Let’s say I want to measure the potential of someone to be a software engineer. I ask them to solve algorithm questions under time pressure. Those who do them faster and better have an LQ. The leet code quotient.
I have reams of data that show that the higher your leet code quotient the more you earn in salary , the more successful the companies you work in tend to be.
I’m sure many on HN would rail against “LQ” being used to drive policy. Like saying we need to make sure we hire and train more high LQ engineers. Yet this is exactly the tone on discussions about IQ.
The more we believe in hiring based on Leet code the better it makes it look. The same is happening with our education system. What if we measured peoples eye sight and then discriminated against people with low VQ ? You don’t need to do that you can invent glasses so everyone has the same VQ.
All of IQ testing is based on a comically simple assumption. Your score on an IQ test is G + S + N. Where G is the general factor , S is the subject specific factor and N is noise.
Who even said there are only 3 factors ? Modern models add a few more but intelligence may not even be a scalar or a low dimensional vector. It might be a vector with thousands of quantities.
And to those who think that IQ is “real” ponder the following - I give an IQ test to Albert Einstein and a Bedouin from the Sahara desert. Afterwards I drop both of them alone in the desert to survive. Who is more likely to live ?
People need to stop putting faith in crude statistical models that have very weak causal basis. I’m not denying that some people are better at some things than others. But assuming that solving a few puzzles and doing crude statistics allows you to predict that is comical.
IQ is a very crude general prediction. It’s completely possible for a 100 IQ to beat a 140 IQ on many different tasks. Like seducing women or playing football or rapping. We have a very narrow definition of intelligence.
We are barely able to manage our own economies without destroying the entire ecosystem, every country is a mess but we believe that we are able to shape evolution itself towards positive goals when such a process requires tens of thousands of years to even work. The last time this was tried we got one of the worst things in human history. Some people thought they were the “master race” only to get steamrolled by the “inferior” slavs.
If you’re calling for a mass in breeding program on humans beings then I have nothing further to say.
The reality is that psychology has been used, is being used, as a vehicle for racism rather than legitimate science. In lieu of real science, nothing at all is better.
Advancements in technology can be detrimental to the environment, lethal, make us dumber, worsen quality of life in several ways, help control and imprison us, and any combination of the previous.
And "expansion into the universe" means little if it's for some lucky few. Why should the rest care, just because if Earth is whiped out those few get to "continue"?
That's even assuming it's doable without something like generation ships - which even at the solar system level is a big if.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...
Increased mental illness might be one, other one is the brain size being limited by the hips of mother. Brains / intelligence also has energy costs which we might not have been able to optimize for yet.
As such, I would say that intelligence is a cost that you run. It allowed for reproduction and survival for humans when they moved towards colder regions for example, but there's little to no reason to maintain that intelligence if you don't need to adapt anymore. I think you need harsh material constraints (I don't know, space faring) to keep it from shaving itself off in order to optimize the human machine.
the good news is that China is doubling down on research into the genetic basis of intelligence. The West will either adjust their worldview or be left behind
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5811819/
It can even be compared across rapidly developing nations with different rates of food consumption:
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
That isn't necessarily Eugenics. If they think that "burger flippers" will produce inferior offspring, it's eugenics. But I suspect that if there is a low incidence of Stanford grads and "burger flippers" coupling it's due to other factors, for one thing the fact that they are two relatively small populations that likely have minimal interaction in a dating environment.
But, maybe things like this should be, you know, patched in an update to the system. It could always be better.
In my comment, it is to be understood that an exceptional individual like Einstein is worth more to the species than an average person. It is not to imply average people are worthless, but rather that exceptional people are rare and the species values them.
Evoking Einstein to defend eugenics is an... interesting choice.
We also ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology they're for or against, because that destroys the curious conversation this place is supposed to exist for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I suppose maybe we have a different set of definitions we are using. I do not view my stances as compatible with those of the time.
When I think of eugenics, I think of Gattaca, CRISPR, cloning, saving lives, and gene therapy.
You're entitled to your own mental states, but you're clearly not thinking the same thing that most people do when they think of "eugenics".
Most discussions I have had on the topic with experts and such in their labs are usually in good faith with collective enthusiasm for what science can one day bring to humanity. It is only online that I encounter a sort of political extremism in opposition to the idea of leveraging what we know (of DNA) to make the world better.
I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that most experts would happily claim, even among friends, that what they're doing relates to "eugenics", which isn't just a sequence of letters that you can find in a dictionary. It's inextricably bound up with a very dark history. Consider why the Wikipedia article for eugenics isn't just a short one-sentence statement that eugenics is about increasing the occurrence of positive hereditable traits.
In China, for example, it is generally considered outright irresponsible to not get genetic testing done, to not abort a fetus with the wrong number of chromosomes, etc. These topics are discussed very openly, matter of factly, etc.
On a separate note but still in response -- Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political and is outright banned in classrooms (and some countries due to the politicized nature of the content).
And that's fine for China. This may even become the norm in North America and Europe at some point in the future. But that doesn't change facts: most people speaking in English will not talk positively about the term "eugenics", which has a crap ton of baggage that you're just ignoring.
> Wikipedia is not a reputable resource for anything even remotely political
That would be a fine point to make if I were citing Wikipedia as a source for a paper I'm writing. However, what I meant was that eugenics has a history that can't be sharply extricated from what you might believe is the literal meaning of the term. Words are more complicated than that.
Similarly, if I went on TV and proudly claimed that we should be doing eugenics, many would assume that I want to forcibly sterilize an underclass using unscientific ideas about heritability, and that I'm probably racist, too. I would have to do a lot of work to convince people that, no, all I really mean is that we should be able to do genetic testing to see if babies-to-be have the correct number of chromosomes (and so on), and decide to bring them to term based on that information.
Maybe you want to rehabilitate the term, which, OK, fine. But it's a mistake to assume that you can take the original definition of something and assume that's all the word "means" to people.
I suspect he would be disgusted at the idea of being used as an exemplar for eugenics.
well Einstein was against this idea of, you know, German pseudoscience, where they had these men going through mountains in the Middle East and measuring skulls and what have you, I do think applied genetics is a very different science.
This thread just keeps getting better. Do you... I mean... you do know why this is funny, right?
You keep evoking Einstein in contexts that would have him rolling in his grave. Imagine raising Einstein from the dead to tell him that he's the standard bearer of eugenics and a version of quantum mechanics that was not in his image. It's humorous.
You seem to know very little about science or its history but are quick to evoke scientism in defense of ideas that in actuality have very little to do with science.
Fun read and all.
Thanks for that link.
Very cool.
>>You seem to know very little about science
Einstein the person, the history of his life, etc are fully separate from contributions to science. Science is, generally, not about cults of personality, history, or any of that.
I have a great appreciation, respect, gratefulness, passion, and enthusiasm for science, progress, and advancement of the species.
One does not have to study the trivialities of how Einstein took his coffee or tea in 1938 in order to appreciate the genius and scientific contributions.
>>You
This side thread with you seems fallacious in a way, but that is okay. I respect you and think there is definitely a place in the world for people who do well in their careers and also worship their idols from history.
You know, all of that said, don't you think it would be cool and maybe beneficial to the species if cloning technologies were perfected and experiments were done where genes like those responsible for the entity you know as Einstein were cloned, given new names, new lives, and such? I wonder what would happen. It would seem such experiments are indeed coming in the future, and I do not think the historical trivialities of one's life have much to do with this scientific curiousity that many a biologist wants to explore.
This entire thread is an aside about an anecdote about how one guy's wife decided not to have kids and therefore there's a Great Replacement of the Mensa Members By The Non-Mensa Members.
Anyways.
What exactly were we talking about again?
Oh. Right. A really stupid paper.
Want to stay on topic? Reply to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
>>In 1918 he was asked by the mother of a brilliant German biology student to dissuade her son from joining the front in the First World War. Einstein complied and wrote: “Can this post of yours out there not be filled by an unimaginative average person of the type that come 12 to the dozen? Is it not more important than all that big scuffle out there that valuable people stay alive?”
>>And in 1922, Einstein told his close friend, the physicist Paul Ehrenfest, whose 4-year-old son had recently been diagnosed with Down syndrome, that he agreed with his decision to institutionalize his son rather than care for him himself, because “valuable people should not be sacrificed for causes without any prospects, not even in this case.”
Source: https://time.com/5314704/einstein-diaries-racism/
Einstein can be seen above quoted as saying things that are very similar to my own writings. Regardless, I just found this interesting today and thought you'd enjoy it.
As an aside, those quotes come from earlier in his life. It's uncertain if he held the same opinions as he grew older and matured. People's views do change over time, as we can see with Einstein's rueful feelings over the a-bomb.
Being a sociopath is not an evolutionarily stable strategy.
There is, however, the weird outliers. There are those people with similar brain patterns that are not of the violent variety. They seem to succeed in business, for example.
I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Linus Torvalds (essentially the tech greats) were all sociopathic in some way.
FWIW, I am not a trained psychiatrist and am only speaking from the sort of popular psychology news articles and documentaries and TED talks I have seen on this particular topic.
What if 1% of the population were sociopaths?
Is he or she on the wrong side of history in claiming that the value of human life does not lie in intelligence, or in saying that it would be better to weed out sociopaths? Because you haven't addressed either of those (which seem pretty self-evident to me, but YMMV).
According to many even ITT, intelligence is some transcendental category which can only be divined by Nurture and Education.