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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31784 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people.

Well, if the vaccine is that deadly, how smart are the "smart, educated" people who went ahead and got it, versus the "dumb, uneducated" who were suspicious and sceptical?

This kind of class-sneering drives me batty. Oh no, all the morons and idiots will survive! What do you care, if your smart, educated, employed corpse is in the grave?

Well, if the vaccine is that deadly, how smart are the "smart, educated" people who went ahead and got it, versus the "dumb, uneducated" who were suspicious and sceptical?

IF

This isn't the gotcha you think it is An intelligent person who made one mistake is still more intelligent than a dumb person who made one lucky decision

Dead smart guy is still dumber than lucky live dumb guy.

The dumb person may well be more fit (in the Darwinian sense), however.

In a world where birth control exists it seems that they are, and also the world OP describes but that world is a complete fiction so I'm not that concerned about it.

At first they were too smart but then they wised up and they found a way to win

Was Hillary Clinton Too Smart To Get Elected?

Well in the batty hypothetical we're discussing, I have a 75% chance of being alive. Probably a little higher, no boosters. So most likely I'm alive, 40, and dealing with a world in which close on 20% of the US population is dead, with a much higher percentage of those dead being among those who were either in or on track to be in elite professions at the top of their field. That means something, and I don't see why you want to pretend it doesn't.

Statistically, employed people got the vaccine at higher rates than unemployed people. Educated people got the vaccine at higher rates than uneducated people. Highly educated, high iq professions got it at higher rates than lower educated lower iq professions. Even if you're an anti-IQ extremist and you hold to the idea that educational attainment is just status signaling, so that you could decapitate the system and new people would take their place once they had a chance to train up, it would still take decades for those new people to train.

96% of doctors are "fully" vaccinated, so we're losing 25% of those in ten years. Even if you think that ultimately you can take a waitress and turn her into a doctor (after all the doctors were too dumb to avoid the vaccine! She must be smarter than the dead doctors!), that ain't gonna happen overnight. We have no social comparison for what would happen in a complex post-industrial society in that scenario of elite destruction.

A "street-smart" deliveryman or welder aren't economic substitutes for a physics professor or a staff engineer, even though the former guessed right on the murdervaccine. Kinda moot though considering they're not dying, though. In cases where large-scale bad choices are made, there is selection at play, and the high IQ gay techie who doesn't reproduce is in a meaningful sense worse than, and is losing to, the 'working class white' with three kids - but those three kids still can't take the "distributed systems architect" the techie had.

those three kids still can't take the "distributed systems architect" the techie had.

How nice to know that we have arrived at our current state of progress due to easily recognisable hereditary classes/castes. Smart people have always had smart kids in a distinct band of the population different from the dumb masses. No working-class labourer ever made it out of manual work where they grunted at each other over pints of beer up to the elevated cloud mansions.

Sorry, Cardinal Wolsey. No place for you, Thomas Cromwell. You are irrevocably tainted with the smear of the lower, dumber classes. It is only the children of the dukes who will go on to be the intelligent discoverers of scientific principles. There will always be a Robert Boyle, there will never be an Isaac Newton. We can see this via Elon Musk's kids who are all out there working on their Nobels!

This comment would've made more sense if it was posted before my reply to nybbler, where I agreed that many of the current group of very smart people are the children of people outside that group.

I do think that a large, say >25%, subset of the smartest people dying will harm society's overall success more than an equivalent total number of randomly chosen people dying, because genes are very important to intelligence and intelligence is heritable.

Eh, my grandfather was a working class white person with six kids, and at least three of them could have done that job. Maybe 4.

That's incredibly common, yeah, a lot of smart/successful people come from less smart/successful backgrounds. Sorting is reducing that, but not that much. My point was that the vast majority of working class people can't serve in those jobs, so killing all the physics professors would make society much worse off, which is entirely compatible with that because the number of normal people is much larger than the number of very smart people.

And yet amazingly society recovered from the Black Death. Why, it's almost like you can survive, rebuild, and educate the next generation to become physics professors!

Also income isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 proxy to actual societal necessity.

For every heart surgeon that gets hypothetically mowed down you're losing a lot of senior marketing professionals (as somebody who's done that job), makework and bureaucrats who could fade out of existence with the real world barely noticing. My personal ascent to the 1% has generally been distinctly uncorrelated with any sort of 'how much does my job actually do for anybody' principle.

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