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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31630 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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People with Downs' Syndrome aren't protected from attempted malice by virtue of their stupidity - they're just too incompetent to do any damage, and attempted aggression or harmful activity is promptly suppressed by caretakers (who should be doing better things). Maybe your aunt is a not-fraud-committing executive at an insurance company, and your uncle is henry. Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.

We have structured society such that a downs person would have trouble knocking over the light and burning down the barn.

You are correct that with many of the most stupid we are comfortable confining them to prevent self harm or massive harm to the uninvolved.

A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.

I can only think people believe this because they've internalized some kind of balanced RPG stat rolling system and think the actual world works like that. In RPGs for balance reasons you often have things like strength trading off for agility/dexterity/speed. This makes sense in games you want to be fair because it allows for specialization. But in reality strength comes from well built muscles and speed comes from well built muscles and dexterity comes from well built muscles and agility comes from well build muscles. Life does not care even a little bit about fairness, the balancing mechanism is that the weak are culled and their gene lines end. There is no evidence that intelligence is trading off of anything else, at least not since food became so abundant that providing too much power to a brain could be calorically unsustainable. Smart people may handicap themselves through behavior for some culture reason but it's not an inherent quality of being smart and I can think of few survival situations where intelligence is anything but a boon.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would pro

If airdropped, right now, into a remote rainforest, it'd be a toss-up - intelligence is very useful, but Henry's probably pretty buff, and his friends probably have more experiences with rural life.

However, in the past, the people like, say with the genes of, the professionals win easily. They know little about "real life" today, like how to make rope from plant fibers or even start fire, because those aren't useful in the current_year - but they would've been in the past, and intelligence is only an asset for learning that. They're similarly physically weak because, again, that isn't useful for thinking about risk or finance - but in a hunter-gatherer society, it's necessary to labor, and the smartest people would be (as a distribution) as strong as the less intelligent. They also wouldn't be progressive or peaceful!

As someone watching the reality show Alone, where contestants are literally airdropped into the wilderness with only a few tools, none of the winners seem dumb and in fact are generally very articulate and clever problem solvers.

...presuming that the selection effects that gifted them with higher intelligence didn't trade off for anything else important in a less abstract environment. Old stories have many people too clever to be trustworthy, who come to bad ends. Obviously, those stories are less popular with people who are very, very smart, but one wonders if they point to a balancing mechanism in the social game. For all the frequent claims by the highly intelligent that their minds contain those of lesser mortals, it doesn't look to me like it actually works out that way in practice all that often.

Old stories have many people too clever to be trustworthy, who come to bad ends.

Beware fictional evidence.

Old stories are spread by people who wish to control the people who are clever, by reducing their status. Some of the old stories about people who were too clever and untrustworthy are clearly wrong by our standards, like all those stories about Jews cleverly cheating the Gentiles.

Some of the old stories about people who were too clever and untrustworthy are clearly wrong by our standards, like all those stories about Jews cleverly cheating the Gentiles.

I have a bridge to sell you

IIRC (from steve hsu?), GWASes have found, in the modern environment, little antagonistic pleiotropy between traits.

Can you give a specific example of how intelligence might trade off negatively? Reading about hunter gatherers has given me a general sense that intelligence was generally valuable there too. Untrustworthy people of similar equal IQ trick or harm each other all the time - intelligence changes the dynamics a bit, but I don't see it making that significant of a difference, compared to the potential benefit.

Can you give a specific example of how intelligence might trade off negatively?

It's more energy expensive to run that mostly unnecessary 4070. The ability to focus on concrete issues is another obvious problem. Dumb+dilligent has advantages over the common mix of smart+absent-minded. When dealing with necessary, repetitive, simple tasks, I've often observed that "dumber" people seem to have a better capacity to just shut up and flowstate.

When dealing with necessary, repetitive, simple tasks, I've often observed that "dumber" people seem to have a better capacity to just shut up and flowstate

I think this is a modern thing (relative to hunter-gatherers at least) - it's much easier to not 'shut up and flowstate' when it's possible to survive without doing boring repetitive tasks for many hours a day, and when there are more interesting options (books, computer, etc).

There must be some pleiotropy, because most species sit in local optima for most of the time.

You know, there isn't that a 4-million dataset is open for everyone for study. For privacy reasons, large GWAS studies are only combing linear correlations together. We know incest is bad yet those GWAS studies fail to show it. This is very crude model and you shouldn't take it too seriously.

examples

Pursuing search for eternal life instead of reproducing oneself.

Low SMV (for men), ceteris paribus.

Being a cuck.

Writing long, elaborate, texts into defence for being a cuck.

In a broad sense 'antagonistic pleiotropy' is everywhere, stuff like having a human-sized brain means you are intelligent but consume more energy, better wound healing -> cells that replicate more -> cancer, etc.

That's different from antagonistic pleiotropy among existing, common genetic variants in the current human population, which (according to steve, by my memory) is uncommon.

We know incest is bad yet those GWAS studies fail to show it

Among animals in general, this meta-analysis found that inbreeding is very common and often not avoided at all.

I don't think Hsu is that concerned antagonistic pleiotropy. I think he'd prefer increasing IQ via PGS even if it's say decreased athleticism and many other traits.

Isn't it that to getect genetic effect, we need sample size of N, but to detect pleiotropy, we need N^2?

Among animals in general, this meta-analysis found that inbreeding is very common

I don't understand your point here, avoiding it has costs also. Doesn't mean it's bad for individual.

Can you give a specific example of how intelligence might trade off negatively?

You think you're smarter than the people around you, which is true. This leads you to believe that you're smart enough to get away with grifting one of them, which is also true. This leads you to think you're smart enough to get away with making a habit of it, which turns out to be false because of complex social dynamics that you aren't smart enough to navigate flawlessly. You get a bad reputation, the tribe cuts you out and you die alone, or maybe you get your head smashed in with a rock.

Pride, arrogance, hubris, these are vices that elevated intelligence encourages. See also the monotonous failure of technocracy from the Enlightenment to the present day. Just because you're the smartest person in the room doesn't mean you're smart enough to pull off whatever crazy plan your ego talked you into.

I don't think this works, but it is hard to speculate on this stuff.

Reasons to believe otherwise include the phenomena of cults and cult leaders. They tend to be more intelligent than their followers, and they benefit massively from stringing the followers along in a massive grift. In general, the outsized benefits of such a successful grift, e.g. the 'access to women' one sees in said cult leaders (compare to polygamy where the chief has many wives), probably outweighs it failing often.

Someone might also notice the grifting repeatedly fail, and then stop doing it - this might permanently slightly reduce his reputation in the tribe, without him being kicked out or smashed with a rock.

this substack on the "The evolutionary anthropology of deception, magic, and violence.", often gets into how deception or one persongroup taking advantage of another were common in premodern societies - also making the above seem less plausible.

Plus, anecdotally from normal-IQ friends, people-of-normal-intelligence successfully scam or trick each other all the time. If it's sometimes a successful strategy for people of similar IQ, it should often be successful for those of higher Iq as well.

But as I said, hard to make accurate statements about the way intelligence evolves.

See also the monotonous failure of technocracy from the Enlightenment to the present day

I'm not exactly sure what 'technocracy' means here, but the current state of society seems like a 'success' for technocracy in the natural-selection sense of 'reproducing'.

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