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Making Cognitive Enhancement Palatable

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: I think that cognitive genetic enhancement is important for ensuring we have a better and lasting future. Many people have an intuitive dislike for the idea of using genetic enhancement to make a baby smarter but have little issue with in vitro fertilization (IVF). I try to build from a foundation of the acceptable practice of IVF to PGT-P for IQ.

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Thing is, this is going to be for middle-class and upwards of that. Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other (starting age six, I understand from this edifying story).

There's no point in educating these kids above their station, and why would you want them smart enough to recognise their shitty rung of the ladder, be dissatisfied and possibly able to organise to do something more effective than street protests and burning down police stations? They are always going to be at the bottom of the ladder, because great now you're IQ 120. Meanwhile, the rungs above you are making sure their embryos are selected to be IQ 130-140 before implantation in the hand-picked surrogate for gestation, and the classes above you will keep their grip on what they've already got. Before, identifying and recruiting any smart underlings was worth it in order to co-opt that productivity for your own benefit, but now that you can reliably be sure all your kids are smart enough for the new world, you don't need recruits that have to be taught how to be middle-class.

Any jobs the smart underlings can do will be automated/replaced by AI away, and holding on to the slots in the PMC are going to be more competitive as white collar jobs become vulnerable to replacement by AI. Why bother creating competition from below? Leave the masses dumb and ignorant as your children, and their children, pull further and further away, and throw sops to keeping the peace with bread and circuses and legalised drugs, until you can figure out a way to prevent them reproducing at all. Robots will be cheaper and better anyway.

Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other

This is such a quintessentially leftist, zero-sum, all-goods-are-positional-goods, spoils-system, school-pecking-hierarchy point of view. Do you think violent crime is an unchangeable quantity that can only be shifted around like liquid in a hydraulic system, that there's a fixed supply of non-crappy homes such that only a few get to have them, that the economy just needs someone to be on obese and on welfare? That all that IQ score represents is deviation from the median rather than a noisy proxy for absolute cognitive ability, so any improvement will only produce accelerated running in place?

It reminds me of The Citadel of Ricks from that damn cartoon – which is either brilliant satire or an expression of an extraordinarily pathological world model, or both, I guess. Unironic superhumans who can individually construct physics-breaking tools and AI-powered assistants – exploiting each other, building elaborate chains of abuse, maintaining artificial scarcity, ineffectively doing menial jobs to the point of burnout, in a mockery of a dysfunctional American city.

I'd understand it if you predicted a culling, seeing as you expect AI to be economically useful. But who the fuck needs to maintain a permanent underclass that requires babysitting, armed cops and shitty schools? Would our genetically-augmented overlords invest into reintroducing lead-laced gas and asbestos walls, while they're at it?

If I am to be blunt, I think this entire line of thinking is a cope. I think people hide in this worldview from admitting that some groups they care about are just fucked up – not relatively or conventionally, but in some rigorously definable, absolute, physical, embarrassing but potentially rectifiable sense. That there are hard limits on what can be achieved with «85 IQ», which do not follow from it being 1 SD below the «100 IQ» and thus non-competitive in a market economy. Limits on impulse control, cooperation, general decision-making. And moving beyond these limits allows for building an all-around nicer society for everyone, without extra requirements for morality of its elites.

Sure, they can try to cement their advantage – though that'd require the «PMC» to coordinate far more than they've been able so far. On the other hand, the main reason to avoid falling down the hierarchy is knowing how much it sucks down there. Sucks absolutely, not relatively. Scarcity begets crab mentality. And stupidity multiplies scarcity.

There is a huge demand for horror stories about the Japanese way of life. Japanese elites are not inhumanly virtuous or selfless; Japanese culture and society are rather hierarchical. There is, I'm sure, some violence, some bullying, some crappy housing in Tokyo – just very little, relatively speaking. But there certainly are no armed security guards in Tokyo schools. It's not because the undesirables have all been tucked away somewhere on Hokkaido. It's partially, but in a very large part, because there does not exist an underclass with sub-90 IQ in modern Japan. And no one deserves to be born into such an underclass.


@Eetan would no doubt gleefully remind me that the Japanese public has no guns anyway, so those guards wouldn't have had anything to do. Well, fair point. But there's very little non-gun violence either. There's virtually no shit like this in Japan. If the demand to lay down arms and obey can be made legitimate, guaranteeing extreme safety is one of the better ideas.

There's virtually no shit like this in Japan

I look at this and I'm amazed how good the facilities are compared to school I was in, are.