site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   25853 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Your position here is not the mainstream one, if you asked a hundred researchers in genetics if they thought your method could reach 250 IQ they would disagree. I was trying to do the sort of broad explanatory analogy we do a lot of here because it's a general interest place, but there are technical reasons why you're wrong. If you want to convince anyone, you should use rhetoric that acknowledges you're in an unfavored position.

I am a geneticist - nobody talks about selectively breeding human IQ because it gives you bad press, your uni may fire you and you will no longer get any grants.

But humans are just animals, and IQ is just a normally distributed polygenic trait... so ask them about whether it would be possible to say breed +5SD weight or wing size in fruit flies or mice length and they will say "of course"

The rapid turn around of generations via embryonic eggs is science fiction, but it's much closer to "geostationary sattelite" than "warp drive".

Curious. Why people do genetics research at all if it's prohibited where it matters the most, or "EA PGS explains 4% of variance"? Do (some) geneticists secretly hold politically incorrect opinions?

What matters most

Most work in human genetics is finding the cause of genetic disease (inherited and cancer)

In all western countries I can think of, they do prenatal screening tests, the results of which are used to kill the genetically less fit.

What is this if not government eugenics program that almost all scientists support? High 90% of people terminate down syndrome foetuses upon positive result.

In polls, most westerners are ok with termination to stop disease, just not ok with anything that looks like making super babies

Though of course, if you look at sperm donation stats I am sure the average chosen donor is above average IQ, height, attractiveness etc

Do you think there are alleles than benefit individual's intelligence when they are found in their mother but not themselves?

Yes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8456157/

Thanks, but this is for EA, not IQ. I was curious about better prenatal environment for better IQ rather than helping child get degrees.

EA correlates with IQ, and is the best we have in many cases

EA takes seconds to fill out on a form, so there are millions of genotyped samples and thus good GWASs

IQ is harder to obtain, and is controversial so nobody wants to fund it, so nowhere near as many samples

Thanks.

There are still studies ilke EA3, EA4... which is only barely related to finding disease. Why do researchers do that?

High 90% of people terminate down syndrome foetuses upon positive result.

I think you're missing something here, a large fraction (or majority in many countires) doesn't test of Down syndrome even if they can afford it.

Though of course, if you look at sperm donation stats I am sure the average chosen donor is above average IQ, height, attractiveness etc

I'm afraid IQ might be higher than average mostly due to positive correlations with EA and income. Height isn't neccessarily good.

Can you tell if you work in human genetics or not? What can you say about MAOA 2R allele (and 1.5 R allele)?

... okay

As you said, 250 IQ is 10 SD. 5 SD and 10 SD are very different. If you had said 175 IQ, I would not have said that was categorically impossible. While I still do think that IQ is going to have construct issues, if you just assume a normal distribution there will be people who have + 5 SD out of 9 billion people.

The thing, though, is that intelligence isn't like muscle mass. In two ways. One (pretty confident), it's not just a thing you can measure. We genuinely do not know what the capabilities of '250 IQ' would refer to. No such people exist, not even close. IQ is defined by rank ordering an existing distribution and mapping it to a normal. If you carried out your method, and the 250 IQ person wasn't actually practically smarter than the 160 IQ person, you could still say - well, he's 250 IQ, because of the distribution of test scores we inferred the way we did the selection! And there wouldn't actually be anything wrong with that, other than the person not actually being usefully smarter.

Two, (much less confident, plausible but not more likely than not imo that the scientific consensus disagrees with this) intelligence isn't something where there's an obvious disadvantage to more of it. For muscle mass, past a certain point there's some fitness advantage from being stronger but it's more than compensated for by things like energy / diet requirements. So in an artificial environment with infinite food, it's really easy for natural selection to just modify whatever regulates how much muscles grow and grow more and have them get massive. I think intelligence is just hard, though. It's just a very complicated thing, and there's no simple way to have more of it if some other tradeoff is fixed. More intelligence mostly isn't a matter of increasing the number of neurons, plenty of people with the same head size as von Neumann just weren't von Neumann. And at von Neumann's scale non-additive effects probably play a significant role in getting you from 'very smart' to 'top 100', and natural selection just won't work as well on those.

We can get freakish results via artificial selection, but yes we hit limits, eg greyhounds are only like 30% faster than wolves.

But look at corn vs teosinte, or milk yields per cow doubling in the last 50 years... or von Neumann in 1000 years from a hybrid of Middle easterners and Europeans...

I think we could make IQ tests that went further than the current highest scores ie reverse digit span tests, reaction times etc. If you can reliably get the same answers as someone with 160 IQ but faster... you're smarter than them

But yeah the real proof would be accomplishment, IQ is just the best measure we have for intelligence and the goal would be better output eg important original research etc

What if we asked them 'how fast we could genetically engineer 300 IQ humans if genetics budgets were >10% from military spending"?

I think they'd still say roughly what I'm saying - we'd need to actually understand how intelligence works to make changes that go that far from natural designs and we don't. There's a decent amount of funding in genetics and neuroscience, not 60B/year but decent. They'd also probably say that IQ might not mean anything at 300 and that being that smart might not actually be physically possible even if it did mean something.

Are there examples of actual geneticists speaking about limits of linear regression PGI?

actually understand how intelligence works to make changes that go that far from natural designs

Depends on what you mean by "that far".

There's a decent amount of funding in genetics and neuroscience

there isn't, say, IQ genetics study with sample of 10 million with full genome sequencing.

that being that smart might not actually be physically possible

Because what? Smaller animals significantly outperform larger animals with same brain size, their brains are more tightly packed. Why wouldn't be elephant sized brain with density of sparrow be smarter? Cooling might be a problem, though.

(wrote in a hurry) IQ is basically defined to be a normal distribution. 250 iq is 10 standard deviations above the mean, and the probability of being >= that is like 1 in 10^23. We can't sample from the distribution of 10^23 humans, and even if we could it's not obvious what distribution to pick or why, so even in theory I'm not sure what 250 would mean.

10^10 data points is still a lot of data. I think it would be enough to crack nonlinearity to process to human twice further from baseline than existing best individuals. It's unknown nonlinearity, but not cryptographically secure nonlinearity.

not cryptographically secure nonlinearity

AGI is ... also "unknown linearity", and arguably in the exact same sense. The data points mostly duplicate each other and test the effects of small incremental changes. It takes a while to build intelligence out of tiny changes, as the history of the planet suggests

The data points mostly duplicate each other and test the effects of small incremental changes.

I do not think given random two individuals of 160 IQ are mostly duplicates of each other.

If industry could profit from engineering 300 IQ humans as they can profit from LLM AIs, we would have it by now. .... i think "we" will have ASI sooner.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats