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I think this is a good example of the difference between the Goddess of Cancer and the Goddess of Everything Else.
Evolution had one chance to program our values, but it is imperfect and hackish. So instead of optimizing us for "make lots of babies with your own genetic code", it optimized us for the intermediary, "have sex with an attractive member of the opposite sex." For most of human history, those two notions were connected, but then we invented birth control and contraceptives, and we switched from the rule of the Goddess of Cancer (who says "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER") to the rule of the Goddess of Everything Else.
While hanging out in rationalist and pronatalist spaces has helped me to appreciate the appeal of Bloodtopia more, I think my heart is still in Ideastan. I just can't commit to calling childless people like Sir Isaac Newton or George Washington "failures" in some ultimate sense. I think in spite of the fact that they didn't have biological offspring, they altered the future trajectory of humanity so radically that the contribution of some random breeder just can't compare.
I would rather give in to the excitement and mystery of where the Goddess of Everything Else takes us, than stick to the tried and true, but stale world of Bloodtopia.
I think thats a strawman. Plenty of real-life bloodtopians dont even mind the far more common childless priests, and the occasional childless genius is even less of a problem. We also accept that the very fastest cars have their little knacks and tempraments - thats fine, and arguably a good sign of development, as long as normal cars actually work.
This raises an interesting question- how high an IQ can still be expected to reproduce?
It's generally known that very high IQ's are strongly correlated with less reproductive success, rather than more, and that this correlation is much stronger than for the left tail. At a certain point, this probably caps the population average IQ.
At some level there is the IQ > Extreme Wealth > Surrogates or similar understandings with women (eg the Elon pathway).
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I dont think it caps. Most of that effect is few partners you can relate to, and very high IQs more often being symptoms of a problem (think dwarfs vs pygmies). Both move with the population average.
I don't think so. Very low IQs are often symptomatic of a monogenic disease or chromosomal abnormality, but there's no known single mutation or chromosomal abnormality that greatly increases intelligence.
I think it's just that people with very high IQs and developmental disorders are more noticeable than people with the same developmental disorders and low IQs because they're able to function despite the developmental disorders.
Thats not quite what I had in mind. Very tall humans tend to have heart issues. Very tall dogs (having been bred relatively quickly) also tend to have heart issues. But tall animals do not generally have heart issues. The problem is not being tall absolutely, but being unnaturally tall for your lineage. How many genes this comes from isnt important per se.
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Also the very high IQ's with social skills disappear into the crowd (or lead it).
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