curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
In small doses, any kind of conversation can be interesting. Even the guy who only wants to talk about the drugs he's ingested today or how hot various women are - a lot of people are like that, it's worth having some understanding of how and why! Those people are 99.9% the same pathways as you, just (on a cosmic scale) ever so slightly dumber and with different tendencies, and it's interesting how that shakes out. And surely, if you're so far above that, you should be able to participate competently.
I don't think this is a useful kind of analysis, even if the survey wasn't online. It's still asking vague questions that different groups of people will take 10 seconds to answer and interpret in very different ways, and treating them like obvious truth. From this pdf, we find ... 68% of elite ivy league graduates support banning private air conditioning and non-essential travel to fight climate change? I just do not believe that, there's clearly something wrong with the poll. Even if there weren't, consider: For the 'freedom' vs 'government control' question, they plausibly just read it as "do you support conservative-coded views or liberal-coded views" and answered the one that was more liberal. And, you know, that's not an incorrect interpretation of the poll - you don't ask questions like "Does the united states provide too much individual freedom, too much government control, or both?" if you're trying to discern truth, the framing of that is heavily conservative, "government control" one side of a Russell conguation and "individual freedom" is on the other side of one. 90% (!) of ivy league graduate elites support "strict" rationing of "gas, meat, and electricity", when they probably just support carbon taxes in practice.
The whole presentation, along with the report, is on the discourse level of a political TV ad.
35% of the elite would rather cheat than lose a close election, rising to 69% of the ‘politically obsessed’. Only 7% of pleb voters would cheat. That seems like an underestimate to me – who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll? Wouldn’t people be embarrassed (or tactical) and lie – they’re cheats after all
... Okay, this just isn't true. Come on. "who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll" - yes! that is a great question! You noticed something was off, which is good, and then somehow used that to infer that outgroup = bad. I know a fair number of "politically-obsessed" "elites", and even in private they don't talk like that at all! The answer is just "people who are lying or trolling on the poll".
Now, all that aside, the "elite" do have a number of beliefs that are bad and are harming themselves and others by implementing them. But bad analysis doesn't get one any closer to fixing that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I agree that - if there were clear and severe control / procedural problems - that's almost as bad as actual fraud. I think the cases for procedural problems is as weak on the facts as the case for actual fraud though.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Wow ... . You're just <negative outgroup stereotype 1> and <negative outgroup stereotype 2>. There are a hundred thousand comments like this every day on twitter, and I like that this forum is a break from that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
No, my understanding was that I was defending using the race mean instead of the population mean. That was my vague recollection and seems to match a quick skim of articles I just googled. I'm not confident that that's what the NFL was actually doing, but that's what I thought happened.
Obviously using the race mean when you have actual good test scores from when those players were young is dumb, that barely even needs to be said
The problem is that the "not atomized communities" can just be (hypothetically) glassed and population-replaced by the atomized communities that use that atomization to build modern technology. There are existing relatively illiberal nations that are still very modern and atomized relative to e.g. the amish who'd love to do that if the international system was different. That's a strong selection pressure!
Actually that's not really a hypothetical is it, it describes the rise of the modern state.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
... 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.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Thanks!
The first thing was more of a composition error - I mean to imply that the whole basket of traits were somewhere around 50%.
The second mistake was just implying something incorrect though. I know that, I just wasn't paying enough attention while writing so broadly.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't remember that debate on themotte, but I feel like this probably isn't an accurate description how that discussion went? I highly doubt the 'HBDers' were defending 'using a group mean instead of individual scores when the individual scores were easily available'
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
(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.
And before that he was a student at UC Berkeley and also a self-identified Marxist, ditto Yarvin.
I do not see anything about UC Berkeley on his wikipedia page. I see
attended St. Mark's School of Texas, then Colgate University for one year before transferring to the University of Virginia.[37][39] In 2001, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago
Can I have sources for Spencer and Yarvin being self-identified marxists in college? I searched for a bit and was unable to find anything for either. If Yarvin used to be a communist then I definitely should've known that. It's not implausible for Spencer, but
no he did not
Wikipedia directly claimed that "He unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican in the 1994 California gubernatorial election and for U.S. Senator in 2016" and then
Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the 1994 California gubernatorial election, challenging incumbent Pete Wilson. He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly.[11] He came in second place to Wilson, receiving 707,431 votes (34.3 percent).[12] Newspapers referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ.[13][11][1][9]
Do you disagree with that?
Between this and the "race norming" post up-thread where you conveniently pretend that the NFL hasn't been collecting Wonderlic scores on every new player as they enter the league since the late 70s
I believe they ended up using the same baseline assumed intelligence for black and white players, not individual historically collected scores?
Having supersonic aircraft and computers and industrial agriculture is more incentivized by nature than 'not atomizing communities' is disincentivized. And taking all the smartest people and putting them in the same social circles is very useful for that. It's much easier for a smart elite group to somehow get an above-replacement fertility rate, or develop agi, than for small rooted communities to evolve computers and nukes, so the former seems more fit in the long run i think. A lot of stable equilibria in nature look locally like 'unrest', e.g. groups of related animals fighting over territory. Big Macs are basically pure negative in a way that 'having all the most capable people in the world develop technology together' isn't.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
And it's not incentivized by 'capitalism' or 'globalism', it's incentivized by ... nature, causation itself. It's just useful for very capable people to be around very capable people. It's more fun, but mostly it's just vastly more productive - Einstein in a hunter gatherer village is a town priest, or a very good trapper. Einstein in a major city is Einstein. And we all benefit from Einstein and the (at least) hundred thousand other very smart people whose work our complicated society rests on.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Race Norming
I don't see what the race norming scandal had to do with lying. As far as I understand it, it isn't facially unreasonable to estimate the past IQ of black people based on the black population mean instead of the general population mean for paying out injury settlements. I don't at all see how this is manipulating the data to reflect the truth. Especially since it's, like, for an injury settlement.
People who possess merit benefit from HBD awareness because if it succeeds 1) they don't have to keep pretending that they can't see the obvious correlations between race and achievement anywhere and 2) don't have to take 'affirmative action'-style hiring practices to hire supposedly high potential but socially disadvantaged minorities who will in fact perform poorly.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think a more parsimonious explanation is that people naturally become friends with, care more about, and adopt the beliefs of the people they spend time around and believe in the same things as. So when someone leaves their old community behind to join a new one - especially one whose people are in general smarter, more capable, generally better to be around - they just are going to care about their new community more. And then different groups of people generally find reasons to dislike other groups. Deep South folks also dislike liberal elites, it does just happen in general.
Modern elite liberal culture actually demands less obedience to its ideology than most other ideologies. For instance, it doesn't literally demand obedience. Which, you'd think that's a low bar, but not one that most historical ideologies meet! Christianity, for instance, does actually have divine commands that you must follow, a holy book that's indisputably correct, heresies, and so on.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
That happens a lot actually. Not among HBD people, but actual white nationalists, the kind who like hitler or explicitly say "I want a Christian White Nation".
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There's a continuous spectrum of how intellectually challenging a job is, though. Managing, accounting, nursing, sales, secretary, plumber, cashier, janitor (not in exact order, maybe see here idk). The ones that are less intellectually challenging (generally) pay less well because they're less productive and because more people can do them. I don't really have any strong evidence either way for whether culture or IQ has a larger effect, but if anything I think the IQ->gap pathway is simpler than the culture->gap pathway. Black people who are employed will have a natural desire to get better employment and higher pay as much as white people do.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure IQ has a bigger effect than culture on eg the percent of programmers who are black being low. Certainly culture has a bigger effect than IQ on the percent of blacks who commit crime, and even if there's a natural tendency towards that due to low IQ it's very easy to imagine stable social situations where black crime (and for that matter crime in the white underclass, low-IQ whites also generally aren't programmers) is much less frequent.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
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.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Yes I agree that it would be good to do that, and have made many posts to that effect. Although we don't even need embryo selection for that since we can already identify smart parents, it's useful.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Maybe that gets him 5 IQ points, certainly not 100. Or very likely that he was selected as one of the smartest out of billions people means that there's just less juice to squeeze out of that.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.
From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University. He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller.[37][39] His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime"
Yarvin was a libertarian before he was a reactionary.
In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley.[15] Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin's mind-set.[13][16]
Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 and was "He was publisher of The American Conservative from 2007 to 2013". "He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly"
Sailer "Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][12] "
As far as I can tell, you are just factually wrong. These people were not pushing 'DEI' during the 'bush administration'. Which is what you claimed. And their ideology before being reactionary seems to have mostly been conservative.
Even if you were right about those people, it wouldn't matter because you claimed "I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now". If that was true, then there would be around 50x more people pushing HBD. A lot of people were pro-diversity two decades ago.
Also, people change ideologies sometimes. Reactionaries have to come from somewhere if there were fewer of them 20 years ago. But a lot of them seem to have come from conservatism.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
That isn't what that post is about. The title of that post is "Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)". (In anticipated experiences). HBD pays rent, depending on how you interpret it, in anticipated experiences by predicting a lot of anticipated experiences, such as future differences in behavior of various races, future test scores of various races, future successes of countries populated almost entirely by various races, how effective interventions in schooling or income vs interventions in genes will be to modify such outcomes, etc. Yudkowsky is definitely not claiming that if something isn't politically useful, it isn't worth knowing.
But you can also still have widespread knowledge of HBD and also colorblind meritocracy. That we've been moving away from that a bit doesn't actually make it too unstable to maintain, most aspects of social organization ebb and flow with time. To make a larger scale comparison, if you think free-market capitalism and democracy are inevitable - consider communism, fascism, and the significant appeal that the two had within many liberal democracies around a century ago. They ended up being stable because they weathered tough storms, not because the water was calm. Similarly, 'colorblind meritocracy' is having a bit of a tough few decades, but that itself is very weak evidence against the thing's ability to persist.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
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.
The replies to a lot of tweets with over 10k likes are filled with LLM-generated "helpful" spam replies, and those spam replies, as far as I can tell, get hundreds of likes from actual users. A few years ago the replies to top posts were much better than today. Yes, LLMs can't do most things, but they can write low-context tweets, they can write SEO spam slop at 0 marginal cost, and that's all you need for it to be a big problem.
I think you're right that people will either just ignore it, and just read the tweets / watch the videos of the popular users they currently follow (say what you will about MrBeast, he's clearly intelligent and very good at optimizing for his targets) and ignore the LLM spam replies / comments like they already do though. Or they'll eat up the slop and love it.
Soon AI will likely be much smarter, but we'll have bigger issues than higher quality internet spam
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