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Notes -
Rationalism Done Right (and Hipster Eugenecists)
I don't follow the Rationalist sphere very much beyond this community, but I came across the above article with claims that there may be some rightward shifts within the rationalist movement in interesting directions. The author starts by mentioning that:
I can't speak to Hanania's views so I would take that with a grain of salt. But the author creates "a list of beliefs for rationalists or effective altruists who lean right", which are the author's conception of "right-wing rationalism." They are described in the article but listed here:
The list is weighted too much on IQ differences and socio-economic outcomes. Basically five of these points are restatements of the importance of IQ. But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable. What makes China and what makes the United States is not only a function of IQ.
Point #6 is interesting because I felt it was the biggest differentiator between rationalist thinking and dissident right-wing thinking- the latter of which is concerned with the problem of ethnogenesis and race formation which, if you care about basically anything: civilization, politics, religion, you have to consciously confront the problem of ethnogenesis. It's interesting to see a higher awareness of that problem in a Rationalist, although again he seems only concerned with IQ drift and is missing the bigger picture of ethnogenesis. That is probably why he ultimately describes himself as "enthusiastic for immigration", still viewing the problem as capturing as many high-IQ genes as possible rather than confronting the harder problem of race formation.
Point #9 is also a step closer to DR-oriented thinking:
At the end of his article Parrhesia mentions "the Collin’s pro-natalist conservative faction" and linked to this article: Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take 'control of human evolution'. There's a lot of sneering by the author, a lot of cultish goofiness from the subjects of the article (the Collinses), but ultimately I think there's a lot of substance there.
Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool? The Effective Altruist forum has a thread on this article under the thread name "Pronatalists" may look to co-opt effective altruism or longtermism. The greatest consternation was over this part of the BI article:
I think the vision here is a far better implementation of longtermism than EA.
As these threads of of Rationalist thinking start to converge with DR thinking, they will have to confront the major problem of coordinating behavior. There's a tounge-in-cheek naivety in the plan of the Collinses:
This sounds like a crazy idea (and it is). But a much more attainable solution is to organize the social behavior of similar people by granting social status to reproducing, and incentivizing assortative mate selection with high-quality and like-minded people. Basically the things Religion has done for us until now. This could be accomplished with the revitalization of traditional religious institutions or the creation of a new non-theistic cult that coordinates this behavior. The DR is split between the two approaches, and the Collinses would clearly fit better in with the latter.
Another aspect of the article I found noteworthy was that the Collinses (who are Jewish) laugh-off the predictable comparisons to Nazism which (to be fair, credibly) are going to be associated with any pro-natalist movement by its opponents:
Another interesting statement from Simone, which is something you will read verbatim in the DR:
I agree with all of this and the list . IQ predicts a lot, like which countries tend to have more innovation and dollar-adjusted GDP, real estate, and stock market growth and appreciation. Investing in high-IQ countries and regions , like Silicon Valley real estate, is almost always better than low/average IQ ones. But most of this is just HBD. Rationalism may include HBD but it's a lot more than that. Pre-2016 someone like Charles Murray would fit this profile, but now the trad or Trump-right has sorta overshadowed this HBD-right . I wish it would come back.
edit
I think it sorta is. the US is hugely diverse. The higher-IQ parts of the US seem to be closer to the high-IQ parts of China compared to less intelligent regions of either the US or China. Similar to China, high-IQ 'blue' areas imposed the most Covid restrictions. Same for higher ed. Culture is in many ways downstream from IQ. China likely has assortative mating by IQ, similar to in in the US. Very seldom will you see large IQ differences between couples in Bay Area, New York, etc.
Okay.
This assumes those countries and regions are intrinsically high-IQ as opposed to being high-IQ because they're already wealthy. Otherwise, maybe it's much cheaper to raise the IQ of currently low-IQ regions than to get some marginal amount of additional productivity out of high-IQ regions. This is basically the Stephen Jay Gould* argument for EA directing resources towards poor countries in Africa.
*Quote:
It's more than just diverting cognitive resources to low-IQ areas. You need to also create economic and social conditions conducive to capital accumulation and innovation (otherwise you get brain drain, and thus back to square one). The US is perfect for this, being that it has generally low taxes and free markets. The UAE is the opposite, being fairly restrictive. Low but stable marginal returns can still be pretty good compared to negative or flat elsewhere or much more risk .
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