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Notes -
Maybe this is a better fit for the Friday Fun Thread but IMO it’s culture war-y enough for here.
Here’s a thought experiment based on a thread that has popped up in /r/whowouldwin:
Imagine that every single person in Liberia gained a 180 IQ overnight. Also, they were imbued with an extraordinarily strong sense of patriotism such that they never wanted to move away from Liberia for more than a few years for school or special training. Could Liberia reach a GDP of $1 trillion by 2040?
Relevant stats: Liberia has a population of 5.3 million, a GDP of $4 billion, and a GDP per capita of $750.
I don't think it is that interesting a question because there's so much missing information. I'm on the record as thinking that IQ is a useful metric, but I think it stops being useful past the 150/160 mark - I'm not entirely sure what exactly it means to have an IQ of 180 or how dramatic of an impact it would have. The only individual with an extremely high IQ I'm aware of is Chris Langan, and that extremely high IQ appears to have led him to become an anti-semite and develop a very convoluted theory of everything that was so important that the 9/11 attacks had to be staged by the Bush administration to prevent the public from learning about it (according to his wikipedia article). There's a decent possibility that the human brain experiences diminishing returns from absurdly high levels of IQ that lead to problematic outcomes which we haven't actually developed solutions for.
The second problem is that while IQ is a great metric, it in no way comes close to explaining every difference in outcome between populations. There are countless heritable differences in cognition that aren't directly related to IQ - levels of neuroticism, extraversion, inclination to left/right wing politics... Would those differences be equalised among the various different competing ethnic groups in Liberia by the same magic that uplifted their IQ? It's extremely easy to make the case that the 180 IQ Liberia in the absence of any other changes would be largely equivalent to real world Liberia except with much nastier and more effective violence and ethnic strife - just look at the population breakdown by ethnic group.
I see this stated a lot with the implication that IQ no longer matters above the level of (myself / my smartest friend / the smartest person I can conceive).
But why wouldn't a person's expected accomplishments go up exponentially as IQ increases with no limit. We can certainly observe that pattern up into the top 1 or 0.1%. Why would there be a cutoff beyond that?
Terrance Tao or John von Neumann would seem to fit the bill as well and are much more accomplished.
I'll admit that the number of people with an IQ of 180 is so vanishingly small we can't make concrete statements about them, and that there is not a robust way to test either.
Let's not forget Marilyn vos Savant, whose career revolved around answering logic questions in Parade magazine.
Loved her column as a kid.
Her IQ was bullshit though. It was based on having a "mental age" of 22 at age 10, therefore an IQ of 220. This makes no sense.
An IQ of 180 is more than 5 standard deviations above the norm. Fewer than 1 in 10 million people have this. I think it's safe to say that vos Savant was not one of those people, even if she was quite intelligent.
Locating the ~750 people with that IQ should give enough sample size to answer some questions.
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