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Notes -
On (Noticing) IQ (When You're Allowed To)
I was writing a reply to @TowardsPanna 's question in the SSQ thread that got a bit out of control. Large enough that I decided to just post it here too.
For what it's worth, none of these ideas are particularly new, at least they aren't if you compulsively browse LessWrong (or even read a lot of Scott), but the older I get, the more I realize that novelty is often just a nice-to-have.
Yes. Of course?
Humans aren't stupid. We’re expert pattern-matchers. We’re distinctively evolved to be relentless Bayesian updaters, constantly scanning our environment for correlations that offer a survival or status advantage. We’re Noticers™. The problem is that we’ve built a civilization where noticing the most predictive variable for life outcomes is considered a faux pas at best and a moral failing at worst. It’s common now to explicitly state, in corporate policy or legislation, that specific classes of Bayesian evidence are "fruit of the poisonous tree" and have to be ignored.
Like many well-intentioned interventions that hinge on obscuring reality, it doesn't work: when you outlaw the most accurate map, people don’t stop navigating. They just buy worse maps.
In the ancestral environment, we didn't have the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (only the Modern Hunter Gatherer has had the privilege). We did, however, have proxies. We had vocabulary size, wit, speed of learning. In the modern environment, we’ve muddied the waters. We’ve got proxies that look like intelligence but are actually just measuring conformity to the upper-middle-class Blue Tribe aesthetic. We look at credentials, which are increasingly just a measure of "willingness to sit still and follow instructions for four years."
(Please note that I don't think that education is purely credentialism. This is a disease that affects midwits first and foremost. A bachelor's in physics is a stronger signal than one in sociology.)
So when we agree to pretend that "mental horsepower" is a myth, or that it’s entirely malleable via the Growth Mindset, we don’t actually create a flat hierarchy. We just create an opaque one. We create a hierarchy based on the performance of competence rather than the reality of capacity.
This leads to a specific kind of societal gaslighting. The narrative is that anyone can be a doctor or a quantum physicist if they just work hard and acquire knowledge. If someone fails to climb the ladder, the implication is that they stupidly chose not to grow their brain. They lacked grit. They lacked character. In a world where aptitude is taboo, failure’s always a moral deficit.
The obvious analogy is a world where the Paralympics and the "normal" Olympics are wrapped up into a single event. Anyone, including the disabled athletes, who points out that missing a leg makes one very unlikely to win in the 100m sprint is immediately walloped and then piled-upon, with cries of "the Science! Not-Murray et al clearly showed, in their landmark 1998 paper, that the number of remaining lower limbs had no relation to performance in the sleighing, shooting and arm wrestling categories. The 2012 Olympics were studied in great detail, and it was confirmed that Usain Bolt had the same number and arrangement of legs as his closest competitors."
When the person with no legs fails to win the 100m sprint, the commentators nod gravely and say, "He just didn't want it enough. He failed to manifest the victory."
I see three main mechanisms driving this, and why the average person (even the smart average person) underestimates the sheer weight of g.
The "All Men Are Created Equal" Overcorrection:
We’ve engaged in a concerted propaganda campaign for decades suggesting that because moral equality is mandatory, biological identity must also be mandatory. This makes it practically unthinkable to consider that it’s perfectly possible to construct a political system that grants equal rights to all citizens while acknowledging that not everyone can visualize a rotating 3D cube with equal fidelity. But biting that bullet feels dangerous to many. It feels like opening the door to old aristocracies. So instead, we pretend the differences don't exist, which inadvertently creates a new aristocracy of "people who know the right shibboleths."
The Bubble and the Range Restriction:
This is the big one. We live in intense cognitive bubbles.
If you’re reading this, you probably spend your life surrounded by people within one standard deviation of your own IQ. You went to a selective university. You work in a cognitive field. You live in a zip code priced for high-earners.
You can go days, maybe weeks, without having a meaningful conversation with someone significantly below an IQ of 100, or even +- 1SD outside of yours.
This creates a statistical illusion known as range restriction. If you look at the NBA, height doesn't correlate very strongly with points scored. Everyone’s already tall; therefore, the variance in performance seems to come from practice, grit, and shooting form. If you looked at the general population, height would be the single biggest predictor of basketball ability (because the 5’5” guy isn't getting the rebound).
Imagine if the NBA had a rule that you couldn't mention height. You'd still need to pick players, so you'd start using proxies. You'd talk about "reach" and "wingspan" and "vertical leap." You'd notice that certain players had better "court vision" or "positional awareness." And all of these would be real skills, but they'd also be correlated with height, and height would still be determining who made it into the league in the first place. The difference is that now you'd be pretending you weren't noticing height at all, which would make you more likely to mistake the packaging for the product.
In your life as a student or a professional, you look around at your peers. You see that Alice is doing better than Bob. Since Alice and Bob are both roughly equally smart (they both made it this far), you attribute Alice’s success to her conscientiousness, her charm, or her work ethic. You conclude, erroneously, that "intelligence doesn't matter much, it’s all about hard work."
You don’t see the people who were both dumber and less hardworking than you; they’re in a different social class entirely. You rarely see the people who are simultaneously smarter and more hardworking; they’re running hedge funds or solving alignment theory and don’t hang out at the hospital cafeteria. These are far more likely to be acquaintances rather than peers.
The problem is when we generalize from this filtered view. We start believing that because IQ doesn't predict success within our bubble, it must not predict success period. We see a colleague who's a bit slower but works incredibly hard and does fine, and we extrapolate that to everyone. We forget that the slow colleague is still in the 85th percentile of the general population, and that the person in the 30th percentile who works just as hard isn't a doctor at all, they're doing something else, probably something that pays worse and doesn't sound as impressive on a Hinge profile (see proxies re-emerging?).
The Opacity of Alien Competence:
Some professions are more segregated than others. An ER physician arguably sees a more representative slice of humanity than a family medicine specialist, who sees a more representative slice than a Google L10, but the direction of judgment is difficult.
When a patient comes to see me, I’m performing a distinct ritual. I listen to symptoms, I peer at them significantly, I type things into a computer. To the patient, the output seems to appear from thin air. A sufficiently competent doctor makes it look like they never broke a sweat. A less experienced one (like me) makes up for it by projecting confidence and then panic-Googling the interaction effects of MAOIs in the bathroom later.
The patient can't judge my raw processing power. They can only judge my bedside manner, my clothes, and my degree on the wall. They’re judging the paint job.
When I'm on call and a patient is rambling in a disorganized way, using neologisms, showing thought disorder, I don't need to know their IQ score to recognize that something is cognitively wrong. But when I'm in the doctors' lounge, listening to two consultants argue about whether a patient's depressive symptoms are primarily biological or reactive, I also don't need IQ scores to know who's making the sharper arguments. The difference is that in the first case, we're allowed to talk about cognitive impairment. In the second case, we're allowed to talk about "clinical judgment" or "experience" or even "medical education," but we're not supposed to talk about the underlying mental horsepower that makes one doctor better at diagnostic reasoning than another.
(Ideally, the whole point of the medical education system and associated exams is to put the gatekeeping before patient contact. When you see an MD in the wild, you ideally want to not need to bother with asking for a transcript of their grades, nor fear that they don't know the safe limit for paracetamol. The reasons why this idyllic state of affairs doesn't hold are too lengthy to fit on this margin. Be smart about things.)
Conversely, I can't judge the competence of a senior software engineer. I know enough Python to automate a spreadsheet, but can I distinguish between a decently competent programmer and a 10x developer without referencing their credentials or status? Probably not.
This brings us back to the original shower thought. If we can't discuss the engine, we obsess over the trim.
In a "blue" environment where social class is ostensibly "over" and never discussed, it’s actually the primary sorting algorithm. We use heuristics like "do they speak with a Received Pronunciation or General American accent?" or "do they know the current correct terminology for this specific social justice concept?" to decide who’s smart.
This favors the people living and breathing inside the dominant culture. It favors the legacy admission who knows how to dress and speak. It subtly closes out the dissenting voice from the outsider who might have raw supercomputer-level processing power but speaks with a regional accent, wears ill-fitting clothes, and hasn't learned the subtle dance of feigning humility while signaling status.
Some professions, like programming, are comparatively more sane/honest. You can have a perfectly decent career in FAANG if you don't shower regularly and speak with a lisp, assuming you are actually good at your job. Hell, like the dude with the MLP (pony, not perceptron) resume, you can counter-signal by being incredibly eccentric. If you're still drawing a seven figure salary, then you're worth it.
Speaking very generally, I think society (a vague term, can't help it) needs to move in the direction of more meritocracy, not less. In practice, that looks like more standardized testing, with reduced focus on vibes.
The vibes are, paradoxically, easier to fake than the exam results:
Consider the standard critique of the SAT: "It just measures how rich your parents are."
This is statistically false. The correlation between SAT scores and parental income is real but moderate (around r = 0.4). But compare this to the correlation between parental income and "being captain of the fencing team" or "having a polished personal essay about your volunteer work in Peru" or "speaking with the correct sociolect during an interview."
The SAT is a partially gameable metric. "Holistic" traits are entirely gameable products.
If you are a rich parent with a dim child, you cannot tutor them into a 1600 SAT. You can maybe get them from a 1000 to a 1150. But you can buy them a spot in a prestigious internship. You can hire a consultant to write their essays. You can ensure they have the "right" hobbies.
Since this is my soapbox, and you're presumably still reading this far, I also want to speak out against another approach towards modern fetishization of pseudo-meritocracy, or more accurately, aristocracy.
I should probably elaborate on the @2rafa position, since she's the strongest advocate (only advocate?) She's old money. My impression being not "my parents paid for Stanford" money, but "my great-grandfather's trust fund paid for Stanford's new rowing pavilion" money. She'll happily tell you that the problem with modern society isn't that we sort by intelligence, but that we pretend to sort by intelligence while actually sorting by a particularly vulgar form of striving that she finds aesthetically repulsive.
Her critique goes something like this: The modern PMC striver is a grotesque creature. The Tiger Mom. The résumé-padding, LinkedIn-posting, "crushing it" bugman who measures his self-worth in LeetCode problems solved and whether he made partner by 35. This, she argues, is what you get when you tell everyone that anyone can be elite if they just grind hard enough. You don't get equality. You get a soulless arms race of performative busyness, a cargo cult where the striver apes the surface of elite competence without acquiring the substance.
Better, she says, to return to a system where everyone knows their place. Where the sorting happens early, quietly, and permanently. Where you don't try to be elite, you simply are. Where excellence is demonstrated through effortless grace, not desperate optimization. The boarding school accent. The understated wardrobe that costs more than a car. The ability to discuss Proust and quarterbacks with equal nonchalance. The aristocratic assumption that if you have to ask, you're not one of us, and that's fine. It's a system that rewards being rather than becoming.
From her vantage, this is obviously superior. And I get the appeal. If you're already at the top of the heap by accident of birth, a system that freezes the heap in place is very comfortable. You don't have to worry about some brilliant kid from a refugee camp out-hustling your mediocre son for the last spot at Harvard Medical School. Your son's spot is secure, not because he's particularly gifted, but because he's yours. The system can quietly acknowledge his inherited position without anyone having to say the quiet part out loud. The "genteel" facade is the point, it transforms raw inherited advantage into a question of taste.
This is far from the worst approach. The elites are elites for a reason. That reason is often hereditary. Even total regime change and societal upheaval usually has the dispossessed children of nobility (or the elites) almost inevitably percolate back to the top. This is evident in data from places as far-flung as China, where the grandsons of pre-revolution landlords often outperform their peers. The previous status-quo was bearable, in some ways superior.
However, the aristocratic alternative often ends up parasitic on the very meritocratic machinery it despises. You still need high-g selection somewhere. You still need the engineers, the surgeons, the generals who can think. You can dress that up in tradition and patronage, you can recruit them as client talent, you can offer them a place in the court, but you cannot run a technical civilization on inherited gentility alone. At some point, reality reasserts itself, usually via catastrophe.
But here's where the rubber meets the road: I am that brilliant kid's son. My dad did out-hustle the mediocre sons of privilege. He clawed his way out of a refugee camp because somewhere, a grinding, impersonal system looked at his test scores and said: "This one. This one is worth plucking from the mass and polishing." He wasn't sorted by vibes. He was sorted by a standardized exam that didn't care about his accent, his hand-me-down clothes, or whether he knew which fork to use at a state dinner. It cared whether he could solve the problems in front of him, quickly and correctly.
The "genteel sorting" system that @2rafa prefers would have written him off before he started. He didn't have the right pedigree, the right consonants at the end of his name, the right summer internships. He had the wrong everything except the one thing that actually matters for medicine: the ability to hold a thousand variables in his head while making a decision under pressure. The exam caught that. The "holistic" process would have missed it, distracted by his lack of polish.
So yes, I have a personal bias. I believe in meritocracy because meritocracy is the only reason I'm here, writing this, instead of hauling crates in a warehouse or pulling weeds out of a farm. But my bias aligns with a principle: if we're going to have sorting, and we are, because complex societies require it, then let the sorting be honest. Let it be based on the thing that actually predicts performance, not the cultural markers that predict comfort for the existing elite.
The aristocratic approach pretends it's avoiding Goodhart's Law by refusing to articulate its metrics. But the metric is still there: it's called lineage. It's just a metric that can't be improved upon, only inherited. And while it's true that modern meritocracy is imperfectly gamed (that's what this entire post is about) the solution isn't to replace an imperfect but theoretically climbable ladder with a walled garden whose keys are handed out at birth.
The modern PMC striver is indeed a pathetic figure in many ways. But he's pathetic because he's been lied to. He's been told that credentials are everything, then handed a system where credentials are increasingly just proxies for the ability to acquire credentials. He's been told that growth mindset will make him a doctor, then sorted by an IQ test disguised as the MCAT. His sin isn't striving. His sin is believing the official story, and optimizing for the proxies rather than the underlying reality.
@2rafa's genteel system doesn't fix this. It just makes the proxies even more opaque and even more heritable. It replaces the MCAT with the recommendation letter from your Exeter headmaster. It replaces the LeetCode grind with the unspoken assumption that of course you'll summer at the firm your father's college roommate runs. It removes the last remaining pressure points where someone like my father could punch through.
What we need isn't a return to aristocracy. It's a return to honesty. Acknowledge that g exists, that it matters, and that it's largely heritable. Then build a system that finds the people who have it, wherever they are, however they present. Make the exam harder to game, not easier. Make the credentials less important, not more. And stop pretending that the alternative to vulgar striving is egalitarianism. It's very much not. The alternative is feudalism with better manners.
Sadly, none of this particularly matters in the long-run. The AI will "meritocratically" take your job, and will eventually do it better than you can imagine. My kids aren't going to college. Yours probably won't either. I find that reassuring, in some ways, short timelines taken seriously make a lot of squabbling moot. You can stop running so damn hard, the winner has a jetpack. Isn't that oh, so reassuring?
This is a fantastic comment, and I've reported it for AAQC. However, there was a long comment chain recently about how enshittification is actually something happening when the systems around us move with greater efficiency and slack is ironed out.
A perfectly meritocratic system that sorts everyone into their position with perfect efficiency sounds fantastic on paper and nightmarish in practice. As someone who both benefits and suffers from the effects of arbitrage, I am not sure if I prefer one or the other.
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I think the worst aspect of “not noticing” in various ways is that it harms the person with lower capacity the most. When we can’t acknowledge that not every kid is going to be successful in college, that doesn’t hurt those who will be fine in college, but those who won’t. We can sort of cheat them through (combinations of grade inflation and easy majors can probably get anyone within 1σ of normal to a diploma) but even then, they cannot do that level of work, and worse, they graduate with outsized expectations (I graduated therefore I get a nice middle class job, right? Right?) but with no actual skills they can actually trade for a decent living. Now instead of the dumb kids learning carpentry and roofing, they pretend to learn Literature and graduate with no skill at all. Further, there’s no real plan for how to employ those with limited ability. Most of those jobs are either gone to computers and machines or to immigrants or shipped off to Pakistan. Even if we start recognizing that Johnny is stupid, there’s no place in the economy for him, nor is there a welfare program for him. He’s either going to hustle (probably in some form of illegal way) or starve or get hooked on drugs and hopefully take himself out.
The economy has an almost bottomless demand for low skill labor. Amazon, Uber, Walmart, etc.
Do those jobs provide liveable wages? I mean I get that we have some sort of “jobs” for stupid people, but they generally don’t pay enough to live on let alone have a family or not need roommates etc. especially when compared to things like skilled labor.
Walmart pays $20/hr in a second tier city- entry level. So do amazon warehouses. Waiting tables is pretty similar, and has advancement opportunities to bartending, classier establishments, etc, which pay significantly more. Construction starts out in the upper teens with rapid(often twice a year) increases as skills improve.
if you get good at a skill in construction ie carpentry, electrician, plumbing, refrigeration ect ect you can make hilarious amounts of money an hour in the northeast.
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I feel like the USA combination of affluence and low minimum wage means that this is more the case than for other Western economies
Except almost none of these people are making minimum wage.
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Not with the minimum wage, housing regulations, mandatory health insurance, AI, etc.
This simply does not line up with observed reality. Low-skill employers are always hiring, they're advertising heavily for employees, they keep raising wages and improving conditions, and these jobs can't be done by a clanker because the clanker does not have hands.
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They have killed the status on those jobs. Straight to Incels’r US. Back in the day you could work a factory job that sucks, have a still skinny wife, and pump out a couple kids in a 1500 sq ft house. You can still pull that off if you are Hispanic. But not if you are white and even if you are black it’s going to be hard.
It only worked because jobs and incomes for women were scarcer than for young men. Baby Boom wasn't a natural occurrence but deliberate social engineering.
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Lower class native men get in relationships all the time. To the extent that lower class women are less desirable partners, that does go both ways.
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Latino here. I did not know that I got a +2 racial bonus to TFR. How can I unlock this power?
Haven’t you been offered wives from the old country(who want citizenship)?
I have been offered fake marriage for citizenship several times (either for money or to help out my cousins), but never true marriage. I have always refused, because I wanted to keep the option open of marrying a mail-order bride for real.
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You have to invest into latina wife racial skill, even early levels will manifest as decently looking wife, who will pump children in order to get welfare - which is way more than she could earn back home in the shithole she comes from. I would think that you leared this from your race clan/guild already. This strategy is used by many such players, who tunnel new players through VPN from their original servers.
Also probably unspec [Dreaded Jim] from first date conversation rotation.
Immediately prior to a first date with a latina, quick save and respec attribute points from [Dreaded Jim], [Steve Sailer], and [The Motte] to [Bad Bunny], [Karol G], and [J Balvin]. Once her map's "First Bang" waypoint has been unlocked and accessed, the respec can be reversed back to its prior state.
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It's achievement-based. You have to have two kids to unlock the perk.
Fucking win-more mechanics.
I still fondly remember Heroes' Bane, Bioshift, and Gyre Sage (and a bit more) giving me about 22230 power/toughness, which was completely useless against a Hundred Handed One with Holy Mantle.
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You could always do some fuckboi-maxxing and lean into your inner Yeison/Jhonny/Brayan/Kevin.
Then you can tap into the diverse array of unique and scintillating personalities that latinas have to offer.
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Why can Hispanics do it but whites can't? I'm trying to parse what this even means.
A Hispanic that is either first generation born here or illegal/semi legal that came from my Mexico there is no social stigma with being a laborer. A white guy has a stronger expectation to make it into white collar world or higher (boss/capital side).
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Blue-collar white people are a different social class than recent Hispanic immigrants. One’s dating pool is constrained more by class and social expectations than by income per se.
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By working under the table while also claiming benefits (by stealing someone else's identity). I mean, theoretically a white person can do the same, but there aren't entire state governments dedicated to helping them obtain benefits while being illegal immigrants, and entire DA departments unwilling to prosecute them for it. See this comic/infographic, along with the pathetic attempt to debunk it:
https://imgur.com/fwd-fwd-john-legal-vs-juan-illegal-lA0eug9
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/13/facebook-posts/post-comparing-joe-legal-and-jose-illegal-rife-ina/
No undocumented Hispanic immigrant I have ever seen has stolen someone else's identity. They are all scared of la migra and try to interact with the government as little as possible. They do work under the table for cash and avoid payroll taxes, but most of them are at an income bracket where they would only get money back from the IRS from their withholdings if they were working legally.
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It's certainly not due to the overwhelming number of skinny hispanic women in wealthy countries. The TFR of hispanic countries are also now pretty similar to the US.
It’s actually lower in most cases.
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While I agree with your defense of meritocracy, I also think it is possible to over-fetishize g.
The reason I took a longer time for writing my master thesis than most of my peers was (if I say so myself) not that I was dumber than them. Instead it was about a lack of ambition, depression, substandard social skills and so forth. So "can this candidate finish a 12 months thesis in a year?" actually tells you something useful about a person, apart from "what IQ did this guy have at age 10?"
(Of course, your NBA argument applies: differences in g are small within select groups because their effect is oversized. You can study physics while being alarmingly pathological on a lot of different axes. But no amount of conscientiousness, well-adjustedness, healthy eating habits, mental balance, social life, and so will compensate for the handicap of having an IQ of 90. So anyone who struggles with their thesis is unlikely to struggle because of g.)
I would be the last person to claim that conscientiousness is unimportant. ADHD sucks.
But I can take a pill to improve my conscientiousness, and I can't take one that moves my IQ in a positive direction. So it is not nearly as harsh a constraint.
You just need to get everyone else to take pills to move their IQ in a negative direction. In a world of idiots, the moron is king. Hence the push for cannabis legalization.
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There’s nothing I can add other than to reiterate @Corvos and @orthoxerox’s replies. Because classical systems still involve effective, consistent multigenerational meritocracy (ie social mobility), they effectively offer almost the same competence with a huge reduction in unnecessary make-work. Kids studying for 5 hours a day after school is worse for society than them spending that time digging ditches and filling them in; the latter at least involves exercise. Yes, you are impatient, but that is more about you than it is about society.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens. My mother’s family were a mix of middle class for many decades. My father’s family were a mix of shtetl dwellers and Italian Jews who mostly arrived between the 1820s (early for Ashkenazim) and 1890s (with a few later outliers), and who went on to make and lose several fortunes, but who were at the time of his birth as middle class as you can get (think a small town accountant or government worker).
The other thing I want to point out- and I see myself as more expanding on your point than making a different one- is that in developed countries, thé effective floor for functioning people is just not bad enough to complain about. The people who manually harvest crops for twelve hours a day for subsistence wages are foreigners whose children will work in a warehouse, and their children will work for the utility company, and their children will work in offices. Everyone except the fruit picker is doing fine. I use this example not to make a point about immigration, but because there simply are not large numbers of native poor who are functional enough to run this cycle.
@self_made_human does not come from this society. Rapid upward mobility whatever the cost makes a lot more sense if your country has a large class of subsistence farmers. We do not live in a country where working in a sweatshop is aspirational, we live in a country where a mediocre suburban middle class life only requires that one be… mediocre. This is why I’m so hard on ‘accommodations’ in academia, or on the oriental grindset. Your kid having less than perfect grades will not sentence them to decades of subsistence level poverty. It’s ok to be bad at school because the only thing you need to do to have an OK life in America is to… not fuck up. Literally, look up the research on the success sequence.
This is so well said. I should print it out and put it in my office for students to read.
I wonder how much of the culture war can be charitably phrased as: On the one side we have people striving to try to make themselves/America better and on the other side people worrying that this striving is going to fuck things up. (It's not too hard to find examples that work with both red/blue as either side.)
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Hi, can you expand on this point? My position is that there's obviously marginal utility in increasing/decreasing schooling duration/homework, but then that's a very individual thing where some need more and some need less. This individuality expresses itself in extra tutoring (some people need more time than the average to get something) or special classes (some people need less time than the average to get something and is ready for the next thing). Since society most often rule in averages*, then yes an arbitrary fiat of extra 5 hours system-wide is probably going to be bad, probably just as bad if kids spend 5 hours digging. I suppose what I am trying to get at is do you have a different more clarifying example of your position?
* It's been said before but the dream for education is obviously personalized individual study plan suitable for the person. AI and tech seems to be 1 or 2 years from being able to offer this.
First homework is stupid. Even worse it is pointless. It takes the most valuable time of your life for some absolutely marginal advancement in academic performance. If someone can't grok quadratic equations - solving 200 more at home will help? Making them suffer trough war and peace or crime and punishment will make them appreciate literature? That somehow staring at the physics handbook will make them understand relativity?
We treat knowledge as goal not as a tool. Tell the little ones that at the end of the course they will know how to make total synthesis of cocaine and you will have the most attentive chemistry class in the history of the world. And they will do their homework without even being assigned.
Most work you perform during your working years will be stupid and pointless, but you still need to do it. Better that children are taught early to swallow their pride and get shit done even when they don't see the point in it.
You might as well put blinders on the kids to prepare them for the fact many of them will develop vision problems as they get older, and force them to wear fatsuits to get them ready for the obesity many of them will settle into as their metabolism slows, and steal their lunch money to train them for taxes, and...
"Adult life sucks, so we should make life for children suck to prepare them for it" is such an insanely negative-sum, anti-child view that I am filled with shock and outrage every time it comes up. It's like you don't remember what it was like to be a kid, because you don't treat children like people.
From "Book Review: The Cult Of Smart" by Scott Alexander:
And from "Chattel Childhood: and the way we treat children as property" by Aella:
For what it's worth, having seen homeschoolers extensively- the most impressive specimens homeschool through early highschool, but if male they switch to some sort of hybrid system after that(community college/homeschool hybrid is the best). Girls are approval motivated enough to keep themselves on track without a formal class structure. Boys are not. Not self motivated- approval motivated.
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We really need to stop talking about education like we're just educating ancient nobles' children.
Or as if the fact that a handful of related universities in one single country were based on an idea two hundred years ago somehow makes that idea The One True Fundamental Truth globally today.
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Going by the digging ditches comparison, it's also pointless and stupid, but for many kids it would be genuinely more fun and engaging. That's because it has the possibility of a positive reward signal: finishing the ditch. But the quadratic formula is something many genuinely are just not capable of: there is no final "get shit done" point for it.
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And better still that we work on removing the stupid and pointless work as much as possible.
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This sounds like a hack Michelle Pfeiffer would try to educate inner city children.
What would actually happen is that the kids would think you're cool but the minute they had to apply any of the things you said in a more boring, sterile environment (and of course they must) a bunch would get tired and move on to something significantly more stimulating. I don't know what schools you went to but plenty of kids are fucking lazy and need the tripwire of mandatory homework. Plenty of kids would be hooked on every word in one class and then not care about another.
You may have been particularly intelligent and conscientious, most aren't. Unless we're talking purely about schools that cut those people out, kids need to be forced to push through their boredom because work will be boring.
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@quiet_NaN this is interesting to me because I feel like high-school level homework (and to some extent college level) was actually helpful for me.
Doing the readings in history and typing up notes really helped me remember history better Doing problem sets in Calc I-III and professional exams helped me remember concepts better than I would've otherwise (though I still forgot most of them within a few years) Doing coding assignments in CS 101 really helped me be able to code.
Maybe it's more about elementary and middle school homework?
I absolutely agree. I had a math class at uni and the prof gave us hundreds of problems to solve with a promise, that one of them will be exact copy on the exam and that we are allowed to bring solved problems to it. This actually made me go through all the problems. Copying the one I solved from notes on exam helped, but I had perfect score on all the other problems as well. Solving them for a week or so definitely helped. I caught several deficiencies, I taught myself more efficient ways to do checks mid-problem, I even consulted theory as problem solving brought understanding that went beside me at the time, and I just rechecked the theory because it was cool to have more thorough understanding.
It was kind of grueling, but I did not regret it. It was probably better than yet another Netflix binge session.
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There is homework and then there is homework. On one end of the spectrum, you have problem sets designed to help you master algorithms. On the other end, you have things like projects, which Scott correctly defines as "take this subject you already understand, a few sheets of construction paper, scissors, and a computer program such as PowerPoint, and combine them in whatever random way you want as long as it takes a minimum of six hours of time". And there are plenty of those in high school.
In fact, Robin Hanson has a post about how only math homework helps. It probably generalizes to other math-like subjects, like physics and compsci. But it does not justify the three hours of homework a day that kids receive from all their subjects combined.
I've seen the justification that can be paraphrased as "most of them will be doing uninteresting and uninspiring work 9-5, uninteresting and uninspiring homework helps prepare them for the fact that not everything is gonna be exciting edifying self-directed projects all the time".
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Agreed. Doing the individual work is when learning happens. Sitting in lectures has its benefits but we probably do too much of it in high school. Cutting classroom instruction time by 66% with more time to do the work during the day would increase learning.
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I think that math class is probably the worst offender for pointless busywork.
Case in point: Polynomial long division. 100% "we make you learn an algorithm as a proxy for intelligence", 0% "something you will need to know as a prerequisite for understanding something else." The correct place for it would be "Having just discussed the properties of polynomial rings in general, here is as a curiosity a technique of dividing polynomials. You know that it will not be relevant for you exam because it involves just playing an algorithm (possibly even with concrete quantities)."
Instead you get tasks like "one of the factors of x^3+5x^2+7x-3 is (x+3). Factorize x".
People whose skill is to pass 'math' class in high school do not need to worry about being replaced by LLMs, because they were presumably replaced by WolframAlpha in 2011.
This is equivalent of doing multiplication and eventually memorizing the multiplication table during elementary school. With enough "busywork" you will be able to factorize from your head, which will enable you to solve some key problems much, much more quickly "look and see" style ,sifting through unproductive approaches before even trying them. This is cookie cutter thing in many engineering areas, basically anything that uses differential equations which is a really a lot of stuff.
Busywork is really important especially in early stages. You have to go through some shit like memorizing vocabulary when you are learning a new language, before you will be able to do some creative things like translating poetry or doing some Tolkien-like stuff with that language.
No, that is my whole point. Knowing the multiplication table up to 9*9 is a prerequisite for the following:
Anyone who is arguing that kids do not need to learn what 7*8 is denying the need for learning arithmetic at all. (There are probably people arguing that you do not need to know arithmetic because computers exist. I disagree. Knowing how to arrive at a result without a computer in principle, even if a million times slower and error prone, is useful in itself. Besides, with LLMs, this argument generalizes against anything you learn in high school.)
I am fine with busywork which is an instrumental goal for something worthier. I learned my multiplication table because I knew that it would enable me to do long multiplication in base 10. Then in fifth grade, they tried to make me learn 2..9 * 11..19, and I was not having it. If you are in base 10, the utility of knowing non-trivial products of integers takes a sharp dive after 99. I felt that if I gave in and learned what 137 was, they would come around in sixth grade and demand I learned by rot what 1315 or 237 was. (For factorization, the useful thing would be to quickly identify a prime factor in any integer in a given range, but even this obviously does not scale.)
A lot of the stuff kids learn in math class, painful as it may be, is actually useful in some fields. I don't think that youths should be forced to learn what a logarithm is, but they should be clearly told that any subject up to the softest social sciences will expect them to know, so that they can make an informed decision.
Other stuff has value because it teaches core concepts of math, such as proof by induction or the definition of real numbers. Sadly, people only learn what real numbers are when they go to university, and proof by induction in high school is turned into a mockery by turning it to just another pointless algorithm which can be used to prove increasingly pointless sum formulas by rote.
Wait - you value this, but not polynomial division? They're both things you can just ask the computer to do for you instead, but at least polynomial division requires you to hunt down a computer algebra system; long division capability come pre-installed on every phone.
Polynomial division is IMHO a curiosity.
Long division crops up every time you need want to split the bill.
Polynomial division might crop up in the wild if you want partial fraction decomposition, which I guess you might want if you are dealing with rational functions and want to numerically evaluate them or calculate their anti-derivatives. While I am sure that rational functions have their uses, my gut feeling is that they are both too narrow to pop up in physics a lot (where you will frequently have square roots placed so that your functions can not easily be transformed into rational functions) and too inconvenient to be preferred for empirical models.
Factorization of an integer is a hard but finite problem. Factorization of a polynomial is in general just not possible exactly. You can test if 7, 13, 17, 19, 23, ... etc happen to divide 3071 to factorize it. You can not test if x-1, x-1.1, x-sqrt(42+sqrt(42)) etc are factors of 5x5+4x4+7x**2-2x-2, because there are countably many algebraic numbers which could be a root.
I think that we learned both polynomial division and solving quadratic equations around grade eight. Solving quadratics in something which I would call bloody useful. Quadratic functions are the first non-trivial functions students can tackle, and quadratic equations pop up all the time in high school physics.
I strongly disagree with the sentiment that math skills which are less readily automated are more valuable. To grok (I'm reclaiming that word) how multiplication and division work doing long multiplication and division is definitely more useful than just using a calculator. Nobody needs the numeracy to be actually excellent at these operations any more. Anyone whose job actually requires them to multiply five-digit numbers will hopefully have the good sense not to try that by hand.
My more general point might be that I do not want students to be excellent at applying any algorithm. They will always suck very hard compared to the simplest of computers. Still, it is useful to demonstrate that you can apply an algorithm, even if it is just at toy-sized problems.
Also, applying a pre-learned algorithm is not math. Some algorithms (e.g. solving an equation for a variable) are genuinely useful in proofs, and thus are valid technical skills to learn to be able to engage in math, same as being able to write symbols with a pencil. And of course, 'can you apply an algorithm halfway reliably?' is also a good way to check if someone has a basic understanding of the algorithm in question (even if it does not probe if they understand why it works), which is why rotating trees by pencil is a staple in CS exams.
Still, for school math, I feel that 'can apply pre-learned algorithms' should earn a passing grade, not an actually good grade, which should require thinking.
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Where do you have proof by induction in high school?
IB does proof by induction in high school.
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In Finland in the mid 90s.
Of course that was by far the most useless thing they ever taught in high school math here (and in fact one of the few useless things).
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Any East Asian education system would touch upon proof by induction, and most certainly of any Math-specialized classes. Seems like AP Calculus briefly touches upon it. IB Math Higher Level and Further Level certainly does. The British A-Level Further Maths also does. India probably does.
Obviously teaching material quality varies and I'm not a math expert but proof by induction might not be accessible but definitely within reach for most high schoolers out there.
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You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class. I have seen many such examples as my country transitioned from socialism to capitalism after 1989. Optically your family may have been lower class as your peers in school during socialism, but your father/grandpa was a former math professor or successful entrepreneur who's whole property was expropriated by commies, and who was forced to become janitor or stoker/boilerman (a popular punishment by the party for people with wrong pedigree for some reason). You still had access to better homeschooling style education, you probably read books since you were 4 or 5, and you were bored at school thanks to access to huge library, you probably know how to play an instrument or two, and you know how to speak multiple languages - and all that despite barely having enough to eat. Nevertheless, you are in fact genetically upper middle class, that is your potential.
I think that especially people in US have distorted view of what true class means with huge number of immigrants, who often flee political persecution completely broke, and who are such temporarily impoverished upper class people. It is different from permanently poor chav/white trash lower class of people who are there for centuries, often due to their genetic issues. And I mean it literally - some of the most fucked up populations suffer from centuries of first-cousin inbreeding with huge accumulated genetic load.
In Paul Fussell's nomenclature, the class of a math professor is definitely the 'upper-middle' class, not the upper class. Math is much too useful to appeal to the upper class (except perhaps as an eccentricity signal 'I am feeling so confident in my place in society that I can pick a subject used by people who need to think to earn a living, because nobody could possibly mistake me for them').
They may not be as rich, but they were genetically up there with doctors and lawyers or upper management and other elite hired white collar professionals who are considered as lower-to-middle upper class. That is my whole point. I'd say it is culturally upper class similarly to composers or musical virtuosos and other gentlemen who exhibited enough brilliance that upper-upper class wanted to be around them and even marry them. There is similar story with Henri Pointcare for math - he was born into low upper class or maybe upper middle class according to your evaluation - with his mother being daughter of minor industrialist and father being professor of Medicine. Throughout his life Pointcare was rubbing elbows with the most influential politicians and elites. Niels Bohr had almost the same situation - father was professor at university and mother was daughter of Jewish banker. Bohr was also highly influential and definitely upper class when it comes to his contacts and power.
But in the end it is besides the point, I think you got the gist of the argument. There is a difference between rich family impoverished by revolution or relocated by Hitler, Stalin or some other pogrom, or even stricken hard by string of bad luck such as health issue, gambling or other addiction - and a true low class of literal inbred morons.
Doctors used to be and top lawyers are OWNERS. Math professors are not. That's why math professors aren't upper class.
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It is NOW, but back in G. H. Hardy's day...
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upper class? hahahahahahaha
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Makes me think of Hasan Piker, who appears to think that he grew up basically working class because his family was briefly of such diminished means that he was reduced to hiring the services of a second rate riding instructor.
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It's additionally confused when the immigrant/native thing gets treated as the only marker of class and/or is seized upon by first/2nd gens as a tool of giving them greater privilege. The amount of times I've had interactions with people talking about bias and classism in the West when they're top 5% in their country of origin and have been the beneficiary and performer of 1000-fold the oppressive activity on their own Untermensch.
Can we create a name for this?
The Pedro?
As in Pedro Pascal.
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Many such cases. You reminded me of the Claudine Gay - the recently axed first black woman Harvard president. Apparently her family were magnates from Haiti who owned a concrete plant in Haiti, with various shenanigans especially with regards to reconstruction after earthquake with Haitian politicians having shares in the company for some reason.
But yeah, she is marginalized person who needs affirmative action.
My law school class was full of black students who recieved explicit LSAT score adjustments in admissions and a frankly obscene amount of scholarship money/free resources by both the university and the law firms trying to pump up their diversity numbers. Not a single one came from an "underprivileged" background. They were the children of bankers and lawyers. One was a literal European aristocrat on their mother's side. It's a really radicalizing experience to be lectured to about oppression by someone who went to boarding school when you're the one two weeks behind because your student loan check hasn't come in yet and you can't buy books.
When I think back to what was the first step for me off the progressive reservation (this was back in 2013 or so), a coworker of mine was arguing that I (a man) was privileged compared to her. This is a woman who went to boarding school at Andover, spent most of her high school and college years snorting coke, and had parents who bought her a condo in SF as a graduation present. While I literally grew up on food stamps.
Amusingly, I’ve spoken to Latino H1B’s who were offended at the implication of being underprivileged.
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Many such cases at Google. It's absolutely bizarre for a public school/public college alumnus seeing those prep school->Ivy League women argue that anyone else is privileged. What's that you're saying? I can't hear you around that silver spoon. Oh, it's platinum, my mistake.
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I think that a case could be made that what made SJ so appealing to the upper-middle (and middle) class was that by denying class, it made them free to be as classist. Before SJP, expressing contempt of the working class would have gone badly in mostly left-leaning academic circles.
Now, it is totally permissible, because being working class does not make you oppressed. After all, with blank-slatism, everyone who does not manage to earn a degree in grievance studies despite not belonging to an oppressed group is clearly just lazy.
So if you are a white woman whose daddy paid for your college so you could work in HR, you a free to feel vastly superior to the proletariat in a way which would have utterly embarrassed any upper-middle person in the 50s. Just take care to refer to them as "deplorables" or "MAGA base" who can not even bother to educate themselves about what is really the secret handshakes of your class membership (like the updates to the pride flag, pronouns, or knowing when you are supposed to do a land acknowledgement) but what you conveniently pretend is the basis of being a decent person.
Which is why the same people also deny sex, which made them free to be as sexist; and deny race, which made them free to be as racist.
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There's obviously no way to figure this out, but I truly wonder what race relations would be like if all racial agitating was treated like the N-word and limited to American descendants of slaves (and Injuns and railway workers)
It has to be infuriating to hear this shit from not just from ethnic groups that are richer than the white median, but from people like Ilhan Omar who ran cause they fucked up their countries.
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>Some Brahmin whose family had literal slaves in India and was driven to private school in a Rolls lumping himself in with impoverished lead-poisoned African-Americans in Flint, MI as part of the BIPOC struggle.
>"You and I are the same because a teenager once told me my lunch smelled weird."
Or the whole Apu thing when I'd argue the Simpsons targeted the Scottish (Willie) and generic Germanic central European (Uter) more directly with lazy negative stereotyping
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“BIPOC” explicitly excludes dot Indians.
Life can uh, find a way, though.
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We weren't really rich (more middle class) and being black they probably blended in better, but apparently my sister's friends got a bit weird when they realized she was slumming it. Which...I kinda get. We found it frustrating too.
Was it a phase? How did she turn out?
Her run-ins with the law and rampant rebelliousness in high school appear to have been a phase. The damage that phase did to her life prospects (like missing out on college) seems to be more permanent.
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Most people are lying scumbags who'll try to get away with precisely as much bullshit as people are likely to let them get away with.
We have gone farther than this. Being the lying scumbag would not have been a thing in the small town I grew up in.
Now you basically need to be a lying scumbag to just get average opportunity, so everyone does it.
It reminds me a lot of the steroid era and Barry Bonds. He was already a HOF, but everyone else was doing steroids because it had tacit permission from Bud Selig. So he started doing steroids to be on an equal footing.
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I think the best counterargument is this @daguerrean's post from the latest fun thread. The more meritocracy you have, the more soul-crushing the grind becomes. Personal tutoring can't get you from 1000 to 1400 SAT points, but it can get you from 1400 to 1450. Which means you will lose your spot in Harvard to someone like you who has spent even more time on grinding and got all the way to 1455. The end result is South Korea, which is great to import cars and electronics from, but is a pretty terrible place to live in, no one wants to procreate there.
Yes, examining every single child and sorting them globally is a more efficient use of their brainpower, but is this efficiency worth it? You yourself mentioned that class and accumulated wealth are passable proxies for g. Any significant outliers are usually noticed and get to advance, not to the very top, but if their intelligence is heritable, their children can take the next step. Your subcontinental ancestors probably went too far with the rigidity of jātis, but a more flexible (yet still rigid) European class system works. I'm not saying it's perfect, but turning the dial all the way to the max, East Asian style, is not the best option.
That's just a metric problem. Ivies in the 1920s had very hard entrance exams, and also forced the gals to be pretty and the guys to be strapping jocks.
Ivy entrance rates back in the day were pretty generous and you could still get a solid thumb on the scale. The exams were hard, but they relied on knowledge of things like Greek and Latin and Classical Civilization that the working classes just didn’t have. Plus there’s that efficiency thing, people back then didn’t even think of applying if they weren’t already ‘in’.
Still, a test maxing nerd would not get in unless he was actually brilliant. They let in mostly actually rounded elites
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People say they believe this when they argue IQ is fake, but whenever I try to clarify it I get ghosted. I ask them, so, you believe a student that scores 80 on an IQ test, if they study and work hard, can become a doctor? And you would be happy seeing this doctor?
Nobody ever says yes! On some level they appreciate that IQ tests are measuring something real, they're just uncomfortable with the brutality of the intellectual dick measuring.
You see the same dynamic in fitness hobbies. Genetic advantages are obvious to everyone, for the other guys who are bigger and stronger, but most guys will tell you that they themselves have mediocre genetics and that all their accomplishments are the result of hard work. Related, I suppose, to the Fundamental Attribution Error: actions by others reflect innate traits, actions we take reflect contingent situations and decisions. I'm in good shape because I put in so much work, fat people and weak people and slow people just need to put the work in.
In my BJJ gym, I've noticed it extends to the point that guys nearly all perceive themselves to be smaller than they really are. The big guys think they are closer to normal, the median guys think they are small, the little guys think they are tiny. When a bigger guy, often the same size, wins the smaller guy, often the same size, he writes it off as "He's bigger than me I never stood a chance" and doesn't think the bigger guy worked harder than him at training. When a bigger guy beats a smaller guy, he thinks of it as his hard work and skill that made him better.
I'm vulnerable to this error myself, I think of myself as an average size guy, then I'm reading boxing history and most of the Heavyweight Champions before the 60s were my size or smaller, hell even Tyson in his prime was just a few pounds heavier and an inch shorter. At my whiniest, I've been known to complain that weight classes are stupid and it should be height classes, weight is a decision only height is innate. Why should the purple belt benefit from years of experience and that's ok, but years of hard work in the weight room are an unfair advantage?
One of the reasons why people BS so much is that their own mind is constantly hard at work at lying to them, the conscious experiencer, before it lies externally. To be a good bullshitter you have to drink your own kool-aid first. Most of them have no inclination or reason or ability to discern between their own honest thoughts and less honest thoughts. They don't catch their own mind in the act. This is one of many reasons why the world would be a better place if every person spent an hour in meditation every day.
Absolutely. It's the elephant and the stake in the ground. It's hard for people to understand that they've grown and changed since high school.
Heh, this reminds me of the time I realized I was no longer the scrawny kid I was in school and college. I was riding the subway home, and at my station two high-school-aged blokes were gabbing on the platform too close to the train doors, blocking our way off the train. I made a split-second decision: "it's rush hour, so I should be reasonably safe doing something rude, but prosocial, like bumping into them to signal my displeasure". Thinking I would need some extra impulse not to bounce back off them, I led with my shoulder. Bowled right through them like I was the Kool-Aid Man or Miley Cyrus. Told my wife I expected more resistance and she looked at me like I was mildly retarded.
Am I the only one who never thought of themselves as scrawny and always found the pencil-neck geek stereotype baffling?
Not that I was fat or buff as a teen but my clothes size made it pretty clear "scrawny" or "thin" really didn't apply.
Well, figure if you were top 5% in size/muscle when you were 15, then there were nineteen other fifteen year olds in Finland who looked at you and thought to themselves "Wow, that guy is bigger and stronger than me, I'm scrawny and weak!" It's an ordinal value, not an absolute one, so people are comparing themselves to others, and disproportionately everyone will compare themselves to the apex.
People tend to form durable internal identities during their youth, I would say 15 years old is pretty typical. Almost every male, whether you work out during that time or not, is smaller and scrawnier and weaker than he will be later, so at the time he is forming his internal sense of himself, he perceives the world that way. The typical fifteen year old boy compares himself to his father, he is smaller and weaker than his father. If he's not on a sports team, he is likely smaller and weaker than the kids who are on a sports team; if he is on a sports team, at 15 he is likely smaller and weaker than the older kids he plays with on the same team or at the same club. If a teenage boy has a job, he is likely working with adult men who are bigger and stronger than he is.
People don't tend to update those internal identities over time as quickly or as thoroughly as we ought to. For me, I went from rowing at 155# freshman year of college to getting into lifting and weighing around 195-205# every year since graduation, but my identity formed when I still thought of myself as smaller than that, and it takes conscious effort to think of myself as a heavyweight.
Yeah, I don't notice the 99% of dudes at Costco to compare myself to, I notice the 2 dudes who look like they can bench 3 plates.
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Well, I weighed 50kg when I graduated from high school and 60kg when I finished college 5 years later, so I was scrawny. No fat, but very little meat on my bones.
I was around 80 kg at the end of high school. A couple of friends in university absolutely refused to believe I didn't lift regularly (nevermind I hadn't seen the inside of a gym since that one time in civilian service). That's genetics for you (which also made it a huge pain in the ass to find jackets and shirts that would fit me at the shoulders without being massive tents when I was in better shape than now).
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Yeah there's that too, but that's partly a separate thing; outdated schemas/models/modes of mind. It may play a significant part in people's BS though. Good thinking.
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and uncomfortable with the implications of the results of those IQ tests when looking at populations rather than individuals.
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It's much more terrifying than that. There were two rough branches of the old eugenics movement, American and European. The European school of thought was that to get more quality people, those people should have more children. Deliberately breed your best specimens to get better.
The American school, OTOH, was more concerned with raising the floor by culling the lowest quality people. Ergo, Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood, inspired by the simple notion that if all the black people have abortions, then in a generation or two there just won't be any more black people. Trawling through American history, you'll occasionally stumble across references like "during this decade, the state of X sterilized 50,000 people, mostly the indigent and feeble-minded". This culminated in the 30's when American progressive eugenicists were quite proud to announce that finally a world leader had embraced the obvious logic of their approach to the selective breeding on the animal Man for the improvement of all society - and I'm sure you can guess who they were talking about, and how quickly they all distanced themselves from those positions and claims after 1945.
Basically, leftists have a cognitohazard blind spot on this topic because if they allow themselves to even consider biological inequality then the superstructure of their belief system goes right back to the stuff of nightmares.
I don't know how serious you're being, but Sanger was explicitly anti-abortion. She lumped it in the same basket as infanticide, and wanted widespread contraception in order avoid those things.
I just read Woman and the New Race. Though she praises eugenics, she's more a Malthusian than anything. She really thinks it's the problem of too many kids, or that unfit people shouldn't breed because they can't offer care. Really, her understanding of genetics is pretty vague. She's just as concerned with contraception for those with Tuberculosis as for those with any heritable condition.
Huh, looks like you're mostly right, though the sources I see to double check seem to suggest that she was mostly opposed to abortion because of the high level of danger to the mother.
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I think this goes too far - she certainly was anti-illegal abortions and preferred contraception, but I wouldn't think of her as anti-abortion in a pro-life sense.
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Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis. They were European, they were less than left wing, and they practiced both positive and negative eugenics. More Aryan Uber-babies with three blue eyes (more is better), fewer gypsies and schizophrenics.
The Right is hardly over its own hangups in that department.
I have only rather cursory knowledge of the history of eugenics but based on nothing but this I think some things need to be pointed out. Eugenics was ascendant in the specific historical context of the post-WW1 Western world as a response to the disruptive consequences of the war. Huge numbers of healthy and virile men were killed and wounded which was bound to result in long-term demographic decline. Traditional moral codes were collapsing, divorce rates skyrocketed, promiscuity was on the rise, cultural decadence was everywhere, as was alcoholism, drug addiction etc. The finances of most nations were in disarray, as was international trade.
As a result, proponents of eugenics were generally concerned that a) the birthrate of socially desirable elements will decline, both an absolute numbers and in relation to the birthrate of socially undesirable elements (the feeble-minded, people with hereditary mental illness and disabilities, alcoholics etc.) b) the foundering national economy was going to be burdened by the ever-rising social costs of feeble-minded, morally imbecile social groups growing in number.
It’s small wonder that positive and negative eugenics usually went hand in hand in every nation and federal state which adopted it. (Did it not?) Those who believed in eugenics wanted to curb two larger negative trends overall. It didn’t have that much to do with ideology. Eugenics was even popular in liberal democracies.
With respect to the Nazis I think there’s a politically motivated tendency to gloss over two aspects. One is that there was a secret state campaign to kill the mentally ill and people with hereditary diseases, as others have mentioned, generally called “Merciful death” (Gnadentod) – the expression “Aktion T4” was only invented after the war – specifically aimed at freeing up healthcare resources and diverting them to the war effort (the armed forces were going to need doctors, nurses and hospital beds), plus reducing state healthcare expenditures overall.
It thus had a practical (but of course wholly unethical) purpose and was unique in the world in the sense that it meant extermination and not only sterilization of socially undesirables (which was also a state policy enacted earlier). For this reason I’s argue that it cannot be considered an example of eugenics, which wasn’t even a word the Nazis used (“racial hygiene” was used instead). It has also become common to call this particular policy a case of “euthanasia” which is completely dishonest BS, of course. Another aspect of the Nazi policy of mandatory sterilization was that it specifically targeted people with black ancestry, which is not something that eugenics as such entailed in any other nation, as far as I know.
Eugenics was popular much earlier than that, it was a popular ethos of secular progressives who were very much into Darwinism and espoused social Darwinism as a scientific way to rule nations. It was espoused by Sir Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenics and Darwin's cousin. It is not dissimilar to current progressive or rationalist ethos: we progressives use science and rationality to improve humanity. Plebs and especially religious backward morons may see things like sterilization as morally abhorent, however they do not see the purity of our work which will diminish pain for all the future generations. The utility gains of our girm work has almost no bounds, we need to find our courage and moral firmness to go through this.
It is also unsurprising what happened after it all failed. Progressives as usual declared that eugenic progressives were not true progressives, and that in fact they were far right Nazis - the same as they washed their hands from support of Stalinism and many other crimes they came up with. But it is in fact in their DNA.
I agree but as far as I know it was after the catastrophe of WW1 that the project of eugenics assumed a sense of urgency in the minds of its proponents.
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For the Nazis, the individual was completely subordinated to the Volk. The victims of T4 were considered genetically inferior, so they would not give birth of the Germans of tomorrow, and also unable to work for the present needs of their Volk, so for the Nazis they served no purpose, and were thus killed.
To be considered a useless mouth to feed, being disabled was not enough. After all, a woman who has lost a leg in an accident can still serve her people and fatherland by giving birth to a lot of soldiers and soldier-birthers. Only being disabled because of a genetic disease was worthy of death by CO poisoning in a van, because in that case she might contaminate the gene pool of the next generation.
The difference between eugenics and Rassenhygiene seems like a particularly fine hair to split.
Eugenics is basically: "Not all genetic variants are equally valuable and we should strive to increase the quality of our gene pool."
Rassenhygiene is: "The gene pool (not that they had the word, but certainly an equivalent concept) of our noble Volk is under assault from both without and within. Other, lesser races try to contaminate our noble bloodlines with their inferior heritage, and undesirable traits manifest themselves sometimes even within pure-blooded families. Like dog breeders, we must therefore prevent our women from coupling with inferior men and cull anyone whose blood would weaken the German Volk no matter their heritage."
If this does not convince you, consider the positive eugenics the Nazis engaged in. Lebensborn was the program led by Himmler himself. This included finding racially superior children among the Untermenschen in the occupied territories, which were then kidnapped and Germanized (or gassed, if they the SS doctors thought they had genetic problems or were not racially valuable enough to contribute to the Volk).
So I am with @self_made_human here, Nazi Germany went all-in on both positive and negative eugenics, albeit with a clear flavor of racial purity.
Noted. My basic point is this: numerous Western nations practiced eugenics back then, including Germany. With the exception of the latter, these policies did not entail extermination or open racial discrimination anywhere. To address these two Nazi policies and then categorize them as ‘eugenics’ is thus biased and frankly propagandistic in my view.
Unfortunately or not, that applies to eugenics as a whole. At its core it’s a collectivist policy that subordinates the autonomy of the individual to the interests of ‘the people’, putting an obvious strict limit on reproductive freedom if it is deemed necessary.
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This is silly. Nazis borrowed heavily from American Eugencists and FDR borrowed heavily from Mussolini. Modern leftism derives a lot of its roots and ideas from 1920s American Progressives, 1920s Eugenicists, Facists, and the USSR Communists. One of their most major arguments with Fascism, for instance, is its aesthetics (see the newest, or one of the newer Ezra Klein podcasts where he and his "fascism expert" guest malign how fascists deride fat people and ugly art/architecture). I'd agree with the idea that there is a very fine line between a modern progressive and a person who thinks we should re-start mass sterilization, and most of that fine line is IQ denialism.
Other types of ideology can weather the storm. The anti-slavery folks of the 1850s didn't think blacks were equal in talent to whites, they derived their views in other ways. So could the modern Christian conservative.
That is American Eugenicists -> Fascists -> FDR -> American Progressives -> Modern Leftists. If I'll give you the last one for free, which still leaves four degrees of separation.
I will grant you that the early pro-choice movement likely did not consider every possible child equally valuable for society for reasons of genetics and race as well as environment. (Apart from the race aspect, I do not think they are totally wrong. "You exist because your daddy was too drunk to wear a condom correctly and your mum too optimistic to go for plan B, and because abortion is illegal" is not a great set of dice rolls for a new character. Giving the women choice is a non-evil (unless you are Christian) to counter the unfortunate selection effects of g-dependent birth control).
Okay, walk me through this.
The SJP are the ones in IQ denial, correct?
What exactly is IQ denial for you? The negation of HBD? The rejection of intelligence as a concept of colonizers? Accepting IQ, but denying any heritability (blank-slatism)?
I have to admit that 'a SJP who embraces HBD' does not invoke a particularly coherent image in my head, same as for 'a nihilist who finds Jesus' or 'a triangle without corners'.
Is the idea that they would embrace HBD and basically advocate for forced sterilization of low g people to raise population intelligence? Or that they would embrace white supremacism? Or that they would double down on their initial ideas about group differences, and try to form the world towards their own ideals, forcibly sterilizing smart Ashkenazim and stupid members of what they identify as low-g races to create an utopia where race is uncorelated with intelligence?
Given that forced sterilizations seem bad and any woke could be reading our conversation at this very moment, do you think it is safe to make them even aware of the fact that you consider them in IQ denial lest they cross your thin line and turn into monsters?
Or is it possible that you were simply signaling 'boo outgroup' by saying 'if $enemy realized ${thing they deny}, they would do ${evil action}'.
I wouldn't dare rely merely on the fallacy of inheritance. Rather I would say that most of the bigger ideas remain the same. The Modern Leftist vision for Banks, Tech, and Medicine, for example, isn't a socialist system, its a fascist system. Private actors ostensibly maintain ownership of the means of production, but their ability to make meaningful decisions that the regime disagrees with is practically zero (this has yet to happen with tech, but the Biden administration showed their hand and vision WRT that sector).
They also routinely deploy street militia to agitate and intimidate. A holdover. Still obsessed with race, just in a different way. Still obsessed with abortion and fertility control. And much more if we want to continue going down that way.
I will proceed as if this means "Social Justice Person(People?)" The correct notation I am aware of is SJW.
Any and all.
If you took the rest of the worldview, which says that abortion is great, the state should be involved with everyone's business all the time, the poor must be provided welfare and healthcare so they dont die in the street, and the state should spend vast amounts of money on education and childcare. You get to Eugenics very quickly if you don't have blank slatism. Its the only way to avoid human suffering and a permanent class of wards of the state. Sterilization of Low-g people is the low hanging fruit. Noticing that certain groups are different in average g is step 2. Sterilizing Ashkenazim may be a thing some places do out of tribal self preservation as the Nazis did. Who knows what exact type of derangement would emerge. I certainly didnt anticipate in 2015 that 10 years later the progressive shibboliths would be chicks with dicks playing high school track meets and Somali fraudsters shouldn't be deported, but here we are.
Forced sterilizations are only bad if you are Christian. If they are not they should advocate for them based on their principles. I think, currently laid bare they would be forced to openly advocate for the abortion of all white male children. Which would show them to the world as their true selves.
"If only my opponents actually followed what I think their principles are they would be shown as
their true selvesthe complete opposite of who they are" is an argument that doesn't even work in practice against Christians. And Christians have a literal book they purport to follow the teaching of, on pain of infinite torture in hell.More options
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Judging by urban TFR, mass sterilization has been ongoing in progressive areas (and progressive countries more broadly) for quite some time now.
They prefer the imported humans over the domestic ones- once the economic opportunity per capita to support a middle class vanishes, the limited number of spaces at the top means they can simply staff them all with IQ denialists, and the low-IQ will keep the people who would have been the middle in line.
This is European domestic policy in a nutshell.
Of course- they had "alternate ways of knowing" and "it's just not Heckin' Nice", which is part of how modern progressives delude themselves into the pretense that they're still the anti-slavery faction (while doing literally everything they can to impose it, like importing an underclass that is indistinguishable from a slave class in the way the population is permitted to treat them, then pushing the costs of that onto the people who now have to compete with those slaves by giving them benefits reserved for citizens).
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I find it amusing to point out that, in America, modern day positions on abortion have very little correlation with 1930 positions on abortion, but a lot of correlation with 1930 views on eugenics. Eugenics was, in the American sense, a progressive movement, albeit one which looks kinda strange today- just like temperance.
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Yes, that's literally the example I was talking about. Progressives in charge of American Eugenics organizations in the early 30's had very kind words to say about the "fine Mr. Hitler" for finally being willing to try to implement "sterilize all the bad people" on a national level. Then of course, things went a little off the rails, to put it lightly. The right/left divide was... weirder back then. A couple years after that, leftist propogandists were all but begging the US to not get involved in Europe and just let the Nazis and Soviets conquer the place, please bro, remember how much the trenches in WW1 sucked, just stay out. And then Hitler betrayed Stalin, broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and those same propogandists literally had their anti-war books and records recalled to be replaced with paeans to the glory of battle.
But for the overall point, imagine if you believed in HBD and that it was scientifically possible to selectively breed humans just like any other animal and also had a powerful technocratic impulse to run roughshod over democracy and liberty in favor of expert-driven perfection of the masses.
My thesis is that if many progressives allowed themselves to really accept that dumb, violent people have dumb, violent kids, then the same impulse that drives them to ban plastic straws would drive them to support mass sterilization campaigns - rather like it did the last time they considered HBD fit for consideration.
OTOH, they might actually support killing criminals again, so there'd possibly be some upside.
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They're also the primary reason the left distanced itself from eugenics.
The US left still loves Planned Parenthood and Harvard-educated experts; they just like to ignore why Planned Parenthood was started and what Harvard-educated experts said on the topic before the Nazis made the concept verboten.
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One problem with the Nazis is that they were very, very, very bad with eugenics.
Like about as backwards in their biggest focus as you can be. Total unforced error, and extremely ironic given the manpower of the Manhattan Project.
You kinda skipped that detail.
That depends on what you think they were optimizing for.
Not winning a major war or increasing average human intelligence, that's for damn sure.
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The Holocaust was just plain old ethnic hatred, not eugenics. It was never presented as eugenics. The Jews were not dumb, or inferior, they were the enemy. Secretly controlling the banks and puppeteering the Allies against the Germans. They had to be removed from society in order to safeguard the German people. That was the story the Nazis told. (For a long while they were even pretending to be resettling them, rather than admitting they were killing them.)
Aktion T4 was the eugenics program, it focused on killing the disabled.
Sterilization programs went on after the war, in places like Sweden and Switzerland, until the 1970s.
In Greenland, as we learned recently, until 1990s.
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The Nazis both a) backed down on aktion t4, although they tended to quietly reinstate it and b) openly referred to the Jews as inferior repeatedly, running a eugenics program that specifically wanted to produce Aryans.
For the Nazis, a central example of inferior races would be the Slavic peoples. Obviously they should be replaced with Germans for most purposes, but for the time being they could still serve the Reich better through labor than death.
By contrast, the Jews were considered a parasite race. I think that an analogy would be to imagine that we suddenly discover vampires (e.g. of world of darkness) are living among us, killing with impunity, enjoying superpowers, making life miserable for the mortals through manipulating state affairs like they have been doing for millennia.
I do not think that most humans would support a policy of "merely take away their civil rights and companies, but leave them otherwise in peace to use their supernatural skills to scheme their way back into power".
For the Nazis, the two existential threats to the Reich were also Jewish in nature: the US (controlled by Jewish bankers) and the USSR (based on the writings of the Jew Marx, with plenty of Jews among the Soviet elite).
The analogy of the people as a human body ("Volkskoerper") is a common Nazi one. For the Nazis, the Jews were basically a potentially life-threatening infectious disease (like smallpox) of the body of the people, whose eradication was imperative. (I'd argue that they would have viewed the 'gypsies' as a less serious infection, an annoyance which should be wiped out where found but ultimately not a threat to the survival of the Reich.)
This explains why the Nazis started the Shoa before they had won their war, and spent a lot of resources direly needed in what they considered the war for the survival of the German people on their genocide project. Why they kept up the killing even when the Allies advanced and it became apparent that they would not win the war. The holocaust was never a bonus objective for them. It was an independent goal which was arguably as important to them as winning their war.
(In case I am somehow unclear: the Nazis were, in my not so humble opinion, horribly wrong about the Jews (among other topics). The group responsible for millennia of human misery is not the 'Jewish race' or some blood-sucking monsters, but good old h. sapiens torturing his own, and the fucking Nazis were clearly prime examples of their species in that regard.)
I mean, I would at least try imprisoning the vampires and harvesting their blood to keep us all immortal. I don't recall all the caveats of being a ghoul though.
I think the obvious danger is the blood bond. You would want a lot of vitae donors, preferably late generation, so you can feed them using blood of non-human animals.
The effects of drinking the mixed vitae from a lot of different donors i poorly studied, but there is some cause for concern. The side effects of being a ghoul seem manageable, possibly frenzy checks.
To my knowledge, nobody has yet written up an EA impact analysis of ghoulifying the human population.
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Man, imagine if the Nazis actually had a categorization scheme by race that informed their views on eugenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_racial_theories
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It's interesting to imagine an alternate history where the Nazis had been mildly pro-Jewish. Like, instead of trying to slaughter Jews, they had recruited Jews to help with the war effort.
The Nazis as Nazis wouldn't exist were it not for the failed communist civil war, led by jews. Hell, if Jews weren't who they are Hitler would have never started hating their guts in University. So I find it really hard to imagine such an alternative universe.
I see a report of a comment and I usually check the list of past warnings / bans / AAQCs. Yours is just a long list of crap comments. No AAQCs. Looking through your comment history its just nothing interesting or substantial. I could sum up your stance on every issue as "we should defect harder". With a 4channers sense of what is appropriate, so sometimes you'll suggest things like murdering the wife and children of the healthcare CEO that was killed.
I really don't think this place is right for you. I think you should leave and there is nothing here for you. Your occasional rule-breaking is redeemed by nothing so I don't think we should have to put up with modding you. This comment and most of your other rule breaking violations are not enough to justify a permaban. So this will be a 30-day ban and I'll add a note to have future bans also be a minimum of 30 days.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/364212?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/2368/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/355052?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1841/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/319738?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/274640?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1249/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/269389?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1100/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/236406?context=8#context https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/232497?context=8#context
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He might have decided to look at things in a nuanced way -- to decide that Jews had good aspects and bad aspects. And that in terms of his goals of creating a unified German super-state, it might be better to put Jews in the role of junior partners, not enemies.
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If Hitler hating jews was the jews' fault, is white people being hated by plenty of people the white people's fault?
It's not like whites haven't not just "corroded", but destroyed many societies (while replacing them with their own, which is a different society even if by some standards it is better).
You'll get no argument from me there, the Eternal Anglo state is directly responsible for WW1.
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Even if was the Jews' fault in some sense, it doesn't need to have followed that Hitler's policies would be anti-Jewish to the point of actual genocide.
That being said, I agree with the basic point that it's illogical and inconsistent to hold up Jew hatred as convincing evidence of Jewish misbehavior.
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This website would be bilingual, and probably not for pleasant reasons.
Not pleasant? Speak for yourself!
I've seen how HOI4 games go when both sides get nukes...
Wait that actually sounds cool, how is that?
I'm a big paradox enjoyer but I've never dabbled in HOI4
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Didn’t they get rid of the Jews because they were too clever and people started to think they did societal harm? Good at inventing tech, but would also financially swindle you or push bad pathologies like Sigmund Freud. It seems like every American pop star (or black rapper) had a Jew managing them and pushing their sexuality at a young age. Onlyfans created by a Jew. Something about Jewishness they seem to excel at those roles.
We can’t help but watch and follow along, but 90% of the time it seems like it’s a Jew that created it. My gut says they were also doing things like creating onlyfans back then.
If you believe the stories literal mother-daughter tag-team naked dancers and pimping in berlin.
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The irony there is that the vast majority of Jews who were exterminated were not the integrated, typically pretty secular, educated urban elites.
It was the rural devout Jews. They had neither the means to flee or escape easy detection.
Now do Nobel Prizes.
Jews aren't magically pathological for a society. That's just brain worms.
For instance, lots of prominent leftist/communist thinkers were Jews. But so were Hayek and Friedman, among others.
Yup. It was mostly the "Ellis Island" style jews from the Russian Empire that were purged.
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Hayek too?? Wow. I knew Mises, Rothbard and Friedman, yes.
And Ayn Rand.
yep knew about her. was thinking about actual economists
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I feel like one of the pitfalls of eugenics (then and now) is an assumption about what good genes even means (beyond Sydney Sweeney, apparently). There seems to be a lot more agreement about bad genes: see general consent on the borderline-eugenics of genetic counseling for various diseases, or the general acceptance of anti-incest rules.
You're probably right that Nazis lost out by dismissing a bunch of human capital and (over?)valuing blond hair and blue eyes, but I can't avoid thinking that statement is smuggling in some value judgements about what we should consider the ideal human form. Sure, intelligence is generally valued, but I see a rather open-ended question about the relative merit of maximizing
paperclipschess scores, baseball ability, or height that I'd personally prefer to defer answering.If incest didn't consistently produce still births/literal retardation it wouldn't be the taboo it is the world over.
Yes and no. There's still a strong social stigma against adopted/step siblings getting into a relationship.
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Good Genes is indeed incoherent. Genes can only be fit or not. And fitness is relative to the environment. Therefore, to say Good Genes exist is to say Good Environments exist.
Another way to phrase this is that there is an inverse of eugenics. We could posit a kind of "eu-envirics" focused on changing the environment.
(Insofar as the laws of physics have certain requirements, genetic defects that cause e.g. stillborn births are in all practical sense Bad Genes)
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I'm not advocating for anything other than not exterminating a particular segment of the population having certain talents.
Height is a funny one because of just how tall many European countries are now without any specific program.
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I wish this was driven by a fear of aristocracy, but I don't think it is. Many of these same people scream for a dictator of the proletariat. They imagine themselves as the rightful aristocracy because they are just heckin' good people, you know? And if they had absolute power they'd show it to you.
No, the fear of noticing is driven by a paranoia of Eugenics. If we abandon people to the consequences of their choices, or heaven forbid their children, then that's nearly the same as putting them on a train to the nearest extermination camp. No, instead the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want, and just keep giving them more and more and more forever because resources aren't finite. LBJ won a Nobel Prize for inventing the free lunch.
Yes, it is. This is true regardless of whether you have an IQ-aware society. "No human should ever go hungry, cold and homeless, nor be barred from the joy of raising a family; all else being equal it is always more ethical to help a sentient being get these things if it wants them than not to" should be the common-sense baseline of human kindness, and has nothing to do with true meritocratic hiring vs obfuscating credentialism. People like you who think "some people are dumber than others" is equivalent with "dumb people don't deserve to be happy and safe" is precisely what leftists are afraid of when they try to bury any discourse about the biological basis of IQ and you are making their point for them with this kind of cartoonish psychopathy.
I believe every person deserves to be as happy and safe as they can accomplish themselves. I don't understand why anybody should be charged with doing it for them, especially to their own detriment. That just inverts the roles. You want to make those incapable of taking care of themselves (or their families) my master.
And we're right back to what I was saying. Leftist clamor for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is a volunteer at an animal rescue center a slave to injured puppies? "Should" and "must" are different words, and you're somehow managing to miss the entire concept of morality - indeed, the entire concept of kindness and helpfulness - by confusing them. There are such things as supererogatory moral goods. There are, too, such things as moral duties which it is incumbent on every man to fulfill but which for various practical reasons always go wrong if you try to mandate them by law. Saying "all human beings deserve happiness" is not the same statement as "you have a duty to wear yourself down to the bone to make all human beings happy" and it is a completely different statement from "the state should be an unconstrained human-happiness-maximizer". "Charity is good" is not a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is the taxpayer, whose earnings are confiscated to pay for it?
My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things. What trade-offs one is prepared to countenance in the name of acquiring nice things to give to sentient beings is an entirely different question and not the topic of this thread. Many libertarians take the line of "yes, it is good to give to the poor, it's just that it's also wrong to steal, and one doesn't cancel out the other" and I have no beef with that.
Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
Point of order: this is not true. There used to be long-term functional heroin addicts. There aren't anymore because you for the most part can't reliably buy heroin anymore; pharma companies don't generally sell to addicts, while drug dealers sell improperly-diluted fentanyl as heroin (and that will inevitably kill you).
This is not to say that heroin will definitely not destroy your life, or that it won't kill you if you're a moron or getting it from somebody who cuts it by wildly-varying amounts (its drug interaction chart is also terrible). But functional heroin addicts can exist in a way that functional methamphetamine addicts essentially can't (due to the brain damage).
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I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
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It seems to me more likely that they recognize that all else is, in fact, never equal, never has been, and likely never will be.
Solzhenitsyn figured out how to be happy in a death camp. Some Ukrainians in the Holodomor figured out how to be happy while they and their families were intentionally starved to death. These apparent historical facts appear to me to support @WhiningCoil's model of happiness, and undermine the one you are presenting.
Manic people are often happy as they're starving to death too. But being happy while being subject to genocide isn't the default state, that isn't just postulating a hedonic treadmill, it's setting it to overdrive mode in reverse.
Naming a few intellectuals isn't a very strong argument.
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Eh, some people are so mentally disabled that I've seen academic philosophers in ethics (certainly left-leaning) seriously consider whether they are capable of even consenting to sex (IIRC, concluding that some of them likely are not). See also related questions about whether some people should not be held morally/legally accountable to certain crimes in the same way (and quite the lengthy jurisprudence at this point specifically with regard to the death penalty). This is and should be a true edge case, not "hurr durr, your IQ is 90, we should sterilize you", but these conversations are often still happening in the open in 'respectable society'. My sense is that it's typically left-leaning people pushing ideas that low IQ means different criminal justice, though I'm not sure if there's much of a partisan lean either way on the consent to sexual relations question.
Sure. But that is not an argument about moral weight - it is not a claim that the mentally disabled deserve the joy of parenthood less than geniuses, that it is all, else being equal, less regrettable for them to be deprived of it than for a clever person to be deprived of it. That is what I find ghoulish. What you describe are arguments about whether certain mentally disabled individuals are even mentally capable of tasting that particular joy. "Can dogs safely eat chocolate?" is an entirely different question from "Provided you had a dog that could eat chocolate with no ill effects and liked it, would it be better to give a bar of chocolate to the dog than not to?".
Chocolate kills dogs by overdosing them on theobromine(which produces a high in them very similar to cocaine, although in humans it simply makes other stimulants last longer- that's right, a chocolate bar with your coffee makes it last longer). If you're sure you have the dosage and bodyweights right, you can totally give your dog chocolate and it will very much enjoy it.
Chocolate is just another example of humans being in some ways insanely tolerating of dangerous substances and damage compared to most animals. We just don't think of ourselves that way because of the specific exception of food poisoning which has a lot to do with differences in digestive tract and us not noticing as easily when animals also get the shits & parasites.
Iirc human parasite vulnerability is mostly an immune response to innoculation below thé infection threshold- your dog isn’t less vulnerable to trichinosis from raw pork, his immune system is just trained to recognize when the spores aren't a huge danger. Dogs, pigs, and bears get parasites all the time.
Humans tolerate ethanol unusually well, but HFY to the contrary, not capsaicin- dogs are just unable to learn to like it.
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IIRC humans can get theobromine poisoning, but the required dosages are such that it's a non-issue outside of small children and the elderly binging on chocolate.
Iirc yaupon holly tea could theoretically cause theobromine poisoning if it’s brewed strong enough(black drink probably causes a theobromine high), but chocolate would probably make you sick before you get there.
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I think it is a moral argument, through and through.
Desert is an even more complicated area of philosophy which is kind of neither here nor there, but let's go back to what I was responding to in your earlier comment real quick:
This is sort of just not true, at least given the sort of academic work I've discussed. They do, in fact, think that there exists a person who is not able to morally consent, which, given the conceptual framework, cashes out as "they should not have sexual relations", and it would be morally wrong if they did. Do not interpret this as assigning any particular blameworthiness at this stage; blameworthiness is yet another separate consideration. That said, I think folks would be getting pretty close to assigning some level of blameworthiness to another individual who helped such a mentally disabled person (who is incapable of morally consenting) have sex, even if they wanted to. There's sort of nothing about desert in here.
I don't think this is really the case. IIRC, the academic work was perfectly happy to stipulate that the hypothetical sufficiently mentally disabled person in question was mentally capable of feeling joy from sex. It was the consent part, the morally-important part (especially to those who think that consent is the be all end all of sexual morality, in which camp this philosopher definitely resided), that was subject to consideration.
Since the academic work was confined to the question of sexual relations, specifically, I don't believe it addressed questions about 'the joy of raising a family', but I think it would be at least coherent to similarly assume that such a person may, indeed, be capable of feeling joy from having children and doing whatever it is that they can do to raise them, but I think that's also kind of neither here nor there if we're in a world where they may not be capable of consenting to sexual relations in the first place. Questions may get even harder if one pokes at the content of what it means to 'raise a family' and to what extent they are able to do that. (I am taking no position on this.)
I think this is emblematic of one of the other issues I had with the entire academic project of distilling all sexual morality down to consent. How broadly does one look for possible ill effects? There were multiple different cases (youth for sure, but some of the discussion touched on other cases) where even he couldn't stop himself from turning it into some sort of empirical test. Vaguely something like whether, say, 'allowing' youth to legally/morally consent to sexual relations generally did more harm to them or not. When one goes down this route, IMO, it's no longer an actual investigation into the philosophy and conceptual nature of consent. It's about being stuck to only having one term in your toolbox to use for all things sexual morality and simply trying to slap it on to cases that one finds objectionable for other reasons (some sense of empirical 'harm' in this case). Letting this sort of thing leak through into the conceptual nature of consent and one's ability to consent opens the door to all sorts of other thorny, even hotter-button issues, where many people (especially left-leaning ones) would vehemently object.
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It would help their legitimacy and they wouldn't be smeared that way if the average leftist didn't think there were vast numbers of people that don't deserve to be happy and safe, just defined on other terms.
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Having children and raising a family are two distinct actions: the underclass tends to excel at the former while stumbling over the latter.
Meanwhile, many stepfathers do the latter without getting the former.
As do many single, net-tax paying men without the explicit stepfather step.
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LBJ never won a Nobel Prize. He was nominated in 1964, but even that nomination was for steering American foreign policy toward international cooperation.
You don't say?
Hey, random question, what's the markdown tag for sarcasm?
/s
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Just picking out this particular area of your comment, it amazes me when intelligent people (like you) actually repeat this odd myth in the year of our lord 2025. What you're talking about as "sane" in the programming profession is exactly what you're decrying elsewhere as opaque vibes based sorting. Programmers acting like slobs might have been rebellion against corporate life, or reflected a genuine lack of interest for social norms, twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent. When professors and executives wore suits, choosing to wear a t shirt meant something. Today, it is just another form of cultural signaling.
Sam Bankman-Fried is our prime example, but there are millions more. SBF's appearance and behavior wasn't based in a natural untutored naiveté, it was a carefully cultivated performance for investors who superstitiously believed that this was what a genius startup founder was supposed to look like. He didn't play League of Legends during investor calls because his professor parents never taught him basic manners, he did it because he wanted to demonstrate to the crowd just how "above it all" he was. And venture capitalists ate it up, believing that the performance of Aspie disdain for social norms could substitute for actual genius. Sequoia Capital put it on their website! as an example of how cool SBF and FTX were, and how Sequoia was the hip company that could understand these kinds of geniuses, who could understand their vibes.
We've seen this for centuries in the arts, where the antisocial behavior of brilliant artists becomes a touchstone for young poseurs and strivers. The artsy kids I grew up with imitated the gay drug addicts in Rent and strived to die of heroin overdoses in New York City, who were written in specific imitation in both art and life of the alcoholic painters of La Boheme and strived towards dying of consumption in Paris gutters, who themselves were based on a novel whose real life examples probably imitated Rabelais or something. A real artist is depressed and deep, so the artsy teen wears black all the time and feigns misery and misanthropy. So many great artists are alcoholics, so young artists drink themselves into a stupor. Great artists abuse their sexual partners so must I!
Legible aristocratic or middle class standards of appearance and action, actually looking good in nice clothing and speaking properly, is much easier to learn and imitate, and a much better test of intelligence and conscientiousness, than is performatively spurning those standards. What suit to wear, and which type shoes to match with which belt, and what color tie, is all learnable and teachable. And learning all that, applying resources to acquire the knowledge, and exercising those skills, are all examples of that skill of "holding one million variables in your head and making decisions." Knowing when to wear tweed and which fork to use and which glass to pour which wine into may be frivolous and wasteful effort, but at least it is legible and trainable, and shows some degree of intelligence and training at a glance.
Excellent comment overall, and I may reply further on other aspects, but this in particular stood out to me, as an example of how Vibes Based sorting is so insidious and difficult to rid the brain of. Humans are very good at striving to imitate the appearance of doing something, even when they aren't.
I've got friends who were very early FTX employees. SBF probably cranked his performative autism dial to 11 at certain points, but based on their testimony it always lingered around a 9 even when he was totally in his element.
What starts off as performative becomes internalized as personality given enough reinforcement. It's how frat bros are minted and why Mar-a-Lago face is contagious among MAGA.
SBF is a child of 2 law professors at Stanford with no indications of social-dysfunction in how they present themselves. He, like other autists could have learned to mask his autism and would've coopted the elite culture around him. ADHD kids need to be taught executive function, Elite sportsmen need to be taught financial restraint and autists need to be taught social behaviors. It's standard upbringing. Yes, he was more susceptible to peak autism. But so are millions others, and most of them turn out alright.
SBF ended going down an autistic spiral and that tells me his parents failed in raising him right. Parents didn't teach him coping mechanisms. And his behaviors were likely reinforced by the hyper selective spaces he found himself (MIT, Jane Street, mathcamp, stem prep school). Just the terrible sleep + stimulant abuse would explain half of his autistic spiral in his adult days. Add in hyper hedonism (esp. the orgies), EA psychosis and the insane amount of money in the mix, and it ended up in a predictable place.
Alex Karp of Palantir is a good example of an autist undergoing a autism reinforcement event well into his 50s. Look at any of his old interviews, dude was great at giving the appearance of normal.
Also,
In what world are 2 tenured Stanford professors considered upper middle class ?
This world. Upper class is the people who have names on buildings, not the people who work in the buildings.
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'Two accomplished professionals with a touch of the 'Tism that's sufficient to give them professional success but not go overboard produce children a bit further out on the spectrum' is superduper common. My mom spent 20 years teaching at a school for essentially bottom-tier autistic Children and other learning difficulty havers, and the rate at which the parents would be dual high-flyer doctors, surgeons, academics, engineers or whatever and then the child just gets too much of the secret sauce... It happens. Without even going into the whole 'the parents were born into more typical households in a better socialized environment whilst the children got born into the internet era with permissive enlightened avant garde parents' aspect.
An interesting aside is that there are other significant risk factors that have nothing to do with parents on the spectrum. Specifically, lack of vitamin D during development seems to increase the risk manyfold as observed in children of immigrants with much darker skin tone who moved to Finland: https://www.laakarilehti.fi/tieteessa/alkuperaistutkimukset/maahanmuuttajien-lapsilla-on-suomessa-paljon-vaikeita-autismikirjon-hairioita/ (article in Finnish, feed it to google translate or something).
Couldn't this potentially align with the immense Somali autism rate in Minnesota and struggling children of certain diaspora being more likely to be diagnosed with medical issues to explain their academic issues?
Possibly the first although Minnesota is significantly more south than Finland. Helsinki is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage (winters here are truly miserable when there isn't snow) while Minneapolis is about as north as Milan, Italy.
The second isn't the case in Finland as the diagnoses were made while the children were small kids due to developmental delays, problems with language acquisition and such (iow not just "a bit of a loner").
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That's the core thing to go into though. My grandmother was left handed, until the nuns beat it out of her.
A weirdo kid who is taught to not-be-weird and raised in a culture where weirdness is punished might not turn out "normal" but will just be a little weird. A weirdo kid who is raised in a cultural setting that doesn't just allow him to be weird, but actively honors the weirdos around him as the highest examples of humanity, will cultivate his weirdness and become even weirder.
Plus the filter of the ones that manage to have children of a given cohort of the light-moderate autistic are likely going to err towards the shallower end of the spectrum and then it's a whole new roll of the dice with their kids.
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In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
I've been in the programming workforce for close to 30 years and I have never seen actual slobbery nor any betrayal of social norms there. Peoples clothes (including my own) have ranged from shorts and band t-shirt to straight pants and a fancy collared shirts and I've even seen one or two guys wearing a suit (due to intentional personal style). That is to say, people have dressed exactly as other men of similar age in non-public facing (*) office jobs that don't have status games attached to looks.
The only actual flaunting would be to dress in a business suit with a tie (unless you work in the financial sector) because you'd then be essentially signaling that you're trying to hide your lack of technical substance by over dressing .
*: The one time I ended up presenting a product at an industry trade fair my attire was black jeans, black dress shirt and black leather jacket which was chosen because it was my normal style at the time and also happened to blend in perfectly with the other industry people.
When people say 'tech' they mean silicon valley FANG/startup culture. Just as 'Media' was LA culture, 'Finance' was Manhattan culture.
Ofc, a lots of people are employed in these industries outside their hubs. But, the hub defines the culture.. For ex, NYC tech is post-hipster Brooklyn culture. Boston tech is humble-brag math-wiz culture. Seattle tech is REI-culture. But no one cares about distinct cultures of the satellites. It's all about the mother ship.
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Shorts are sportswear or middle school uniform. (The rules are different in the tropics, but so are the shorts, hence "Bermuda shorts"). T-shirts are traditionally sportswear or underwear, although I agree this had already shifted by 2000. This isn't Sand Hill Road business casual we are talking about. When I started my career, T-shirts with obtrusive logos (including band T-shirts) were acceptable in approximately zero white-collar workplaces.
You are claiming that turning up at the office in the same clothes you would wear to the gym is not performative slobbery. If so, this is a very recent social change. It would have been considered performative slobbery well into the 21st century, and it absolutely was performative slobbery at the point programmers with well-paid corporate jobs started doing it.
The thing about internet and this site is that it's international (as my flair says I'm in Finland while @self_made_human is an Indian living in Britain) which means the norms differ between countries. Where I live "shorts and t-shirt" is normal summer attire when it's hot and "band t-shirt" is simply what a lot of guys would wear in the late 90s and 2000s. Hell, I've had most of my bosses dress occasionally in shorts and t-shirt on hot summer days because why wouldn't you when it's hot outside and you work in an engineering department where nobody cares about it?
Which is to say that there is nothing "performative" about shorts and band t-shirt around here. Frankly the vast majority of engineers just don't care about signaling in the first place and who would you even be signaling to when the only people who see you in the office are your coworkers who also don't care. You dress in shorts and band t-shirt because it's convenient and that's how you'd dress if you eg. went out for drinks with mates on such day, not to "stick it to the man" or to flaunt anything.
Sure, it'd be different if you dressed in some tight gym shorts (that you wouldn't use elsewhere outside gym / sports either), "programming socks" or similar ridiculous things that are actually outside the social norms in public - which is why people don't do it here either (barring perhaps some rare socially maladjusted exceptions).
You mean everything my Swedish and Danish friends said about uptight Finns is wrong? I am shocked, shocked.
Swedes are all gay anyway so why would you ever believe what they say? And for Danes that's of course a moot point because it's not like you can understand them in the first place with their potato-in-mouth speech impediment.
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You're right, I was probably being insufficiently precise.
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Thanks :*
I am happy to accept that any legible marker for competence (or perceived competence) will be eventually gamed. It's not like turbo-autists are particularly good at gatekeeping or status games. Normies beat autists, normies are beaten by sociopaths, who are in turn kept in check by autists.
I'm familiar with SBF's performative actions. However, I still think it's clear that genuine eccentricity is better tolerated in programming circles. Fursuits, blahajs and programming socks are more prevalent in programming circles.
In other words, I think it's simultaneously true that the world of computers has a higher tolerance for off-kilter behavior and a significant number of people insincerely stealing that culture as their costume!
I'm sure HR and management would prefer someone with people skills who looks presentable, all else being equal. But the sheer tolerance is nigh unprecedented! You'd have to descend to the back of the kitchen with the line cooks before "is warm body" and "can do job" become the prevailing concerns.
Why the initial tolerance? The usual theories that struck me as plausible included a high prevalence of autistic traits, a less client-facing environment, and comparatively legible performance metrics. If you have a code goblin, then the additional latency from running fiber to their segregated basement is worth it. You didn't hire them for their good looks.
But you're right that this creates its own failure mode. When the signal becomes "looking like you don't care about signals," you get poseurs who carefully cultivate dishevelment. The difference, I'd argue, is one of substitutability and testing under load.
In a truly vibes-based profession (consulting, say, or certain flavors of academic humanities), the poseur can coast indefinitely. There's no moment where the rubber meets the road and reveals that beneath the performance there's nothing there. Your PowerPoint looks good, your references are impeccable, and by the time the strategy fails, you've moved on to the next gig.
In programming, the compile button doesn't care about your aesthetic. The production system either works or it doesn't.* Yes, you can hide in a sufficiently large organization, you can take credit for others' work, you can fake it in meetings. But there's still a baseline floor of actual competence required. SBF could fool VCs with his League of Legends schtick, but he still needed actual programmers to build FTX. The fraud wasn't "Sam can't code," it was "Sam is embezzling customer funds." His technical team was apparently quite capable.
The point isn't that programming is immune to status games or that all programmers are autistic savants who only care about code quality. The point is that programming preserves a direct link between competence and output that many other professions have severed. You can fake the culture, but you can't fake the merge request. Well, you can try, but eventually someone has to read your code.
This makes programming comparatively more meritocratic, not perfectly meritocratic. The SBF types are gaming a second-order effect (convincing investors and managers that they're geniuses), but the underlying infrastructure still requires first-order competence (actually building the thing). In contrast, in fully vibes-captured professions, you can game all the way down. There is no compile button. There is no production server that crashes. There's just more vibes, turtles all the way down.
Your point about aristocratic standards being more legible is well-taken, though. Knowing which fork to use is indeed trainable in a way that "act naturally eccentric" is not. But here's where I think we diverge: aristocratic standards are more gameable by the wealthy precisely because they're so trainable. If you have money, you can buy the suit, hire the etiquette coach, send your kid to the right boarding school. What you can't buy (as easily) is the ability to pass a hard technical exam.
The ideal isn't "no standards" or "eccentric standards." The ideal is "standards that correlate maximally with the thing you're actually trying to measure, while being minimally gameable by irrelevant advantages." Standardized testing, for all its flaws, does this better than holistic admissions. A programming interview with live coding, for all its flaws, does this better than "did you summer at the right firm."
The clothing and manners debate is orthogonal to the core question of sorting. I don't particularly care if our elites wear suits or hoodies, as long as we're selecting them for the right reasons. My objection to aristocratic sorting isn't the aesthetics, it's the inefficiency. If your system selects for people who know which fork to use, and knowing which fork to use happens to correlate 0.7 with having rich parents but only 0.2 with job performance, you've built an inherited oligarchy with extra steps.
*I am aware of concerns such as code readability, good practices such as documentation, and the headaches of spaghetti code. But programming is still way closer to the metal than most other professions.
My last job interview featured a set of technical questions related to the job- I remember being asked about the labeling of specific wires on a walk-in and one set of pressures on r410a, a couple of other things- but also had a bunch of questions that were just obviously about cultural fit, mostly looking for how I phrased particular concerns. People want to live and work around people that 'know how to use the right fork'. Literally, obviously- think about how uncomfortable you'd be if you had to share a table with Zohran Mamdani at a publicity stunt. But also in everything else. How do you communicate? How do you treat the boss- with extreme deference or as a basically-peer who happens to have a leadership role? Do you expect to be friends with your coworkers, or merely friendly? What do you think is acceptable water cooler talk? These things do matter.
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Even when range-restricted within a supposed vibes-based profession such as consulting (as consultants tend to be quite smart relative to the gen. pop. in the first place, although not as elite as say, HFT quantitative researchers), IQ and competence are positively correlated.
Whether it be a management or economic consultant (or other front office corporate position), just from a slide monkeying perspective, a more cognitively able consultant will be better at spotting potential numeric errors on slides, that numbers on Slide X may be inconsistent with numbers on Slide Y, that qualitative messaging on Slide J may conflict with messaging on Slide K, that Slide M's contents may conflict with what was shown in previous versions of it, that Slide F's contents may be problematic for future versions of this slide with the current client or with future ones.
And then, from a presentation standpoint, being able to withstand and address any questions articulately from key stakeholders. All else equal, more cognitive ability is better on this front too, in understanding the analyses that fed the slides in the deck and being able to answer questions in real time.
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As a very wise friend of mine recently said:
Dressing neatly in a clean and appropriate suit and tie doesn't strike you as a cognitively demanding task, or even really in this day and age an indication of wealth outside of branding, just as a chore to learn and a cultural heritage to pass down. But it does serve as a filter for baseline intelligence and conscientiousness when widely understood as something we can screen for. There are people that are too stupid to dress themselves properly, or insufficiently conscientious to do so neatly.
By building a culture where this is a well known expectation, we create a culture where we can look at someone and (as @pbmonster said in the SSS thread) have their IQ tattooed on their forehead. There's obvious spirals of fashion and veblen goods and in-group signaling that are bad, but culturally expected dress codes don't need to be focused on that. The broad concept of "appropriate" dress. does not need to veer into wasteful or extravagant dress.
Basically, yes, you shouldn't judge a book entirely by it's cover; but damn wouldn't the book store be more convenient if book covers told me more about the content in the book? And this seems entirely within the control of the publishing industry.
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I don't think any of those would be tolerated in any of the workplaces I've ever been involved with. Sure, worn jeans and an old metal band t-shirt don't even get a second look - that was practically a uniform some 10-15 years ago. Same with combat boots and camo pants. Business as usual.
But straight up "WTF is this shit, that guy is weirding everyone out, what is his issue?"-eccentricity? No. The boss would have a Talk with them.
SBF types are basically reverse signaling the same thing the same way that overpaid hype consultanst in fancy suits are signaling to the upper management. Both are trying to use looks and behavior to convince someone who isn't technically competent that "Trust us bro, we're so good that we'll totally deliver you massive benefits".
I've gotten the impression from some older comments here that such gameability was almost the point. That by having the money and acting like you were old money, in a generation or two you'd be considered if not actual aristocracy, at least upper class.
I worked for a FAANG-adjacent company and we did have a programmer who wore a fursuit. Programming socks? Hadn't realized they were called that but I've seen them worn at Google. If "blahajs" refers to the Ikea stuffed shark, you'll definitely find those and similar in software engineering offices.
I think an Ikea soft toy on your desk would be acceptable in a bank, unless you are in a role where you regularly meet clients at your desk. I had a FIMO vampire squid called Lloyd on my desk for several years and it attracted 90% positive interest.
FYI, Blåhaj isn't exactly a regular small stuffed toy (which would be decoration like any other) but a 100+ cm long stuffed shark that's the same size as a preschool kid.
Yeah, in software development offices they tend to get hung above the desks. The stuffed sharks, that is, the kids squirm too much and the wire won't hold them.
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Yeah, that's very different from just a "programming company". California woke tech-adjacent culture is its whole own microcosm which cannot be generalized to the entire programming profession, particularly in international conversations (what with self_made_human being an Indian in Scotland). To put it slightly less charitably, the vast majority of programming profession isn't filled with cliche autist weirdos to even remotely the same extent as that particular subculture of it is.
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When you think about it, this is a pretty succinct explanation for a lot of the failure modes the current elite drive us into. Educational discipline, homelessness, crime....the biggest failures are from dealing with truly judgment proof. The people who wouldn't be in college, whether because of low IQ or conscientiousness or other such traits.
In places where compulsion is really the main option and people find it distasteful or immoral , things fall apart.
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As someone who is somewhat aristocratic (my family did not pay for Oxbridge's anything, but 200 years ago they probably could have) you are misunderstanding how it works. Think of it as meritocracy with a sliding window and a small momentum factor.
Rather than the intelligent rising to the top after a major shakeup and then camping there until the next revolution, people broadly rise or fall through their lifetimes. My family were long ago pretty influential. They made many bad choices and a few good ones, and went from 'we own a castle and a good estate' to 'we own a farm and a small business' to 'sorry, kid, I gave everything to an exotic dancer' and then back up to 'decent upper-middle class' through the generations.
This results in a society which is marginally less meritocratic but involves considerably less striving. Your brilliant father would have been unlikely to go from hauling crates to owning (a chain?) of hospitals, though it did happen, but would likely have gone from hauling crates to second-in-command of the hauling company, married to a nice girl of a higher class, with children who raised in the style of that class and who would move upwards or downwards from there according to their own ability. Especially since brilliance is more clear when IQ is slightly higher variance in your profession.
I do think of it that way? I meant to gesture at that when I said:
I agree that the reason for this phenomenon is simply innate talent in many spheres. Not even landgrabs and terrorism could keep the genes down (epigenetics is grossly overrated).
I suppose I shouldn't hide that the other side of my family started off much better than my dad. They weren't ever wealthy (wealth in Colonial India often meant landed gentry, merchants etc), but they were part of a chain of well-educated intellectuals. The PMC before it was cool. Sadly for me, this never meant enough generational wealth that their kids could coast, though I haven't anything about squandered inheritance.
I don't disagree that the old system didn't have elements of meritocracy. It had plenty. At the same time, it didn't have the churn or the finding power that standardized assessments or talent screens have today. And we need a great deal more talent, nobody has enough.
That is achingly slow! A hypothetical talented kid from a humble background can do very well for himself in 3 decades because they're on a more even (and relevant) playing field. Med school required good grades. Higher training built up experience and competence. That's a very different place to be.
I'm sure my dad would have managed to make something of himself even in the aftermath of Maoist China. But the system that got him where he is worked out better for him, and for the rest of society, if I squint.
I called the previous system "Basically Fine", the same goes for the one we have today. But that's a low bar, we can do better. As it stands, I'm more focused on eliminating the really bad distortions on meritocracy, such as affirmative action, and I'm not losing sleep over legacy admissions in the best unis.
My apologies, I thought you were describing an essentially static model, with occasional perturbations producing results better than a random shuffle but with no meaningful mobility. I think it's more fluid than that.
This on the other hand is the core of the matter. It is. That's the tradeoff. The positive side is less energy wasted on striving, but more than that, it's having some idea what the future holds. It's as easy to fall as to rise, after all. Parents have no way of knowing if their children are going to have anything like their status, and devote huge amounts of effort to trying to make it so, which is corrosive for the childrens' wellbeing and for the social structures that the parents kick over if they're in the way. Parents aren't even sure they're going to be able to maintain their own social status in a couple of decades. It seems to me that this contributes to a very scrambling mine mine mine atmosphere that is completely unable to make long-term investments because there is no guarantee you're going to be around to collect on those investments.
But as I say, it's a genuine tradeoff and people are going to land in different places on what they want to trade off.
My impression is that historical nobility had a lot of status anxiety too! Not just status, but plain finances to boot.
We're used to the economy consistently growing, at a pace legible to human perception. This is a historical anomaly, and true in the West for maybe 400 years, and mere decades in other places.
Before this, it was very difficult to grow the pie. You were more concerned about slicing it up such that the children didn't starve. Look at the practice of primogeniture, or sending second sons to the navy. The family farm or even ducal holdings never seem to multiply, and if you slice them too fine, you'll be nobility in name alone.
This isn't the case any more! A smart parent, in the 20th century, could start saving and making sensible investments. You can do very well by your kids even if they turn out to be one of the dimmer bulbs in the shed.
While people may feel anxious today, even more so, that's vibes and not based on an assessment of facts or historical reality. Compound interest is a helluva drug, and might even be a better investment than sending your daughter to be an art-ho in Bushwick. The typical worst case scenario is them ending up on SNAP, not starving to death, as might have easily been the case in the past.
I can hardly predict the next decade with confidence, but I believe that money makes everything easier.
Our impression of historical stability for noble families is also heavily influenced by lying. Dishonesty and outright fraud have always been key elements of creating lineage stories. Cutting both ways!
The ancient frequency of Moses/Oedipus/Cyrus (Herodotus rather than Xenophon)/Arthur sword-in-the-stone myths likely reflects a way to incorporate peasant "risers" into existing lineages. The Hapsburgs were notorious for inventing spurious links to Caesar or Charlemagne. This occurred at lower, and less notable, levels of nobility all the time. A sufficiently rich peasant found a way to claim descent from so and so, and with the right palms greased the write documents were "verified" and no more peasant. I similarly roll my eyes at the western credulity given to claims by Oriental families to have lineages dating back before our earliest written documents, but without evidence to back it up. Accounts of nobility were always historically shaky in poorly documented societies with weak record keeping.
We now, of course, are so often treated to the opposite in America, false middle class consciousness. Republican family origin stories where dad was a "small business owner" (third generation multi-millionaire) and I worked my way through college (interned with a family friend's finance company); or the international student version where my parents were refugees (oligarchs who fled when their patron was ousted in a coup).
God that must be tough, I can't imagine that kind of oppression
We should give them some money to open a small business, a daycare maybe
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All well and good so long as we remember that "Merit" as measured by IQ is just the ability to do well in school and learn complicated things. It is not some end, just a talent like hand-eye coordination.
As to the rest, the absolute best any non-elite can ever hope for from the universe or a test is blind fairness. Anyone who thinks we can weight things one way or the other to offset "privilege" is just building a privilege generator.
Would be awkward for everyone if IQ positively correlates with other positive traits not immediately connected to taking tests.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/study-links-childrens-eye-hand-coordination-with-their-academic-performance.html
Brain do work gooder faster, affect many thing.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA525579.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha
I feel like all of these tests and correlations are just trying to grasp at a specific quality some form of capacity of abstract thought not directly linked to the here and now, lets call it "plasticity". The capability to approach a novel problem without first being specifically coached on the particulars. If we could quantify just exactly what's different in brains with vastly dis-similar IQs then we could start gunning for the problem, attempt to artificially "uplift" those incapable.
None of this will happen, because of the knee-jerk anti-eugenics stance of the mainstream left/right.
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Most positive traits correlate somewhat. So do most negative ones.
The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded. Smart people can convince themselves of anything, and thus lose connection with reality in proportion to how smart they are.
Take Scott's most recent post on child rearing for an obvious example. He's the smartest person I've ever met personally, and he's a tard.
No. Being deep enough on the autism spectrum makes you retarded about some things. People keep (often intentionally) conflating that with intelligence.
Scott is much more an example of someone on the autism spectrum than he is an example of the modal intelligent person.
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Boy, I don't know how much time you spend around not smart people, but I promise you it's all worse on average.
I think you have to take a wildly uncharitable interpretation of what Scott wrote to think he's therefore bad at child rearing.
Would I personally indulge my toddler quite so much? No, but it sure was funny to read about. My little girl isn't quite so ridiculous, yet.
I think there are certain brain worms that target a certain level of intelligence, but it's not like it gets worse as you get to super geniuses relative to say 115.
Bertrand Russell was a pacifist and Albert Einstein endorsed socialism explicitly. These are views I consider immensely retarded due to overwhelming theoretical and empirical evidence against them. Motivated reasoning effects everyone, and smart people perhaps find more territory to get lost in than a more average person.
But overall there's basically no known tradeoffs with higher intelligence. There are not a set number of character points. Life isn't fair.
The empirical evidence against socialism during Einstein's day wasn't quite there. Animal Farm was a speculative novel at the time, not known as prescient.
Einstein wrote his famous essay in 1949.
Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944. He identified the knowledge problem, which devastates any ideas about central planning, in 1936.
Samuelson wrote Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1946 and Economics in 1948.
Mises wrote Socialism in 1922.
Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
In the essay, Einstein reveals he does not understand basic economic principles and simply tries to discredit the entire field as insufficiently scientific. He also talks about human nature, and goes on to reveal he doesn't understand it very well. He was, to his credit, not a fan of the Soviets.
I'm being a wee bit uncharitable, because the most influential living economist of the time was probably Samuelson, and he used a bunch of math to justify some version of socialism. (He was still defending the growth of the Soviet economy in 1989...) But Einstein didn't even try to justify his delusions with the math of blackboard economics.
Actually, by total coincidence I just found a quote from Samuelson shitting on Einstein being as delusional about economics as Chomsky.
And the communists had equally impressive-sounding arguments for why Marxism would work. And the Soviets were doing everything humanly possible to hide their failures. And 1949 was before the Great Leap Forward. And...
It obviously wasn't impossible to realize by then communism would fail; Hayek and Mises did. But castigating Einstein for not realizing it, when economics was not even his field... seems a bit harsh? Humans don't have ten years to consider each bit of evidence. Scott has admitted that he would have probably been a communist if he had been alive at the turn of the century (I can't find the exact tumblr post, but this one gestures at the same general direction), and I would have probably been one too if I had not come of age in the 21st century with all the evidence available to beat me over head.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 108:
(But as for the people who have access that evidence and still choose to be socialists, there is no hope.)
As the Samuelson quote I cited in another comment makes clear, Einstein had a pie-in-the-sky moronic view of how economies worked.
He was already anti-Soviet, so he knew that wasn't going well.
Further, Einstein took an explicitly anti-intellectual approach to the question. He was dumbing things down even though he obviously could have grasped the theory and math had he chosen to.
The fact that economics was not even his field is a pretty fucking good argument that he shouldn't have lent his prestige to such a moronic pursuit via that essay.
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Well, super duper extra embarrassing given my user name. But was Animal Farm not an allegorical criticism of Stalin? Like the badness was known?
Again, sorry if I misremember, I've used this handle on various parts of the internet for literally longer than I can remember.
It was written before the badness was widely known- and intended as an intra-socialist critique based on the behavior of Stalinists who fought alongside Orwell(in a different socialist faction) in the Spanish civil war.
So not speculative from Orwells perspective, who already recognized the hazards and badness of at least Stalinism. But not yet recognized as a prescient critique of repeated failures of general socialism.
I don't think that's contradictory to what I recall. Maybe it's time for a re-read anyway.
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I've spent most of my life associating with the lower half of the IQ distribution. I'm well aware of the failure modes and ridiculous behavior of the dummies. Stupidity, however, is its own limiting factor.
The failure modes of intellect have basically no upper bound.
That's a good way to put it.
More degrees of freedom to really get into complex ways to fuck things up.
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Indeed, one can see here for an example that Steve Hsu wrote about.
As Hsu remarked: “No evidence of diminishing returns in the far tail of the cognitive ability distribution.”
Even when range-restricted to the top 1% of 13-year-old test-takers on the SAT math, the four quartiles among The One Percent follow a rank-order with respect to any doctorate, STEM publications, STEM doctorates, patents, whether-95th-percentile-income eventually attained.
Note Hsu’s blog post and the linked underlying Nature article are coming up on 10 years old in a few months, yet things remain unchanged with regard to blank slatism and hopium as to the diminishing-to-zero returns of IQ.
Yes, IQ and its proxies predict academic success. That's what I said. Our economy is set up to award higher incomes to those with higher education, thus the income. But this is just circular logic. High paying jobs are mostly gated behind advanced degrees, which require at least an average IQ to fudge and a high one to excel at. Give out jobs based on who is the best basketball player, and height would predict income just fine.
One would need to find a similar explanation for patents. In any case, your head canon is at odds with the evidence.
Using AFQT scores as a decent but imperfect proxy for IQ: In a regression with net worth, education, and eight other factors as covariates, IQ was still a very significant predictor of income. Even controlling for net worth, education, and eight other factors, each additional IQ point was found to provide $346 to $616 worth of income across four regressions. That is, someone who has an IQ of 125 would be predicted to make about $5,190 to $9,240 more a year than someone with an IQ of 110, when the two have the same net worth and education. Mean income was about $43,700 in this dataset, so that's a solid chunk of change.
Across these the four regressions with the same specification (they differed in their estimation methods), both IQ and net worth were significant at the 0.01 level in all four. In contrast, education was only significant at the 0.01 level in three of them and not significant at the lower bar of 0.10 in the fourth. This would at least suggest circumstantially that education was the weakest strongman at the circus here. Plus, in any case, this is "over"-controlling and understating the effect of IQ, since IQ allows one to attain higher education levels. IQ also allows for better wealth preservation, holding income constant.
With the endogeneity problem of IQ and education in mind (the over-controlling), this article wanted to take a further look. It appears the author may have used the same data source as the first one, given its relative availability, but his was limited to those with children and he made slightly different design choices here or there (such as taking log income for regression analyses). Nonetheless, the author similarly found an association between IQ (AFQT score) and income that persisted after adding the controls of "marital status and presence of a live-in partner, education, number of children, employment status, employment history, hours worked, and age. Measures of race/ethnicity and sex are also included."
The author then moved onto to evaluate the IQ (net of education) -> Income vs. IQ -> Education -> Income pathways. The first is the direct or "partial" effect of IQ ("extent to which it affects income, net of differences in educational attainment"), the second the "indirect" effect of IQ ("the extent to which AFQT increases income by increasing education"). He calculated a value of 0.505 for the standardized regression coefficient of AFQT on income (a one standard deviation increase in IQ increasing income by 0.505 standard deviations). He found that if you split this 0.505 between the direct effect and the indirect effect, the first would get slightly more than half of 0.505 and the second slightly less than half of the 0.505. That is, not only is the indirect IQ -> Education -> Income pathway unable to fully account for the IQ/income relationship, this indirect pathway actually gets edged out by the direct pathway of IQ (net of education) -> Income.
Even in a severely range restricted dataset (the Terman set of individuals who identified as children to have estimated IQs of at least 140), IQ was still found to directly contribute to lifetime earnings, independently of the indirect effect through education. Like the previous article, this one that uses the Terman study found that for men, more of the impact of IQ upon income was direct rather than indirect through education. Additionally, among men with a BA or less, a standard deviation of IQ was worth about $160K of lifetime earnings. Among those with an MA or more, a standard deviation of IQ was... also worth about $160K of lifetime earnings.
All in all, the evidence points toward a robust IQ effect upon income that exists independently of the indirect effect of IQ upon education (and in turn upon income). Not only that—if anything, the independent, direct effect of IQ upon income exceeds the indirect effect of IQ through education upon income.
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You could probably see if there's signal by controlling for education level and seeing if the income outcomes still hold. I'm not sure if anyone's done that (or if there's enough data -- almost every recent study of this sort I've seen uses the SMPY cohorts, because there aren't too many other choices)
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That post deserves a top level post. I mean, yes, toddlers are often trying(and often deliberately trying), but he's not reacting as the received wisdom of parents passed through generations would recommend.
I trust Scott to wrangle the outcomes of his own genetics more than I do any onlookers with partial information.
His little boy is a hell of a character, but there's nothing in those anecdotes he shared that strike me as an actual problem. Keep in mind Scott does baby duty at set times, and for much of the day he has outside assistance. He can afford to be a bit indulging without losing his mind for the time he has the watch.
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Can I ask how you met Scott?
Went to a meetup at his house back when he lived in my state.
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Just "learn complicated things"?
I'm afraid the "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting! We live in a dazzlingly complex world, it's been several centuries since even the most talented person could have understood every facet of modern civilization and technology. Even Neumann and Tau would die of old age before becoming true polymaths.
IQ is strongly correlated to a ton of good things, moderately correlated to a tonne more of other good things, and then weakly correlated with the metric fuck-ton of everything left. Income, physical and mental health, job performance! Even beauty is weakly correlated (so much for the Halo effect as a true fallacy). There are few things that can be tested as cheaply and easily while offering as much signal for the downstream traits we care about.
A quadrillion IQ brain floating in the void isn't worth very much, but we were never talking about intelligence in isolation. If grip strength was the defining factor for success in life, I'd be working on my handshake right now.
Overrated. While I think that you probably cannot be literal retard and succeed, as soon as you are 100-110 IQ or some such, you can succeed. The thing is, that there are multiple different "merits" that can help you:
Being pretty. Being 9 or 10 out of 10 will hugely improve your life and make it overall much easier. Especially if you can marry somebody who works for you. Tons of studies on this.
Being socially apt and charismatic. You don't have to be able to navigate complex issues, if you can influence some high IQ loser to do it for you. Also ultra high IQ is correlated with being quite weird and socially dysfunctional from my personal experience, there is a colloquial term for it in form of "lonely genius syndrome".
Being violent top dog. This is especially beneficial if you live in failed state, or you want to become local drug kingpin etc. You don't need to solve for high-complexity issues, if you can just pistol-whip your local nerd and take all of his crypto. If he protests, you can chop his finger off or some such. At minimum you should be able to defend yourself and not be bullied. Nevertheless being born as a sociopathic psycho can prove to be highly beneficial for highly successful violent career. Many such psychos became famous warlords, dictators and conquerors, and they belong to selected few most influential people in history. Some of them like prophet Muhammad were literally illiterate.
Being tall. Famously being over 7 feet tall and without genetic defect gives you pretty good chance to get into NBA and become millionaire. Being over 6 feet tall seems to be seen as very a meritorious when it comes to ladies and reproduction. Many more such niches unrelated to IQ.
Being healthy. Who cares if you are top IQ guy who can navigate highest levels of theoretical physics like Stephen Hawking, if you cannot navigate simple stairs. I'd rather be healthy, 100 IQ person than him living in constant pain unable to enjoy simplest joys of life.
Many more such cases. IQ is only one measure of merit - an important one, but it is not be-all-end-all.
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Indeed, this is the major problem I have with the OPs comment. We're not looking for intelligence and using "performance of competence" as a proxy. We're looking for competence. It could be that intelligence is a better proxy for competence than our current tests, and almost certainly is true that an intelligence test is a better measure of intelligence than our current tests of competence are for competence (because competence is just harder to measure). But intelligence itself isn't usually what we're looking for.
I don't think I disagree. Competence is the most important thing, but it is also devilishly hard to pin down. That only gets harder when you need someone to demonstrate their competence before they get the job.
(And then you see person specifications asking for 5 years of experience in some React-knockoff that's only been out 2 years)
Unfortunately, there is often a massive, unavoidable delay between training for a job and getting a job. We want to know if someone will be a good surgeon before they hold a scalpel. How would you check if a 17 year old pre-med student will make for a good neurosurgeon if he won't do any neurosurgery for another 10 years?
That brings me back to the point that intelligence really is our most robust proxy. It's one of the few things in the psychometric literature that has resisted the replication crisis. It is still a proxy, and thus imperfect, but like democracy, it's the worst option except for all the others. If you want to go back to work-experience and trainability, we're going to need a lot more apprenticeships or internships. Those are much harder to scale than standardized tests.
FWIW, I think IQ testing should be used to track all public schoolkids into an appropriate educational stream. I think it explains a whole lot about the world nobody but places like this want to talk about. But it is not something to be optimized at the cost of all other endeavors.
For academics, it is the primary requirement. For everyone else, the diminishing returns kick in fast.
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It helps to throw away the entire concept of pre-med and just have entrance exams to study medicine in university that test both relevant biology knowledge (to be self studied from common reference book(s)) and requisite math and physics ability. It's not perfect but it's better than just sailing in with high IQ score or using some utterly bullshit proxy like freeform essay or having the right after school activities.
Incidentally the same also works for engineering: Entrance exam that tests (highschool plus level) math and physics which, not surprisingly, are exactly what's required to manage almost all engineering studies. Too bad they fucked up that tried and true system in favor of very noisy high school matriculation exam scores here some years ago :(
Say what you will about the inadequacies of the British and Indian medical pipeline, but this is a rather uniquely American stupidity. Pre-med offers nothing that just moving the MCAT forward wouldn't, and wastes several years of your youth on a degree that you likely won't use.
I gave an exam straight out of high school, and that was that. I'll say less about everything that followed.
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Good.
I recognize the point as it applies to top-tier quantum physicists, but in almost every other area of life I don't think we should judge people based on 'capacity' as indicated by raw IQ.
First of all, most careers do not have uncapped potential for improvement. Let's say someone wants to become a physical therapist - they need to learn a variety of details about human physiology, be competent at working with people, and have the capacity to keep up with developments in the field. This is achievable by a 100 IQ person just as much as a 130, the primary difference will just be how much time and effort is required to acquire the knowledge. I put it to you that most fields have this characteristic. The difference between a god-tier PT and a typical one may matter a little on the edge cases but for the most part these people are indistinguishable in what they can accomplish. Meanwhile, other traits like personability and compassion may be more relevant distinguishers for how well this person does the job.
Second, IQ already plays into every sorting algorithm we have. Do you really think that being more intelligent doesn't help you acquire certifications? Or that it won't be recognized by gatekeepers in fields where it's relevant? IQ is general problem solving, it's learning, in other words it already applies to all these systems. But, again, it's not the only thing that applies - you are judged on a variety of personal characteristics, such as willingness to put in work, reliability, trustworthiness, not being weird, etc. These things all actually matter.
Like I said at the top, there are some fields where raw IQ really does determine your effectiveness. Maybe you're in or adjacent to one of these, and are really griping about how the selection methods there are failing to identify intellectual capacity? If so I'm sympathetic. But in all other realms, if you don't produce anything with your big brain then you're no more useful than an idiot. I'd rather have someone conscientious and loyal on my team any day of the week.
A higher-IQ physical therapist is still better. Taking the example of a physical therapist, all else equal:
Comparing a physical therapist with 100 IQ to another with 130 IQ, the diminishing returns to IQ would have had to already hit 0 by 100 IQ, which I don't find plausible in the slightest for them to be interchangeable.
This matters not only for edge cases, but also for common cases. A smarter physical therapist has better recall and better ability to synthesize information ranging from exercise form to injury diagnoses.
Suppose a patient is doing PT to recover from a bicep tear. At some point a basic, traditional, bicep curl will likely be involved as a PT exercise, where the dumbbell is to be rotated with palm facing upward.
If the patient doesn't get good rotation on the curl (and thus not getting full bicep engagement), a dumber physical therapist might not even Notice. A smarter one would Notice and take a look at where the patient is gripping along the dumbbell and slide the grip if necessary. After sliding the grip, the smarter one would with greater probability remember to monitor and encourage the patient to concentrate on "pinky first" if necessary, and then troubleshoot from there.
And this is just from one exercise from one particular type of injury. Differences between a 130 IQ and 100 IQ physical therapist can add up from relatively routine situations, much less those with tail risk, when one is considering things from an ex-ante expected value standpoint.
Physical therapy is gated by a doctoral degree in the US, although it historically wasn't and almost certainly shouldn't be. In the UK physiotherapy (which Wikipedia says is the same thing) is a bachelor's degree, mostly offered by "new" universities (in American terminology, community colleges that were upgraded in the 1990s) or specialist healthcare colleges whose main programme is nursing. Less than 50% of British 18 year olds will complete a first degree, so getting a bachelor's at all strongly suggests IQ>100, and healthcare-related degrees tend to be the more rigorous degrees at low-end universities. A 100IQ physiotherapy student would be at the bottom of their class and would struggle to graduate.
In other words, if you think the average Westerner could do the job of a physiotherapist, I suspect you are living in a bubble and don't understand just how dumb most of the lower-middle classes are.
A lot of us found the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong/Slatestarcodex comment sections because (metaphorically, I hope) we couldn't deal with our local Mensa chapters being full of involuntary retards, and then moved from those places to here to get away from voluntary retardation due to wokeness. Those retards in Mensa - they're still the 98th percentile of the bell curve.
Although it’s likely a highly non-central example of a doctoral degree (most people would likely think of an MD or PhD), this is technically true.
Yeah, it’s a point I made back a few weeks ago when we were talking about Trans TA vs. Thot Undergrad. Despite how dumb OU Samantha might sound in her essay, it’s very possible she’s closer to the average Mottizen in IQ than she is to the average person, so one can imagine how dumb an average person might be like.
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You're not describing IQ. You are describing a combination of 1) specialized knowledge, and 2) attention to detail/conscientiousness. Only the first of these correlates to IQ, and then only because a higher IQ person can learn things faster, as I mentioned. Once the 100 IQ person works to acquire the knowledge/experience the difference between them becomes negligible in 99% of cases.
I’ll leave aside your unjustified confidence to characterize what I’m describing.
“Only because a higher IQ person can learn things faster” is doing a ton of lifting.
You’re looping right back into what was already pre-empted by OP. One could just as well sputter:
Anyway, let’s proceed.
It’s not just stock, but both stock and flow. Even allowing for the hypothetical that a 100 IQ person has the same stock of knowledge/experience as a 130 IQ person by turn of some magic genie, the 100 IQ person will forget things faster and learn new things slower, and be less able to pattern match among the things he does have in stock.
The 99% is just a made-up number backed up by your wishcasting.
And even then if we accept differences are “negligible”—“negligible” differences, as I explained, can add up quickly. If you’re a potential patient, all else equal you’d always go for the Physical Therapist with the more favourable “negligible” differences.
If you don’t like getting own-goaled by the physical therapist example that you yourself proferred, there’s always other real life examples such as various HFT marketmaking firms who make a negligible amount of money with each go (and often lose money on each go), but each go ends up accumulating to a lot.
My basic claim that IQ is not and should not be a primary characteristic that we're selecting for. It's secondary, in that it can affect the acquisition of primary characteristics, particularly specialized knowledge. But it seems to me you are reducing my hypothetical PT to this one number, and that you are wrong to do so.
In fact, I chose this example because I know a PT who is not a high IQ individual. He struggled a lot during school and barely squeaked by with a degree. I wouldn't estimate his IQ higher than 105. However, he's consistently rated as an excellent PT, with great reviews from his patients. How can this be? The answer is obvious - he put in a lot of work to acquire the necessary knowledge, and continues to work hard to research the unique problems his patients have, so he has the same functional knowledge as a higher-IQ PT. But he excels in other traits that correspond with high performance in this job, things like personability, conscientiousness, work ethic, and caring about his patients as people. I do not think a higher-IQ PT would be better at the job, even in negligible ways (you're right that 99% is a made-up number, well done spotting that). PTs aren't like Doctor House, coming up with genius insights that nobody else can see. They follow standard therapeutic guidelines. This is the case for most jobs.
As I said in both my comments, obviously IQ has an impact on many things, and 'all else equal' a higher IQ PT has an advantage - but all else isn't equal, and that advantage is not as significant as you seem to think. Overall, I believe that selecting for IQ is a mistake, for a lot of reasons - in this comment chain the reason I'm hitting on is that other traits are more important to many or even most jobs, and that we should assess people based on their performance. Hopefully that clarifies things for you.
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Fair point, but occupations such as physiotherapy aren't the point of contention (beyond the usual debate about whether or not they should be gated behind credentials, and if so, how heavily).
Let's talk about medicine: I would pay a sizable premium to have a shrink like Scott see me, instead of the modal kind, even if the latter delivers adequate care, and the returns diminish steeply. Outside of a single niche, better doctors/smarter-and-more-conscientious students go into the most competitive specialities. Within the same category, the truly great tend to become specialists and experts in their given domain.
Of course, the rate of return per IQ point can vary greatly. A 130 IQ janitor is just sensible about reading the signs that say "do not ever switch off the lab equipment". A hypothetical 170 IQ janitor probably won't stay a janitor for long.
On the other hand, a 130 IQ physicist might well be locked out entirely from the sorts of intellectual work a 170 IQ counterpart might produce.
Since we agree that this is heavily context dependent, and there are few/no professions where there's a negative return from IQ, we're baking the same cake, just arguing about the ratio of ingredients.
Medicine is very regimented. A doctor twice as smart as me completes their curriculum at the same pace, I'm not aware of accelerated med school programs of any quality. I think I've done decently enough, and am probably above average as a doctor in certain ways (as per exam results), but I don't delude myself into thinking I'd be a shoe-in at Harvard Med.
This is less personal angst, and more general commentary. I don't think my kids will need a SAT coach, or the need to dig wells.
(The previous situation was Mostly Fine. I think the current state of affairs are Mostly Fine. They could still be better.)
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