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Scott is familiar with how this discourse goes down. He's knows if he doesn't say "not 100% genetic" out loud along with other I'm Not A Racist-ism's, then that will be the first item in a laundry list for angry skeptics to angry type angry sneers. There are at least a dozen other items on the list and he doesn't cover those. Some make an appearance on the SSC thread. Whether it's worthwhile to fight the losing battle-- I don't know. If you're aiming to persuade someone it's a good idea. Can't win'em all.
I'm Not A Racist And This Isn't Racist-isms are a wasted if you don't consider them necessary. P He softens and hedges when dealing with this (or any controversial) topic. I'm actually surprised he didn't put more effort into softening words. This is not his most comprehensive post. It engages with a narrow slice in the intelligence pie. At a paltry 1300 words it might as well be his literal list of laundry.
Personally, I don't think anyone should be allowed to successfully beat the allegations. Sounds downright unnatural. I'd concede that if anyone can achieve this feat it may be Scott Alexander.
What should we expect a person with 60 IQ be capable of? What should we expect a nation with an average of 60 IQ to be capable of? Are individuals with a measured IQ of 60 in our society less cognitively capable than poorer, less educated individuals measured at 60 IQ across the ocean? Why would that be?
These are practical questions worth answering. In a way that uneducated brutes can understand. Which means it is something I've had questions about. I appreciated the follow-up post and consider this reasonable enough:
Wouldn't that make him a public performer rather than an intellectual? Around topics like these, at least. His insights are quite good as long as they don't touch upon specific things.
I don't know what you mean by "beat the allegations"? Data cannot hate people so I don't even see the need to bring things like racism into the question. The type of people who get emotional and angry (because they think facts are opinions) tend to be stupid, so communicating in a way which requres processing to understand solves the issue (so that one skimming your article without thinking would find nothing controversial). I avoided Reddit bans for years with this method. I could for instance say that having a 'victim mentality' isn't healthy, and that it doesn't even benefit the victim. Also that one should get over the past, especially if those who were involved aren't around anymore (at this point, justice is impossible anyway). This implies "Get over the slave trade already" and many other things, but I never said anything bad directly. I personally only treat specifics as samples of what I've generalized. You can safely criticize like 11 different ideologies at once merely by writing "Don't blame all your problems on one group of people".
I can't say specifically what the 60 IQ range looks like, but I'd expect such people to engage in magical thinking, to have problem with conditionals, to only be able to use simple tools (e.g. would not be able to change a microwave to defrost mode). I don't think it matters where one is from, and I think one would still learn basic social skills (but be relatively naive and easy to trick).
But the answer I just came up with seems quite vague, uninteresting and low value. I don't have anything better though. It's not so much that I have an exact model which explains intelligence perfectly, it's more that claims like "IQ is at least partly genetic" are trivially true, and claims like "High IQs are caused by wealth" are trivially false. What annoys me is when people are wrong about trivial things and avoid obvious examples available to them. If Africans had as many nobel prize winners as Europe did, then it would make sense to question IQ as a metric, but most attempts I see at discrediting IQ are incredibly forced and require some mental gymnastics.
By the way, IQ is made up of different domains like processing speed, verbal IQ, spatial IQ, and so on. If we stopped fusing these together into a single number, perhaps IQ scores would make sense. I remember seeing on a graph that I scrolled past on Google Images that an a working memory of about 3 items corresponded to 60 IQ, and this would be a very low working memory. We also know that chimps do better than humans on some memory tests, despite being much dumber than humans. For simple survival, working memory may be more important than abstract reasoning, and simple communication might not require that much verbal intelligence. So intellectually disabled people might have more severe issues like low working memory, while Malawians and 'healthy' naturally-low-IQ people are dragged down by other factors like poor abstract reasoning. I think education is much less important than most people believe. I could explain why, but my reply is already rather long.
Kinda, yeah. My read is Scott's courage is limited, though I don't consider him a coward. He remains capable of surprising his audience. He values some things before speaking Truth To Power. Mine is a purely parasocial assessment. I don't know if I have an accurate read of his character from his writing and limited appearances.
It would be unnatural if the the rodeo didn't include clowns. I wasn't being very serious. I've seen this entire dynamic play out what feels like 1000 times. It's up there next to Holocaust discussions.
In terms of persuasion, then there's utility to mealy mouthed, soft arguments. They complement the courageous explorers that proudly plant their offensive pole in the snow on top of Mt. Overton. The brave can plant the pole and the soft cowards can find ways to nicely herd people towards it. Maybe Scott is an exceptional, though not exceptionally, soft coward-- not a brave explorer. He is part writer, after all.
Many people get emotional and angry when they see stuff they don't like. Some of them are stupid, sure, many of them are not. Of those, some proportion are ideologues or people with hard values that are going to be mad and troll no matter what. There's still significant number of people worth convincing. If true, that could make shibboleths, caution, and niceties worthwhile.
Scott is someone who wants truth to help solve problems. He doesn't want truth to make the world a worse place by his own estimation. He believes in the genetic role of intelligence, but doesn't want to see pogroms. This makes him cautious and, apparently, quiet. Lots of people don't want to see pogroms, and they associate these ideas with pogrom-related events. I think a normalization and nothing happens (hopefully magic pills in 50 years) is more likely when reality eventually breaks through, but it's worth considering. If it's not worth considering then lots of people still consider it. Seems to be changing!
How do you reason the Flynn effect and what it means? For intelligence in general and IQ testing. Strictly nutritional and stuff like less lead?
Yeah, but this doesn't feel like it has anything to do with understanding how the world works. I feel like you're doing something wrong if you dive into intellectual topics because you want to meet your social needs or influence the values of those around you. If he wants to remain a writer then he has no choice but to continue doing this, but what I dislike is that he's also forced to pretend that this is not what he's doing.
If he cared for truth, he'd not limit himself to those around him. At the very least, he should think things through by himself, and then return to the overton window only when communicating what he found. But if you truly think about things for longer periods of time, especially if you're intelligent, I find that your worldview will become completely incompatible with the consensus.
Yes, and this goes for me as well, so I didn't explain it well enough. 1: Those who handle truth the best are good at seeing things from a detached and abstract/systematic perspective. And I find that those who get the most irrationally angry will only react if you make your position clear. So if you show nuance, they won't know how to react, since it seems like you're arguing for both sides (which is of course because you care about understanding the issue, and not merely nitpicking data which supports a specific ideology). Those who get the most trigged by the idea that black people are inferior to whites are those who are afraid that it might be true. High intelligence makes self-deception difficult, forcing them to think in different ways and get closer to the truth that they cannot hide from themselves. And maybe then they will say "I don't like the fact that life isn't fair" which is actually true, and a real topic worth discussing.
I don't agree entirely. I think he wants to promote his own personal values, and to compromise with others values, even if less appealing values would improve society more. (Relaxing sounds more appealing than confronting what scares you, but the latter is better for you. Morality might be the same, that which appeals to us might be costly and ultimately damaging)
1: Most people below 85 IQ are useless to the system, meaning that they can't do any work which warrants paying them a livable wage. This is not something we should deceive ourselves about.
2: Altruism can create dependent populations. Death is what happens to those who do not adapt, but I agree that it's good to help people to adapt by preventing their death in most cases. What's not good is to help in such a way that the amount of unfit people increases (because it allows people to avoid their own growth and improvement). You feed starving people, they survive and have children, and now you need more food to prevent starvation, right? This problem is inherently unsolvable, we must teach men to fish, not merely give them fish. By "saving" people from growth we push our problems into the future while making them worse. Same when we bail out failing banks and companies. We take surplus from the successful and give it to the unsuccessful, but this just lowers the appeal of success, meaning that less people strive for it, and that more people demand to get what others have.
3: By forcing small incidents not to occur, one makes sure that big incidents will occur in the future. The opposite applies as well, if you expose yourself to small problems then you prepare yourself for facing bigger problems (hence training, studying, exposure therapy, venting, etc). If you prevent a couple from having a few disagreements and talking them out, you get a sudden divorce instead. If you exercise your body, then you're less likely to get hurt next time you need to lift something heavy. All conflicts help fitness/adaptation, they're the feedback you need. Prevent adaptation/feedback/conflict naturally, and you will face disaster in the future. Suppression backfires. People who suppress their anger will sooner or later take all their anger out at once. Things like school-shootings happen because of pent up pressure. The amount of adaptation required is constant, but only by chopping it into pieces can you prevent it from being fatal. One of many consequences of this dynamic is that censorship of controversial subjects is prone to backfire.
I haven't thought much about it, honestly. When I first heard about it I thought "Makes sense, nutrition is getting better" and that still seems to make sense. Education might help too (I said it didn't matter much, but I meant for people like myself who procrastinate in school and teach themselves whatever interests them). Education likely helps performance on some IQ tests, but I don't think the effects on the G factor are very big. I suppose that the Flynn effect is different for different cognitive areas. Spatial seems to have improved the most. There's a million possible reasons for increases and decreases in average IQ, including lead, iodine, immigration, video games with spatial tasks (Tetris likely influences RPM performance), processed foods, literature getting simpler over time, and so on. I suppose these are all true to an unknown extent, which implies that the correct answer to your question looks like a confusing mess, while short precise and elegant answers are likely to be wrong.
They fear what comes afterwards if their society adopts an idea like "black people are inferior." This is more often used as the strawman in the topic. With lots of hemming and hawing from the more congenial HBD people about properly identifying a problem in order to find solutions. Which is a good illustration for why someone like Scott Alexander has to hem and haw in a post such as this.
At the very least, so long as we still have manual labor then people with <85 IQ can be and are productive. They can do even more than that! That's a lot of people. That's much of the world if we accept Lynn's research. They seem to have survived alright and entered an age of abundance. Weak benefit from altruism? Sure. Dumb countries benefit from altruism? Meh. You subsidize them they subsidize the global wealthy. Smart guy invents the smart phone and I benefit. I didn't have to struggle for it.
Are we still talking about the justification for hemming and hawing in a post about intelligence or something else? We should accept our base desires (as school shooters must) stop subsidizing the weak, and initiate conflict with lessers? Euthanize all homeless, feed newborn gimps to the wolves, and stop caring for neighbors that can't even prevent themselves from getting robbed. What're we talking about here?
If we're talking of conflict more broadly, or it's a world of conflict you seek, I wouldn't be so confident intelligence is your superweapon. Intelligence has some great benefits for individuals and nations alike. Intelligent armies still lose wars, intelligent populations still get exterminated, and intelligence doesn't stop a bullet from entering the skull. Whoever can wield violence the best comes out on top in open conflict. Intelligence is a factor in that, but not necessarily a deciding one.
Conflict can provide growth for an individual. It can also be ugly, costly, destructive, nonsensical, and a great many other things. It can make things worse. Weak, dumb, and evil men have and continue to benefit from conflict. I don't believe it is a proven as a cure all. Though I'd concede the world of abundance isn't either.
If we're still talking about a cautious, iterative approach to questions of IQ, it seems to be making progress. If slowly.
Technically, "Black people are inferior" is a value judgement which means that it cannot be a fact. It can be a fact that they're less intelligent than white people on average, which puts them at an inherent disadvantage in modern socities (in which even competition between white people means that many remain lower class), and I do believe this is true. If they wish to prevent negative consequences, they should adopt a stance like "The value of human life is not decided by their intelligence" rather than "Black people are just as intelligent as whites and therefore equal in worth", for this latter way of thinking is what might bring negative consequences.
There less and less manual labor over time (in developed socities), and I think the cognitive demands of society increase over time. In the 1950s you could get by with an IQ of 80 or 85, but today I don't think you can. In the future, I expect people with an IQ of 90 to struggle as well.
I don't recognize those names to be honest. My point is that the way society operates is going to cause a lot of disasters, because we naively suppress small conflicts. To give examples of this mechanism: If you're afraid of regular dentist visits and you don't go, you will be forced to have a really bad experience in a dentist chair in the future. If you avoid people because of minor social anxiety, you will sooner or later have full-blown social anxiety. If you are overprotective of your children, they are likely to get hurt when they move away from home and experience freedom for the first time. If you create "safe spaces" for people, they are prone to stay mentally fragile, which means that an encounter with reality is likely to "trigger" them. If you suppress evidence of voter fraud and vaccine side-effects, falsely claiming that both are one-in-a-billion events, you end up with huge scandals and controversies, etc. A lot of naive attempts at improving things end up doing the opposite (Reddit moderation, the DARE program, no child left behind policies, etc). If you impliment no tolerance policies in schools, don't be surprised if one day a student snaps and kills somebody.
I'm not suggesting that we abandon those who need help, but that we create an environment in which they have both a safety net and rewards for personal growth. Rather than just throwing money at Africa, we should help them become independent of us, for instance. The best you can do for people is help them to the right degree. Too little? They die. Too much? They become reliant on your help and lose their incentives to struggle forward.
This is a good argument. One maxim which comes to mind is "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". If you reward conflict more than solutions, you don't get solutions. That said, conflicts are mostly a signal that something needs to change, and we are lucky that signals come before consequences. Slight tooth ache is an early signal, stress is a signal, a bad grade is a signal. This is where one must start looking for a solution. Suppressing signals and saying "problem solved" will result in disasters later, and you can help somebody in a disaster by turning it into a minor disaster, buying them time to align themselves with reality.
I think immigration will result in a non-negligible decrease of average IQ in every modern country. If immigration is going to be our go-to-solution for low birth rates, the consequences are going to be even worse. We won't be able to solve this problem with any amount of education, and throwing money at the problem is going to be about as effective as throwing money at Africa is currently. If you meant that we're starting to understand IQ better, I'm going to disagree with that at as well - modern politics will make it impossible to do proper research about intelligence, for the same reason that the rest of psychology is degenerating (the reason is politics). Psychology is the most important discipline in the world, but our modern understanding of human behaviour is flat out wrong, and naive idealism is replacing the consensus. Most of our modern "kindness" is out of alignment with reality and almost more harmful than beneficial.
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This is false. The smartest people are often able to construct the most elaborate rationalizations and justifications.
Both are true, I think.
Smart people can argue well for almost anything, even if it's wrong. But they also have more self-awareness. For instance, you know that you're good at rationalizing things which aren't true. When you're intelligent, it's more likely that you will think of the possibility that you're deceiving yourself, even if it's also more likely that you can find a reason to think that it's a false alarm.
I think the former factor grows faster than the latter, so that intelligence is more likely to lead to disillusionment or high levels of insight, than it is to lead to having very strong beliefs. There's plenty of people with IQs in the 130s who have very strong beliefs (mostly due to the boost in confidence one may get for being above the norm), but if you go above 145 you get people like Jung and Buddha who become so self-aware that it becomes meta-self-awareness or meta-meta self-awareness.
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I mean, I don't know how smart I actually am or am not, but Odin dammit if I don't have a head full of awesome rationalizations and justifications for my own bullshit. Reminds me of that Feynman quote about how science is all about not being fooled and how the easiest person to fool is ourselves--definitely true of me!
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