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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   35131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?

I mean, this is literally just "wouldn't the world be a better place if the entire population had much higher verbal intelligence?" Which, yes, of course it would be great (and the same goes for quantitative reasoning, too), but schools are completely useless for this.

At best, they teach elementary skills like reading and writing and sort the people who were born with higher verbal intelligence from the people who were born with lower verbal intelligence by giving them well-designed tests and handing them the appropriate credentials.

Increasingly, they fail to even do this; teachers embrace stupid fads like whole language instead of using proven methods like phonics and run into the usual political problems with honestly assessing students' abilities. So you end up with a situation where 90% of adults graduate high school but only 80% of adults can read, making the high school diploma a useless signal.

MOAR EDUCASHUN is not the answer. There is no answer. IQ is genetic.

There is no answer. IQ is genetic.

This implies some answers.

No, because at a certain point you wind up turning everyone into us ashkenazi and generating crippling neuroticism along with the increased IQ.

I don't think that intelligence is correlated with mental illness in white people. Jews are just neurotic.

Ashkenazi Jews - the stereotypically neurotic ones - are also white. Especially so in the Larry David/Woody Allen-esque liberal NYC progressive-assimilated jew type. Those sorts of jews overwhelmingly are in or the product of mixed marriages.

Intelligence is totally correlated with mental illness in white people- why do you think 95 IQ rednecks just do things while elite human capital, uh, don't.

Lots of Ashkenazi lack that particular trait (Richard Feynman and Larry Ellison come immediately to mind). It is probably separable with ordinary breeding (hello alien overlords), let alone genetic engineering.

Now I'm imagining a scenario where you first breed Ashkenazi wordcels with East Asian shape rotators to create the perfect mind, then mate the hybrids to White jocks in order to add the perfect body. The result would be an elite breed of super-genius athletes we should call Spartans.

I mean, all of this is percentages and magnitudes across large populations, so of course there are going to be outliers of all kinds.

Okay, fine; there is no answer that involves making the current population smarter. If you want to help future generations, you can do eugenics or genetic engineering. And if you don't want to make life worse for your current population you can avoid importing low-IQ foreigners and giving them voting power.

(If this was a hundred years ago I would also mention iodine deficiency and lead poisoning, but we already fixed those.)

Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible.

Okay, fine; there is no answer that involves making the current population smarter.

I still think that that is a bit premature. It is far from certain that we will not find a way to increase g post-birth.

(Whenever I read a story with the plot 'character tries to overcome natural limitation, first attempt fails or has very bad effect, no further attempt is shown' (e. g. Flowers for Algernon, Hawthorne's Dr. Heidegger's Experiment), my interpretation isn't 'one should resign oneself to what Nature wants us to suffer' so much as 'they should have tried again, and kept trying until they or someone else figured out how to make it work.' (cf. Edison, "I didn't fail, I discovered 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb!")

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