut by his agency in putting her in the position in the first place.

Bringing this back to Biden, there's basically a political binary after supporting Harris. Either Kamala wins- in which he has backed the winning horse / has a higher relative influence than he would have had he held out / Kamala's favors to him likely include the protection of his political dynastic interests- or Kamala loses. If Kamala loses, however, the fault is not his- it's either whoever failed to support her (if a key wing of the party rebels), or it's the fault of whoever put her in the first place (the Party leaders who ejected him). The Obama wing of the party suffers whatever intangible consequences there are of having backed three losing candidates (Hillary, Harris, and Biden who they themselves ousted) and bringing Trump into office twice.

It might be to the Party and/or Obama's interest that Biden have not supported Harris in a purely 'Trump minimization' perspective... but this route is also a route in which Biden could also be blamed for a failed convention (which itself could be a defeat condition), which would serve Obama's political interests but hardly Biden's. And also if the party actually wanted a Trump-minimization strategy in the first place, there were many other things they could have done over the last few years other than pave the road for MAGA's return.

Thanks for the explanation, it was a real head-scratcher to me how anyone could be upset at his endorsement, but it makes sense now. Though it's some real Game of Thrones shit, and more cunning then I'd expect from an 80 year old man.

Yeah I don’t think Biden disliked Obama that much historically but it’s easy to see why he might feel very betrayed at being essentially forced out.

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.

because each task has room for optimization that has negative tradeoffs for triathlon performance ("no free lunch").

"No Free Lunch" is cope outside of the context of a competitive environment of evolutionary adaptation. This isn't D&D character creation, you don't have a set number of points to spread around. Some people are just strictly better, and others are just strictly worse. While at some point optimizing for one thing might preclude other things, we're a long way from that frontier. The Marathon was contested for a considerable period of time before runners routinely broke the mark that the best Ironman triathletes have set today.

There's no free lunch in genetics in the sense that if there were something that was simply better for the organism in terms of survival and reproductive success, over enough iterations it would have happened already. But, in our case, we aren't really dealing with a competitive evolutionary environment, and a lot of what would have been evolutionary tradeoffs that would have made an adaptation a dead-end until the last hundred years are now trivially unimportant. Tradeoffs like 'burns 2x calories' or 'takes an extra year to mature' might be fatal in the Great Rift Valley and literally meaningless in Berkley.

That said, I share your concern that IQ might be an imperfect measurement. One of the things that frustrates me about IQ debates is that we're rarely limited to talking about actual IQ scores from an actual IQ test, instead dealing with layers of people using proxies like profession or "sounding like" a high IQ person, then correlating that back to IQ, then correlating IQ to that indicator. It's a weird kind of autocorrelation: we know Einstein must have had a massive IQ because he did a bunch of things that indicate intelligence, and because Einstein had a massive iQ we know you need a massive IQ to do things that indicate intelligence.

Since you mentioned athlecisism, IQ is a score that takes several activities - imagine running, lifting weights, foot-rope drill and maybe throwing a stone. Then average it to some score hoping you captured something like athleticism.

For IQ test the aim is to measure this underlying intellectual ability, the famous psychometric g score/factor of "general intelligence". Individual tests like matrices or vocabulary or object assembly have correlation between 0.6-0.8 with g, but neither of them is perfect correlate. In fact it is harder to say what this general IQ is supposed to be, similarly if let's say professional weightlifter is more athletic than a professional marathon runner.

IQ captures the ability to learn and recognize patterns. Nothing more and nothing less. This is, however, pretty fundamental to the construction of tools, complex societies and delayed gratification, which are necessary prerequisites for civilization.

Don't confuse the map for the territory. IQ tests are a construct that is inherently less reliable at the extremes. In order for Einstein to be Einstein, its was necessary but not sufficient he have a high IQ. All of his collogues likely had similar IQs (von Neumann is the only person I've read about where this might not apply, though he did die somewhat tragically young, which is fertile ground for mythmaking).

My guess would be that enough variation is preserved in the short term. There would be a new norm with the same standard deviation. But that's just a guess.

As an analogy, I think of IQ a bit like horsepower in a car. You can measure power a few different ways, they're all correlated but slightly different, and bigger numbers don't always translate to more actual speed on the road. A lamborghini has a lot of horsepower, but so does a digger.

Strictly speaking, IQ predicts educational capacity. It's correlated imperfectly with a bunch of other positive mental attributes, but bigger numbers don't always translate to more intelligence in the real world, and at the extremes the statistical selection effects are strong.

At the high and low ends, IQ is dysfunctional. Above a certain high threshold, more IQ has negative real-world effects, many of the "smartest" people in the world can't manage their own lives, stay employed or be understood by normies. Even our distant patron Scott looks and sounds either insane or stupid in person. Very bright guy, but a total weirdo IRL, and I'm pretty weird myself.

A society with an average IQ of 120 or 130 would have incredible human capital, a society with an average of 170 would collapse in about six minutes. To bring it back around to my analogy, most of us don't actually want a thousand-horsepower supercar to drive. Roads full of Bugattis would be a nightmare. A bit more speed than average is fine, but as you get faster, there's fewer and fewer places you can drive, and fewer and fewer uses until you get to something like a drag racer, which is fast as hell, and totally useless.

At the high and low ends, IQ is dysfunctional. Above a certain high threshold, more IQ has negative real-world effects, many of the "smartest" people in the world can't manage their own lives, stay employed or be understood by normies. Even our distant patron Scott looks and sounds either insane or stupid in person. Very bright guy, but a total weirdo IRL, and I'm pretty weird myself.

I'm a bit odd, but tradesmen tend to be so it's not obviously due to brains. Is this actually true? I'd thought that Chris Langdon and Ted Kaczynski were exceptions that test the rule- sure, very high IQ individuals are more likely to be oddballs that make strange decisions due to tail effects, but Terrence Tao and Bill Gates were more typical examples.

Let me put it this way, everyone sat in a circle in a room, and Scott moved his swivel chair out into the hallway and spun in a circle while he talked, so all you saw of him was his knees swing past the doorway every three seconds. Plus, that scintillating mind in print is entirely incomprehensible in conversation. It was interesting, but if I didn't already know from his writing that he was smart, I'd have thought he was seriously mentally ill, or perhaps autistically retarded.

Which it is my assertion that very high IQ basically is.

I am not sure I buy into this logic that embryo selection for IQ will not lead to some intelligence diversity. For some higher IQ individuals their intelligence might be more related to memory, or others will bemore related with processing speed, and then some others who are more autistic but still not full autists. I recall reading of research that some brains are more accuracy oriented and others more speed oriented.

The current default is a reduction of IQ from generation to generation. I can see real potential problems with genetic engineering but I am not convinced IQ selection in embryos in particular will be a problem.

What is your plan? Because it is easy to support the status quo that includes a lot of destroyed fences, and then paint embryo selection as the scary alternative. But are you sure what you would have us do is the best option?

The current default is a reduction of IQ from generation to generation

Proof? The flynn effect strongly suggests otherwise.

This post provides a collection of evidence for intelligence decline.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/recent-evidence-on-dysgenic-trends-february-2021/

Interesting. Though-- it looks like the big takeaway from that post (assuming it's true) is actually rather the opposite of the standard "dumber people breed more" line. Rather, it implies that the cultural value we've placed on phenotypic intelligence has increased to the point where convergence on intelligent behaviors is reducing the fitness of being genetically predisposed towards intelligence-- everyone trying to act smart makes it less efficient to actually be smart.

I say this because the other thing this paper points out as declining is a genetic predisposition towards being thin and tall, despite the fact that our culture obviously favors and provides reproductive success to people who embody those things. That would be in line with non-genetic causes of height and thinness (i.e., enough money and leisure time to be healthy and fashionable) becoming decisive over genetic causes (and therefore tradeoffs, like heart disease chances for height or digestive issues for thinness)

My position is a rather unsatisfying "there are enough unknowns that I have no idea what the best option is", but I was curious to discuss others' thoughts.

If a young Englishman scores highly on IQ tests they will likely be admitted to a three year degree program and complete it successfully. Sitting their final exams, they will be recalling material learned at the beginning of their course, three years earlier: success depends on having a retentive memory. Retentive for years. But the IQ test only took an hour or two; no chance to probe multi-year memory retention. How does that work?

One idea is that IQ tests are probing for a healthy brain and a low mutational load. It is still a little unclear why the genes that help with rapidly solving little puzzles should be the same ones that boost memory.

I could imagine that sustained selection based on IQ test will eventually break the correlation of test performance and long term memory. In a dozen generations, say 2323 or 2384, there may be a crisis in University admissions. Too many students are really sharp mentally, but they forget their course work after 6 months and end up failing.

The other, which I am more concerned with here, is the potential for "lost opportunities".

Would this outweigh the advantage of having more mid-level high-IQ people as engineers, researchers and entrepeneurs, increasing the amount of wealth flowing around in the system as a whole?

If we try, I'm sure we could construct arguments about the downsides of building roads. It uses a lot of cement, damages ecosystems, induces car fatalities, increases urban temperatures... There might be five or ten moderately bad things about building roads, more if we delve into hypotheticals. But there is one really good thing about building roads! You can travel quickly and cheaply on them! And that is more than enough to outweigh the costs and the negatives. The downsides can be addressed with related measures, skilled planning and implementation.

I suspect it is the same with IQ. Smarter children is a good thing. There is always the option of taking the genetics of elite scientists and cloning them exactly, if it's the genetics that make geniuses. If it's some combination of innate capabilities and some esoteric twisting of the brain via childhood experiences or plain luck, then the boon of having many moderately smarter people will be helpful in producing the luck and opportunities needed.

I'm imagining a hypothetical scenario where we can raise the average but reduce the variance. In such a case, it comes down to whether you think it's more important to have smarter mid-level engineers, doctors, etc. vs having more and smarter geniuses. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another, but was curious what others thought.

A reduced standard deviation in IQ already exists- women. Very few worldchanging geniuses, far fewer retards.

I leave what can be gleaned from this experiment to your interpretation.

What do you think IQ is exactly

IMO IQ is the malleability of animal pattern recognition, which allows for human intelligence dissociated from pure animal instinct (sex, aggression, status). The cognition which would otherwise be dedicated to learning what is sexually attractive and dominant can instead be allocated toward abstract, socially-mediated goals. This explains why high IQ is associated with higher rates of virginity and delayed age of first sexual experience (the instinct is less powerful; otherwise, the high intelligence would lead to earlier and easier sexual experiences). It also explains why having a high IQ doesn’t appear to be related to skill in music composition, as an element of animal instinct is essential. And it explains the popular notion that there is something socially “strange” about very smart people.

It also explains why having a high IQ doesn’t appear to be related to skill in music composition, as an element of animal instinct is essential.

Do you think that music is distinct from other forms of art in this regard (painting, literature, etc)?

I think that great artists tend to be above average in IQ, at least.

It also explains why having a high IQ doesn’t appear to be related to skill in music composition

What's your source here? I've certainly read that musical ability is positively correlated with IQ, but it seems that maybe there's something you know about music composition specifically?

What do you think IQ is exactly?

I'd put it as "Generalized ability to efficiently process increasing levels of complexity."

Now, its fair to say that efficiently processing some areas of complexity won't translate automatically to others, I think we can take autistic-savants and similar cases as evidence.

But that's really the sum total of what it seems to 'represent' about a person. If you moved them from Tic-Tac-Toe, to Connect-Four, to Checkers, to Chess, at which point would they genuinely start struggling?

Someone who works mostly with 2-dimensional concepts or in constrained workspaces probably demands lower IQ than someone who works in 3-D (or 4-D!) concepts in very open-ended environments. The former, for example could be a NASCAR driver who just has to be aware of his immediate surroundings and only has to navigate a closed circuit, and the latter would be an airline pilot or, perhaps, the technician who fixes the airplane, where there are a lot more variables at play, to say the least.

Reality can be 'infinitely' complex in theory, but someone who is comfortable with higher levels of complexity and can deduce certain patterns or cause-effect relationships is, almost certainly, going to be better at navigating the world. I read some research a while back, which I haven't been able to find again, suggesting that there's a strong negative correlation between reported IQ and the number of auto accidents someone experiences in their life.

Makes intuitive sense to me. The ability to think ahead and grasp possible consequences of an action "if I do X, then Y could possibly happen, and I might be injured or killed." and to notice when others are behaving in a way that might likewise cause an issue will help avoid negative outcomes by simply avoiding situations that could lead to such outcomes.

Now, high IQ can be hobbled by intense OCD, or high anxiety, or a lack of executive function, and I think that is mostly what will explain the divergence between IQ test results and real world success and status. Being socially inept can also be a major impediment. The slight 'paradox' is that an IQ test is a very constrained environment with minimal distractions and all the problems are 'legible' so even somebody with a crippling mental illness can probably perform well if they have the mental horsepower.

But I do think that, especially when measured across broad populations, IQ differences are the main reason some places are able to create and maintain complex civilizations with bridges that stay up, computers, and airplanes and others just revert to the simplest techs they can operate despite tons of outside assistance pouring in.

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?

I think so. The space of all possible designs for human minds is large, and contains Einstein and Jeffrey Dahmer and Hitler and Mister Rogers, so we would certainly not want to move more into the space where there are more sociopaths than 'normals,' but the space is still constrained and thus its highly unlikely we accidentally produce a few MEGAHITLERS by accident.

The risk of creating a bunch of Jeffrey Dahmers (IQ of 145, allegedly) instead of more Einsteins and Von Neumanns is pretty minimal, and probably wouldn't kill us off, and on net I think we see improvement in everybody's standard of living. And probably faster than we would have 'normally.'

If I was presented with a button that, when pushed, instantly raised every living person's IQ by 5 points (as measured on tests), but changed nothing else, I would happily push it, I think it would substantially improve things in the near term and would have few negative side effects even across the long term.

What this tech sort of promises to do is achieve that same outcome, but across a longer timescale.

Jeffery Dahmer may have been very smart, but the vast majority of serial killers are of average or below-average intelligence.

I'll add the caveat that the selection of serial killers who have been caught might not reflect the entire population of serial killers. The smarter ones might have avoided detection entirely.

But I picked Dahmer because his whole thing was he was particularly intelligent and completely sociopathic and depraved... so we do NOT want more of them running around if we start selecting for more intelligence.

It would take quite a few additional Dahmers to make up for the loss of the predominantly low-IQ people committing 15,000 homicides per year.

Or just a couple of them, but they have access to bio-engineered diseases.

But enough about Fauci.

*Peter Daszak.

I think of intelligence like I think of processing power in a computer. Now below a certain level, if you don’t have enough, it’s going to be nearly impossible to do anything useful. I think there are several types:, linguistics, mathematics, art, social. These can’t be used interchangeably— meaning I can’t use artistic intelligence to understand math or language, nor can I use mathematical intelligence to learn to write poetry. To my mind these sit atop a more general CPU that is needed for any type of thinking. And I further think that we’re dealing with multiple genes in multiple places which to my mind would complicate any sort of simple correlation to ethnicity. Until we know which genes exist in which population it’s impossible to tell for sure.

I think of intelligence like I think of processing power in a computer. Now below a certain level, if you don’t have enough, it’s going to be nearly impossible to do anything useful.

The reason I can't quite use this analogy is that even if you have a slow computer, as long as it is Turing-Complete, it CAN complete any given task you put before it, even if it takes literal centuries.

So being faster or slower to complete tasks is not quite the same as being able to handle more complex tasks. I sincerely believe there are problems that 150+ IQs can handle that are utterly beyond a 100 IQer, even if you gave the 100 specific, detailed instructions on how to complete it and gave them years to work on it without interference. MAYBE if you stuck a team of cooperative 100s who are at least capable of delegating tasks and getting along.

So there's other bottlenecks. "Working Memory" is probably the big one. I think extremely high IQ people are also defined by being able to fit a LOT more information in their working memory and thus can can bring all those mental resources to bear at once, rather than having to painstakingly write everything out and do each individual mental calculation one at a time.

So perhaps add in RAM to the equation. If you can't fit the majority of the problem in your head, at least big enough chunks of it to make progress, then you'll find yourself unable to ever solve it.

Side note, this is often how I feel most constrained when faced with complex problems. I can't actually 'visualize' the problem in my head because trying to load all the details in ends up pushing some parts out, and I can compensate by writing out bits of info, but this always slows me down substantially.

even if you have a slow computer, as long as it is Turing-Complete

Here's the thing, though. No real world computer is Turing-complete. They all have finite storage and thus fail the infinite tape requirement. For an obvious example, try running eg. Stable Diffusion on an early 90s PC - you simply can't because they don't have enough storage for the model and results, even if you allowed infinite time.

Reminds me of the assertion that a 2004-2006 research supercomputer could probably have been capable of training GPT-3.

I would be careful associating working memory with the brain's ability to actively model complex problems. The latter is a conscious process, while the former is unconscious. An 80 IQ person can, with pen and paper, rotate any shape or model any system given enough time, or calculate out a 6-move chess sequence that Magnus Carlsen could perform in seconds mentally, but he could never have the spontaneous causal associations in his mind that naturally occur to more intelligent people. The lack of this faculty, and exclusively this, is what precludes low IQ people from complex things. This is why the computer analogy is weak. And why low IQ civilizations just can't get it together. If it were only a matter of processing power, nothing would stop them from busting out the compasses and graph paper. But intelligence is really a phenomenon of the subconscious, of the brain noticing a pattern and showing this to the conscious mind. For that reason it can never be taught or compensated for.

While I agree with you, I think "busting out the compasses and graph paper" is what science is. We've reached the limits of what we can do in our minds, so now we do mathematics on paper. This allows us to calculate things that we cannot wrap our heads around (try visualizing infinite-dimensional spaces for instance)

One thing I have noticed that less intelligent people do is solving the same problem over and over again. Even culture wars are like this. "X people are discriminated against, and it's totally not their fault, so we need to give special rights to X group to prevent this, as it's only fair to escalate their power/position in society". Even as a teenager I generalized this problem to every related problem which could exist, but somehow society still sees a sense of novelty in "We are X, we are victims, give us power or you're bad and support bad things"

Edit: My point is that, even with pens and stacks of paper, stupid people cannot generalize or reach levels of abstractions which gives them the advantages of space. Space is really powerful though, even more than Time (which is probably why PSPACE and EXPSPACE are bigger than PTIME and EXPTIME respectively. Not that I actually know complexity theory)

Not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing, but consider that writing something out is not the equivalent of having it in your working memory. Although human language is very rich, if we consider writing out a problem to be the equivalent of forcing some million-parameter vector in latent space into a sentence of unicode text, then there's likely to be a huge loss of information/nuance that we can't perceive consciously. It may be that the ability to hold slightly large/more concepts in your mind is responsible for the spontaneous causal associations you describe.

Working memory is a passive process, it's not what we use to consciously model things. Not sure what we'd call the modeling area of the brain, I've heard sensorium used.

It may be that the ability to hold slightly large/more concepts in your mind is responsible for the spontaneous causal associations you describe.

It's a bit of a mystery really. All we know for sure is, working memory/modeling ability/intelligence are strongly correlated. When you and I say modeling ability we're probably thinking about shape rotation or figures and so on, but I believe each form of intelligence has its own type of modeling ability, which is accompanied by a strong working memory (at least in that field). So I suppose there's no knowing which is the 'essential' component, the two always occur simultaneously.

I'm sure you've seen the Gwern essay on embryo selection where these lines of argument are touched on (https://gwern.net/embryo-selection). The whole thing is ofc great, and on this point the TLDR is: yes absolutely selecting myopically on a single trait can go wrong (especially over long timescales and/or small populations) but given the size of our population and existing genetic variation it's not a pressing worry at all. Further it seems that presently IQ correlates are other "good things" like overall health, so the tradeoff does not even arise.

Selecting only on one trait means that almost all of the available genotype information is being ignored; at best, this is a lost opportunity, and at worst, in some cases it is harmful—in the long run (dozens of generations), selection only on one trait, particularly in a very small breeding population like often used in agriculture (albeit irrelevant to humans), will have “unintended consequences” like greater disease rates, shorter lifespans, etc (see Falconer 1960’s Introduction to Quantitative Genetics, Ch. 19 “Correlated Characters”, & Lynch & Walsh 1998’sCh. 21 “Correlations Between Characters” on genetic correlations). When breeding is done out of ignorance or with regard only to a few traits or on tiny founding populations, one may wind up with problematic breeds like some purebred dog breeds which have serious health issues due to inbreeding, small founding populations, no selection against negative mutations popping up, and variants which increase the selected trait at the expense of another trait.^28 (This is not an immediate concern for humans as we have an enormous population, only weak selection methods, low levels of historical selection, and high heritabilities & much standing variance, but it is a concern for very long-term programs or hypothetical future selection methods like iterated embryo selection.)

The footnote (no. 28) continues the argument:

Although unintended side effects due to bad genetic correlations is frequently raised as an objection to selecting on intelligence, it is not an issue, as the genetic correlations of other traits are so uniformly in desirable directions (with the practically-unimportant exception of myopia, and the dubious exception of autism spectrum disorder symptom checklist scores). In any case, we can note by their behavior that people do not genuinely believe this objection, as they are, among countless other things, not upset by having intelligent children, do not regard successes like childhood vaccination or iodization or lead remediation or improved nutrition or the Flynn Effect as humanitarian disasters, interpret reports of (hollow) gains on intelligence due to formal schooling as reasons to increase funding for formal schooling, are worried by brain-damaging diseases like Zika (thus passing the double reversal test) and would be horrified by a proposal to starve or drop babies on their heads to spare them the supposed terrible unintended side-effects of being above-average.

The footnote (no. 28) continues the argument:

I support embryo selection but I don't buy the argumentation Gwern puts forward in this footnote. People may be fine with rolling the dice naturally, but still take issue at monumental, population wide changes due to engineering.

"Yes, I'd love my kid to be selected from a better distribution, but I fear long-term effects if this policy is implemented at mass-scale because I am not a geneticist and it seems risky" is a perfectly consistent position.

The point of the argument in the footnote is to show that, once the "genetic engineering" boo lights are removed, everyone's revealed preferences favor the same outcome as the world in which we select embryos for higher intelligence, harmful comorbidities included (real or imagined). If people somehow think that rolling the dice with nature is less likely than embryo selection to unintentionally couple higher intelligence with undesirable traits, to the extent that it's preferable to accept "natural" outcomes orders of magnitude worse than their preferred outcome to mitigate the risks unique to embryo selection, they either have a dismally wrong understanding of embryo selection (which, reminder, is just rolling the dice a bunch and picking the best-looking result) or they're not reasoning consistently.

At its core, objecting to the reasoning of the geneticist with a shrug and an "I dunno man, sounds risky" isn't actually an argument about the risks (surely the geneticist has deeply considered them, and our objector is already on-record as lacking the qualifications to do so!) - it's an expression of distrust.

I suspect people's primary objection, regardless of whether they clearly understand and express it as such, has nothing to do with the long-term risk of embryo selection at a genetic level, and is instead based on the same obvious ethical and political concern for any eugenics proposal - that it will be applied unfairly by some groups to gain power over others. This includes geneticists and their employers miscalculating, misrepresenting, or lying about risks, evading liability for accidental harms or unsatisfactory outcomes, and charging enormous sums of money for extremely modest benefits; and rich parents granting their children an effortless comparative advantage over the majority of children whose parents don't (or can't) pony up to rig the game for themselves.

So far, the only one tradeoff we know for sure for IQ is 'doesn't want children'. Suppose we made genetic score for triathlon. What makes you think sports celebrities you listed wouldn't be above average in these scores? What if we don't get Einstein but get 10x more geniuses that are better than Einstein?

An interesting question is why IQ suppresses fertility rates. We know, incidentally, that high IQ's are strongly correlated with poor sexual/romantic success. Maybe it's not a coincidence that ultra-high IQ groups like Ashkenazim and Tambrams use arranged marriages(doesn't Japan widely use don't-call-it-arranged marriages?). It also seems like, in the US, groups with higher out-of-wedlock birth rates are the ones which see the most dysgenic IQ selection.

There's only one recorded case of a virgin birth in human history. Kinda hard to have kids without a partner. I suspect that within marriage fertility rates are not particularly correlated with IQ.

Poor romantic success can't be the only explanation https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/not-just-dysgenic-outcomes-but-dysgenic [intentions too]

My understanding is that, in the developed world, IQ (or at least, earnings and education as IQ proxies) are positively correlated with male fertility but negatively correlated for female fertility.

Basically, smart men earn lots of money and so can attract a wife more easily, while being able to afford to house more children.

Smart women spend their most fertile years in education and 'greedy' careers, leaving little time for babymaking.

High fertility among low IQ people was previously driven by teenage pregnancy, but that has mostly disappeared in the past couple of decades

My understanding is that the correlation of male IQ with fertility is limited to men with conservative attitudes about gender- liberal men don't get a fertility boost from higher IQs(presumably this is because men with more conservative attitudes about gender are more willing to 'marry down' on average- the surgeon will go for a cute nurse where infectious disease docs are mostly interested in ObGyns and pediatricians with the usual fertility penalty from decade long higher ed tracks), but that conversely sudden spikes in male wealth(eg male lottery winners) lead to fertility increases regardless of IQ so I think you've probably gotten the mechanism right.

Out of marriage fertility is declining, including among low-IQ people, but it's still much higher among the poor and dumb than among wealthy, educated, smart people, and differences in developed world TFR tend to be driven by out of wedlock childbearing because married couples tend have similar TFRs in western societies.

Isn't intelligence correlated with mental illness?

That seems like a big tradeoff.

The opposite. Higher IQ = better mental health.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5014225/

I mean, it makes sense right. Higher IQ leads to better life outcomes which leads to better mental health.

Perhaps you could "correct" for life outcomes and get a neutral result, but that wouldn't make a lot of sense as high IQ causes good life outcomes.

Yep, an entire class of low intelligence alcoholics & criminals aren't considered mentally ill because their affliction is socially acceptable.

Instead of manic genius, you get alcoholic loser.

Hmm. It seems this is an area of at least some some contention, with some research (e.g. a Mensa survey, which obviously is based on a self-selected sample) suggesting a higher correlation, but most research suggesting IQ is protective.

There's also some evidence suggesting a genetic correlation between autism and high intelligence.

My guess is that (to the degree that IQ is genetic) is that it's probably possible to "overselect" for it to the detriment of other good things (although IIRC we also know that e.g. autism is probably at a minimum correlated with other factors, such as older parents and maternal fever during pregnancy).

Higher IQ leads to better life outcomes which leads to better mental health.

In my personal experience I have observed that the connection between high IQ, good life outcomes, and mental health is not strictly linear. But that's anecdotal and a very small sample size.

I think Mensa selects for people whose IQ test score itself is their highest "achievement", i.e. the lowest performers at any given tier of IQ. So it's very possible that Mensa members could have on average unusually poor mental health.

They looked at phenotypes. Imagine looking at two nearly identical twins, both with genetic predisposition to schizophrenia but one was lucky to avoid it, and the other got it along with IQ drop that goes with it. This would inflate positive correlation between IQ and mental health. There should be looked something like Scott wrote about: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational

This is well put. What we don't understand as well, when it comes to different forms of intelligence, is what the trade offs are. Whereas it's very easy to see that the weight reduction that helps you cycle faster can hinder your sumo wrestling prowess.

What do you think the trade-offs are? I think you mentioned below how spending time with Cambridge math students led you to believe that high-IQ people are defective in other ways.

I have seen statistics showing that high IQ is highly correlated with many other factors of success, such as marriage stability, high incomes, mental health, physical health, and lifespan. People who have high IQs do not go senile as early.

Furthermore, it seems to me people with above-average IQs have more friends than those with below-average IQs.

But, clearly the stereotype of the Poindexter math student exists for a reason. So it may be that there is a threshold beyond which negative characteristics emerge. Or it may be that it's not so much high IQ, as it is an autistic level of fascination with math, that leads to the typical phenotype of the Cambridge math student.

In any case, there seems like a clear and obvious benefit to going from an IQ of 100 to one of 115.

The experience of the IQ 150 math student is so strange that it doesn't really generalize to the greater population. Although, even here, society will massively benefit from higher IQs even if the individual doesn't.

Neurotypical people with high IQs learn how and when to pretend to be stupider than they are very early - I can see my 4-year-old son (who has a diagnosis, but is noticeably less autistic than his brother or either parent) doing it already. So if you did meet a 160-IQ neurotypical, they would come across as being as smart as necessary under the circumstances, not as smart as they actually are.

You would identify that person because they have enjoyed improbable success in multiple different g-loaded activities, not because they are scarily bright in person - scaring the normies is, after all, stupid.

In any case, there seems like a clear and obvious benefit to going from an IQ of 100 to one of 115.

It's currently beneficial to be 115 iq rather than 100 iq but it could certainly be possible that such a big jump in iq in a single generation risks various other deleterious effects when selecting so strongly for only one thing.

And what if we expand this to include people who have a median familial iq of 85 or even lower. Should the target still be 115? How big a rate of increase is really healthy? How hard should we really select?

So this is impossible without gene editing. The reality of this technology is much different than perception. The average woman with IVF has 7 embryos to choose from. Many of those will be unviable or not ideal for other reasons. Maybe, maybe, you can select between 2 or 3 on average.

You're not getting IQ of 115 from a median family IQ of 85, not that those people do IVF anyway.

I didn't say this was currently possible, I responded to your example of going from 100->115.

Let's say the industry booms and technology advances so we can have a 100 embryos to choose from in 10-20 years, what then?

I think the embryo case below probably is going to be about the tail end of the curve because of the Silicon Valley demographics of people who'd use an embryo selection service for IQ. They are people with high IQ, who've been successful because of their IQ, and are in a culture that is a bit obsessed with IQ, so they especially care about that of their kids and may be trying to terminate the IQ130 embryo in favour of his 140 brother!

I find it highly likely that at the lower, mainstream part of the curve, IQ is indeed more simply correlated with many good things – a less alloyed good if you will.

But as for trade-offs to do with types of intelligence in general, it just seems pretty intuitive to me that if you take a bunch of archetypal impressive people, successful in different ways, you will find many whose brilliance could have been compromised by being too good at logic and not distracted enough from logic puzzles by other parts of life.

Sprint speed or vertical leap is a much better measure of general athleticism. In an endurance sports, the trained athlete always beats the untrained one. But you would never beat Usain Bolt in sprinting even if you trained your entire life and he just did normal childhood activities.

But obviously, there's a lot of training involved in IQ as well. IQ tests rely on the fact that people aren't training for them, and quickly become tainted when people do. I've seen data showing that, among IQ test subskills, the one which is most correlated with g is actually vocabulary. This is, of course, easily trainable. But training speed varies by intelligence. And, of course, smart people will develop large vocabularies in their day-to-day life. Other skills, such as digit span, may feel less trainable, but there are tricks you can learn in only a few hours to improve your ability considerably.

In any case, to answer your question, IQ is g in so much as we are able to measure it. And what is g? It is the general factor of intelligence determined by analyzing correlations between different skills. There are clusters of skills which are highly correlated and relate to things that we might consider mental abilities. But there are other skills (like running fast) which are uncorrelated and do not pertain to general intelligence. So, mathematically, a single factor g is determined by its correlation to other skills which we know to be g-loaded. A person with high g will likely have a good digit span, but we won't be able to assume anything about their running speed. (I'm a little out of my depth here on the mathematical rigor, so perhaps someone can explain this better.)

In any case, I think IQ tests measure g well enough up to at least 2 standard deviations above the norm (assuming no intensive preparation).

How would you make an IQ test better to measure g more appropriately?

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.

Sure, there are aspects, but 1. what makes you think they would be negatively correlated with IQ 2. we can't measure them for now or it is too time consuming

Right now, most genetic studies on intelligence do not even use IQ but use EA (educational attainment) as a proxy for IQ. Obscurantists laugh that genes explain small fraction of EA, but what do you want if these studies do not use full genome sequences and mediocre proxy of IQ?

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".

There is no reason to believe the "no free lunch" theorem holds and plenty of reasons to believe it doesn't. There are lots of genes with purely deleterious effects (those which are fatal to embroys, for instance. Or cystic fibrosis).

Even if the tails come apart -- e.g. you cannot simultaneously MAXIMIZE running and swimming ability -- does not mean that there's no genetic free lunch. Starting from a genotype that wasn't near human capacity in either, you could increase both.

If I were to refine my thoughts, I would say I believe not in an absolute, universal no free lunch, but rather a weaker, "not much free lunch beyond a particular threshold". As you put it, where the tails might tend to come apart.

My concern lies there, at least to the extent that human progress depends on the abilities of the individuals at those tails.

Wouldn't trade-offs being everywhere in evolutionary biology count? I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, if intelligence were a 'free lunch' wouldn't we expect to see far less variation in intelligence in humans? Natural selection having already optimised it?

The most significant drawback for IQ is 'doesn't want to have children' and longer reproduction cycles. Also, a fraction of variation in intelligence is non-linear (heterozygosity) which simple selection cannot maximize and this is why agriculture uses f1 seeds, albeit aiming other traits.

There's lots of traits that haven't reached fixation, but this doesn't mean there's no free lunch. Evolution is slow and the environment changes much more quickly; we are not at equilibrium. The "no free lunch" theorem is equivalent to "all organisms are equally fit", which is clearly false.

Natural selection was still in the process of optimizing our genes when they hit the point where their phenotypes could invent and spread much faster-optimizing memes and then (in an instant, geologically) start wondering whether faster optimization was possible for genes too. Even brain size growth, perhaps the cruelest obvious tradeoff, doesn't show any obvious signs of having leveled off.

Okay. I wouldn't worry too much about these things, since in any embryo selection other factors will outweigh IQ. In IVF, embryos are already screened for chromosomal defects. They are also graded based on a cell development and uniformity.

If (lucky you!) you had multiple embryos with no defects and high grades, then you might do additional screening which is already available from Orchid. This might tell you if your child had a high risk of chronic disease or mental illness. If you still had multiple candidate embryos after all that, you might choose one based on IQ. But consider the uncertainty of this test, and also how siblings already exhibit a high degree of similarity with IQ. The difference in expected IQ might be 1 or 2 points with huge error bars.

So I wouldn't worry that we're going to be breeding people like pugs with huge defects caused by over selecting for obscure characteristics.

The biggest risk to our genetic health is that people are having children later in life and intelligent people have too few children.

But consider the uncertainty of this test, and also how siblings already exhibit a high degree of similarity with IQ. The difference in expected IQ might be 1 or 2 points with huge error bars.

Where's you getting this from? Per Jensen, average difference between sibs is 12-13 IQ points. If your PGS captures r^2=25% variance, then expected difference is 12.5*sqrt(0.25) IQ points. (That is about 10-20% difference in income when adult). That's for two embryos only. Steve Hsu gave more data - how how far you go with more embryos - but i can't remember where it was

Nobody knows how much of the variance is captured. I assume a low amount as this is unproven technology.

I'll grant that I assumed the average difference between sibling was less than 12-13 points, so if that's true I'll admit the difference in IQ can be more than 1 or 2 points.

(Caveat: even though IQ is mostly genetic, it's still partially environmental. So if the mean difference is 12-13 points, the mean genetic difference is less.)

Nevertheless, until we radically change how IVF works we won't be selecting from dozens of embryos. I still rate this intervention as incredibly minor without further advancements.

Sasha Gusev lists IQ PGS as explaining 41% variance at population level and 14% between sibs, since he tries to give as much deflated numbers as possible without lying, true must be higher.

the mean genetic difference is less.

sibs share environment.

ROI of improvement in possible child income by IVF PGD expenses is high

Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.

He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.

I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?

where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt

Hillary? Bill? Pelosi? Cheney? Obama's IRS investigated conservatives and smuggled guns and spied and I'm still hearing about how he was so pristine that he had to suffer attacks about a tan suit.

Trump already said that he doesn't see himself running again, and he seemed fairly emphatic. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/23/nx-s1-5123345/trump-wont-run-again-2028-election

Of course he could change his mind, but I haven't felt during this election that he has been as intensively engaged with the process, as he was the last two times. I think he is tired of running for President. And he almost died in Butler.

From what I recall of American history, no major candidate for President has ever gone through the election process more than three times, except for FDR. And FDR's smallest margin of victory was 7.5%, so he had it relatively "easy" compared to Trump. (FDR did also run for Vice President in 1920, and lost in a landslide.)

From what I recall of American history, no major candidate for President has ever gone through the election process more than three times, except for FDR

Henry Clay. He never quite grabbed the brass ring, but he was a major candidate for much of the first half of the 19th century.

1844 is the one that has to have hurt the most. So close, after so long, but not able to pull it out, once again.

Good one, I had forgotten about Clay!

I think that as an "outsider" candidate (yes he was president, but he's still very much outside normal political machinery), Trump benefited a lot from recent anti-incumbent trends. Covid, inflation, war, and general unhappiness has led to a lot of countries voting against their incumbents, which goes against normal trends where incumbents normally have an advantage. I doubt that will still be true in 2028, and even if it does the Republicans can probably find someone else by then who can harness it better than the guy who's been doing the same political schtick for 10+ years.

According to the SSA Actuarial Life Table, a seventy-eight-year-old American male has a twenty-five percent chance of dying in the next four years. However, the fact that Donald Trump has no chronic health conditions means his actual chance of dying may be lower than that.

Trump is an obese, elderly man - but that is confounded by the best healthcare money can buy. He's a teetotaler: he doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he doesn't use any hard drugs, as far as it is publicly known. He won't live to be 100 like Carter but he's got good odds of living another four years. He seems like the kind of man to be vigorous and active all his life, but one bad stroke or heart attack and he withers and dies in six months. Being politically active and campaigning is stemming the onslaught of dementia: retirement will kill him.

No Chronic health conditions and access to the best care available.

Jimmy Carter made it to 100 (for some values of 'made it') and I'd not be surprised if Trump is kicking at 90.

I upped by assessment of his health when I saw that recent video of him playing a round of golf.

Wow. He seems more aged/old than he comes across elsewhere but also somehow sharper and in better physical condition than I expected. A 50 minute Trump Biden golf trip video (alluding to their golf banter) would have actually been very cool and hunanzing for everyone I think.

Biden is not capable of playing golf unfortunately.

Whatever you think about their respective congnitive decline, Biden is physically frail in his old age in a way Trump is not.

I think they'd be pretty low. 82 is old, he'd be president til 86. After Biden that will be an impossible sell, Trump makes decisions emotionally but I think even he would see the futility in running in 2028. He also does listen to some of his closest advisors, family etc. and they'd certainly advise against it. I'd give it maybe 10% tops.

That said I'd give a return to pre-Trump election dynamics even lower odds than that. You'll have someone like Vivek or Vance running next. The neocons were jettisoned and joined the dems, Republicans are solidly the populist party for now and I don't see any changes in the political trends that caused the political realignment. If anything there will be long term effects of the recent mass migration that will fuel populism and racial spoils politics for decades to come.

Neocons jettisoned... Vance

Using a strict definition of neoconservative, Vance isn't. But he's exactly the kind of person who would have been a neocon during their era. It's why I actually kind of like him on a personal level, even though hypothetically I'd still vote in walz over him for president. Don't confuse paternalism for populism.

Vivek or Vance

That GOP needs somebody who can unite the politically incorrect technocrats, the religious interests, and the populists. Vance gets the first two, Vivek gets only the first. Abbott probably gets all three, Desantis or Cruz could probably position himself there as well. Kari Lake hits the last only; Hawley gets the religious interests and the populists, but he needs to reposition himself to get the technocrats.

Words cannot overstate how much a significant chunk of the GOP base gets the ick over Ted Cruz. There's a reason he's running behind Trump and in a dogfight for re-election in Texas.

That GOP needs somebody who can unite the politically incorrect technocrats, the religious interests, and the populists.

Towards the end of Francis Ford Copella's Megalopolis there there is an interesting moment where the lynching of a cross-dressing Milo Yiannopoulos/David Fuentes analog by a bunch of very "Trump-coded" construction workers who are sick of his grift is juxtaposed with an elderly banker shooting his trophy wife when he realizes that she had been unfaithful and was only using him for his money.

I feel like there is discussion to be had about to what degree technocracy of any stripe (politically correct or otherwise) has a place in a populist party/system. And make no mistake, the GOP is a populist party and has been for close to a decade now.

David Fuentes

Who?

Did you mean Nick?

Yes, i had a wire crossed.

I don't understand. You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes (I assume that's who you mean, I can't find any relevant David Fuentes) to be politically incorrect technocrats?

You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes to be politically incorrect technocrats?

Of a sort, yes.

Or more pointedly i don't think they nor the people people they apeal to are looking to vote Republican as much as they are looking to vote against mainstream Democrats.

I disagree with this characterization. Nick Fuentes has always run a vibes based group, his main victory was telling Ben Shapiro he wasn't conservative enough. He's also been calling himself a Christian Nationalist for years. Milo used to be a politically incorrect technocrat back when Allum Bokhari was ghostwriting for him but after getting cancelled by the mainstream conservatives and joining Fuentes (and then leaving Fuentes) he's publicly renounced his gayness and can be seen walking around with a breviary.

Despite their faith being obviously fake and ignorant I would still consider them part of the religious conservatives, although distinct from the main religious conservatives on account of being younger, antisemitic instead of philosemitic and almost completely irrelevant.

A feel like you're splitting hairs and the distinctions you are trying to draw are largely irrelevant.

Be that as it may, Elon is clearly a technocrat and clearly in the GOP coalition.

Abbott

Abbott is a cripple and will never seriously be considered for a presidential ticket for that reason alone.

He’s also managed to position himself as a serious winner, and weak horse strong horse.

It's been known to happen.

Indeed but there was a massive effort to hide and obscure it that would never happen today.

There is no going back to pre-Trump, any more than there's going back to pre-FDR. The milk is spilled, the eggs are broken, the die is cast. Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.

If you care about corruption, Nancy Pelosi's career of insider trading is right there. What you want has nothing to do with corruption, or you'd mention the net worth of politicians on a congressional salary. You'd mention book deals that are explicitly excluded from bribery and ethics policies. What you want is something else.

I think what you want is to return to the migration consensus, because that's what I think is the only true difference between politicians and parties these days. You know this is true because of what happened in France, where, when push comes to shove, there's the remigration party and there's everybody else. This explains the Never-Trumpers and the likes of the Cheneys and Mitt Romney. This explains the hysteria over Trump, and the uniparty. Maybe I'm wrong, but I this isn't about corruption, and Trump is not particularly corrupt when compared to other politicians.

Nancy Pelosi's stock market gains are not anything crazy. She just gambled on the tech market going up, and it did. The average congressperson's portfolio doesn't particularly outperform the market.

She gambled on the tech market going up, and also supported a lot of pro-tech-company legislation. I don't think pelosi is special, but that's definitely a conflict of interest. Politicians should be forced to put their assets in a trust like carter did, or better yet liquidate most of wha they own and dump all their money into an index fund.

Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.

But who else can? J.D. Vance? Seems kinda unlikely. Desantis? Tried once, failed... maybe he could succeed without Trump as opposition, but it seems doubtful. What the Democrats hope is not that the GOP goes back to pre-Trump, but that their base basically dries up and blows away, becoming an unaffiliated and impotently dissatisfied group who can be ignored electorally. The GOP keeps the neocon remnants that haven't gone over to the Democrats, plus a few paleocons and business republicans who aren't neocons, and as a result is so small that it never is able to mount a serious challenge again.

I mean it’s not necessarily going to be a Return To PreTrump. Somebody will take the crown simply because the sentiment precedes Trump and will be around without him. The MAGA crowd has now tasted real power, if you think they’re going to allow this moment to fade without any significant victories, you’re mistaken. And with that power available, someone (probably someone anointed by Trump himself) will take the cause and run with it.

I guess the question is how many MAGA presidents would have to lose in a row before they gave up?

But who else can?

Vance, DeSantis, Abbott, and Scott are the obvious candidates that spring to mind, and I wouldn't rule out Kushner or Don Jr. either. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans also have a reasonably deep bench of young-ish state level officials of which i expect at least a couple to ready for promotion to the national stage within the next 4 years.

Recall that no one outside of Florida had even heard of DeSantis prior to 2016. (Sure he'd been a state rep. since 2012 but how many people know who thier own state rep. is much less who anyone else's is?)

Scott

Which Scott?

Alexander, of course. By 2028, his time in California will have tipped him over the edge.

He would never go into politics, lol. I'd eat my hat!

You can have your own views on the Republican bench, and I'll say as a Democrat, in theory, the GOP has plenty of possible statewide elected officials.

But just in the swing states, the Democrat's will have Rueben Gallego, Roy Cooper, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Stein and that's not getting into somebody like Wes Moore in Maryland. Now, I'm sure you likely don't like anybody I Just listed but those people are all statewide elected officials who have won or in the case of Gallego, will have won solidly in swing states.

Obama was a first term senator but he had unique magic. I’m not sure that Gallego is the same way. Cooper is a red state democrat who for that reason doesn’t have a progressive record to run on; this probably makes him a better national candidate, but seems likely to cause problems in a democrat primary. Shapiro and Whitmer are actual possibilities, although Whitmer is uniquely polarizing and Shapiro is likely to cause some issues with the Muslim vote.

I maintain that the top three Republican candidates by default going into 2028 are Abbott, Desantis, and Hawley. It’s possible Vance makes it onto the list, but it’d require a pretty good four years for him. I’d point to Cruz and Youngkin to round out my top five instead.

If Trump wins and there are a decent four years then it would seem that Vance is likely a shoe in for the nominee. He would be endorsed by a popular two term Republican president. I could see him making RDS the VP.

Out of your list, I think only Shapiro and Moore are actual national possibilities. The rest are some variation of Blue Scott Walkers or nobodies whose current media attention is pretty much an in-kind campaign contribution.

Shapiro makes sense but makes Michigan perhaps easily red.

The problem for the Republicans is what does the post-Trump era look like.

I love J.D. Vance. I think he's the smartest politician we've seen for a long time and he is clued in to the real problems we face in a way that the dinosaurs in both parties are not. He is probably one of the few politicians who has read Scott.

But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.

Now that the Republicans have gone populist, they will need populism to win. It feels overly dramatic, but I am seriously worried that unless Trump wins we will have uniparty rule for a long time.

The GOP’s 2028 nominee won’t be any Republican that people are talking about today. It won’t be a white man. Given the inexorable demographic trends, it will be an Hispanic populist outsider. Think Nick Fuentes but with greater respectability, and who has ties to the military. America will want a military leader to deal with challenges posed by China or Iran. Someone Trumpian and with a bio that could fill out a webpage like this.

Hispanics don’t particularly want a Hispanic candidate, they want a strong white male leader who gets what he wants and has a sufficient number of Hispanics in his inner circle to prove he’s going to bear their interests in mind.

But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.

I feel like this is something the Pumpkin-Spice class tells itself to justify not even bothering to try. Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, all being clear counter-examples.

Maybe I'm over updating. I'm a huge DeSantis fan who legit thought that he would win the Republican nomination. He is massively popular in Florida. But he couldn't even get off the starting block.

So here's my updated theory. In the current climate, 95% of the media is enemy territory. You need some sort of guerilla strategy to get airtime. Simply having a great track record and great ideas isn't enough. Look what the media did to Vance. If he gets coverage at all in the media, it's heavily negative. Meanwhile, a midwit like Walz gets tons of positive coverage despite having a terrible record and being a phony to boot. So Republicans need to hack the media to win, which is what Trump did in 2016.

The idea that a conventional candidate like Romney or Bush Sr. could thrive in 2024 just seems anachronistic. The elites wholesale abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats starting around 2010. Without their support, you need something special.

I don't know. I hope I'm wrong.

As i touched upon downthread, I think DeSantis' problem was that he was running as the "Trump-Lite" candidate against Trump himself, and that there was no particular reason for anyone already inclined to vote for Trump (or an otherwise Trump-ish candidate) to pick him over the genuine article.

I wonder how much Twitter changes this. It really does feel like Musk’s takeover of the platform has had major benefits for non-leftist media and organisation, and perhaps suggests strategies for the right going forward — most crudely, getting RW billionaires to buy space in the public forum.

He's 78. He'll be 82 in 2028. He's already showing signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. I wouldn't put it past him to still think he can make a run (I don't think he's capable of admitting he was beaten), but I can't see it being a realistic possibility.

If Trump doesn't win he will go to jail (80% certainty). I think this might constrain his ability to run.

But I think he might run anyway. Contra the people who say he is senile (a sure sign of TDS by the way) he is still very energetic and funny as hell. Last night's speech at the Al Smith dinner was a banger. The guy had a crowd of New York democrats roaring in laughter.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XI0MUoW28VE

I could write some of the jokes out but they wouldn't do it justice. It requires a feel for the crowd and comedic timing that only a really talented performer can deliver.

He was fine. If you disengage from your partisan inclinations and watch Obama, Bill Clinton, even Bush I and II speeches they’re all often very funny and have good jokes. That’s what happens when you hire professionals to write these things for you. Trump’s delivery is fine. He does the job. He’s not embarrassing or bad. He’s also not great or anything.

I’ll be honest, I found his speech at that dinner very grating. Yes, his speechwriters supplied him with a couple of mildly funny lines. The lead-up to those lines was 15-20 minutes of rambling, political self-promotion (I’m aware that politicians routinely attend these functions as part of campaigning, but the talented ones are able to be far more subtle about it than Trump was) and mean-spirited, unfunny jabs at Kamala Harris, Bill DeBlasio, and Chuck Schumer. Now, look, I hate all three of those people. I’ve said far meaner things about all three of them than what Trump said. However, that’s totally against the spirit of an event like this.

I’m not sure that Trump really grasps the purpose of a “roast”. It’s supposed to be compliments disguised as insults. Celebration disguised as denunciation. Love disguised as hate. And the disguise is supposed to be thin enough that anyone with a modicum of subtlety and tact can easily discern what’s really going on. Whereas Trump genuinely loathes the people he’s talking about (and to) so there is no warmth.

And perhaps that’s inevitable, when you invite powerful and controversial individuals (like Chuck Schumer, or Bill DeBlasio, or Donald Trump) to such an event. Maybe the “roast” style is just fundamentally unsuited to accommodate differences of opinion and interests this divergent. Certainly I’m not gonna weep for Chuck Schumer’s hurt feelings, or Kamala Harris’ tarnished dignity. As someone with a lot of genuine love for roasts as a comedic/social art form (and someone who has participated in a few of them myself) the whole thing came of as very unseemly and inappropriate to me.

Oh man I read this the exact opposite of you.

I thought Trump was extremely, savant level charming. It honestly made me sad that most of our politicians are so terrible.

Him pointing out that he wrote Schumer his first check, or getting in the jabs and stuff against Eric Adams (even if they were all pre written, which I doubt since it sounded very much like trumps “voice”) made it feel like there is hope that we can all actually get along.

Maybe this is just crack to me since I’m an upper-class-adjacent (friends and I are now scheming to buy a table at this event) Catholic, straight, cisgendered white male with a wife and children.

I loved this event last night. I am legitimately in afterglow this morning from it text back and forth with the aforementioned friends.

Yeah, he's a bit of dick.

One interesting thing about this situation is that, supposedly, Trump decided to run for President when he himself was the victim of a mean-spirited roast by Obama at the Press Correspondent's Dinner in 2011. This whole thing could have been avoided if Obama had just resisted the urge. But it was too tempting.

Like Trump, Obama has great comedic timing. I laughed back then at Trump's expense much like I laughed at Schumer's this time. Being actually funny (a rare trait in politicians) excuses a lot in my book.

I totally forget my chain of evidence now, but I remember once seeing compelling proof that this isn't really true and is just a fun myth. Maybe it's because Trump ran for president several times before, maybe it was some leak from some insider who said it didn't make a difference. I guess it basically doesn't matter because the story that Trump ran to get back at Obama is so good that everyone in the future will believe it.

a rare trait in politicians

It's pretty common in Presidents for the obvious reason that you have to be top 1% in several aspects of politics to get the office. The only modern President I can think of (say, post 1980) who doesn't have a reputation for being personally funny and charming was HW (and, maybe, Biden, although he supposedly had his charms before decline set in).

The Zapruer Film of the 21st century. Obama had just given the order to kill Bin Laden. Seal Team Six was making final preparations as he spoke. The newly-released long-form birth certificate listed the time as 7:24PM, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

Contra the people who say he is senile (a sure sign of TDS by the way)

I don't think he's senile. I think he's showing signs of decline. Clearly not as bad as Biden, but come on. It's not TDS to recognize the man is old and shows it.

TSD has always cut both ways. People literally think Trump was sent by god to stop pedophiles and prevent the obvious communist takeover of America or something. Of course he has all the normal age related cognitive decline for a 78 year old. Honestly, I think he's beating the median.

I thought the same as you but today I heard a recording of him talking in 2014. I think his vocal pattern is just like that, regardless of cognitive decline.

All I can see is what I see. When I watch events like the Al Smith dinner I see a person far more present and capable than Harris (who appears absolutely haggard to me in her rare unscripted appearances).

Let’s not forget that age 60 is not exactly a spring chicken either.

I do agree that the odds of Trump falling off a cliff in the next 4 years are non-zero. You can't cheat father time. But, no, it hasn't happened yet.

I've seen Trump look sharp and alert, and I've seen him ramble and spew word salad. Maybe, like Biden, he has good days and bad days.

Harris, after watching her Fox interview, I think really is just dumb as a post. And yes, it's ridiculous that she's the "young" candidate.

But I remain of the opinion that Trump at 82 will not be in any shape to run for president, let alone to perform.

It truly is amazing how relatively dumb the two dem candidates are. I’d peg both of them as having around 100-110 IQ points.

Are you suggesting Trump is unique in his shamelessness?

Placeholder reply: I have thoughts on this, but I don't want to divert the evolution of the discussion yet.

Maybe I'm not evolving the discussion much but I think he is unique or at least extraordinarily unusual in his shamelessness.


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