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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I’m concerned that something that gets lost in these discussions is that there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.

Just because you’re intelligent doesn’t mean you’re a high-quality individual. One criticism you can’t make of the people who run the current western political establishment is that they’re not intelligent enough. There are many intelligent people who are actively malicious, or they’re lazy, they leech off society, or what have you; conversely, some of the people I admire the most are not very intelligent at all.

A eugenics program that optimized for intelligence above all else would be short-sighted.

Judging by genetic correlations with fertility, we'll see worse dysgenics if we look at the bigger picture. In fact, intelligence is being bred out largely on account of its contribution to tasks common for people high in conscientiousness, honesty etc.

Of course this is the sort of thing original eugenicists cared very much about; their program was explicitly dedicated to breeding a kinder, more prosocial man and eliminating the genetic basis for criminality and insanity, not maxxing cognitive test scores and exam passing rates. But the bulk of the discussion got reduced to IQ/g because... because cognitive psychometrics proved harder to cancel with accusations of Nazism, I think.

And this Old World interest in «good character» in general is suspect. Show your KPIs or walk, euro boy!

there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.

These are all fluid in a way that intelligence is not. I can practice radical honesty, I can force my self to be more conscientious, etc. Intelligence is a hard limit on potential, and no such thing exists for how many lies I tell.

These are all fluid in a way that intelligence is not.

Well, maybe - but what's the evidence for that? How much more fluid are they? Is this something measurable, or does a relative paucity of measurement allow wishful thinking to fill in the gaps? I'm reminded of naraburns' review of The Cult of Smart ( https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/joopge/disappointed_by_the_cult_of_smart/ )

His criticism of American public education seems basically cogent, if occasionally incomplete or, perhaps, symptomatic of motivated reasoning. But when he observes that

We sink vast sums of money into quixotic efforts to make all of our students equal

it does not seem to occur to him, at all, that we could therefore choose to stop doing that. Instead, bizarrely, he recommends we continue doing that--indeed, he thinks we should pay teachers even more money to keep doing that. Only instead of trying to make students equal by teaching them math, we should make them equal by teaching them to care about one another, to be compassionate, to work to the best of their abilities and be grateful to receive from others in accordance with their needs. Why deBoer thinks schools will be any better at teaching children these things, than they are at teaching children math, is never expressed or explored. Why deBoer fails to notice that there is no reason, in principle, to think that people's dispositions are any less governed by their DNA than are their capabilities, I can only guess, but it is an absolutely glaring oversight. What do we do, in his perfect world, with children who are predisposed to be bad at caring? What do we do with teachers who are bad at teaching it? DeBoer seems to be laboring under the delusion that teaching people to behave is substantially less quixotic than teaching them algebra.

If evidence exists that it is substantially less quixotic, then that would be wonderful news (provided the evidence is good.) But considering how much something like this is desired to be true, I think the lack of some well-known solid evidence is probably not an encouraging sign.

You theoretically can, but probably won't do it in any way that matters; if you are inherently dishonest, you'll see specifics of the case justifying another deceit or swindle, your barrier for excusing transgressions is lower than in people with strict moral code. And it probably does not even have the pronounced negative component. In my experience, archetypal WEIRD/Hajnal-born people genuinely feel terrible when they are «forced to cheat» against the consensus morality. By the same token they don't experience exhilaration at discovering a clever hack there (even when they love to hack and tinker in the abstract or in mediums that are not morally laden).

Now, in a sense you're right. With large-scale intrusive social engineering, it should be possible to nudge the whole society towards greater effective cooperation and conscientiousness, in a way no education and nutrition beyond the basic can do for intelligence.

A year and a half ago, on reddit, I quoted::

A commenter in Steven Hsu's blog wrote 2 years ago on his recent visit to China:

I also took a trip to China recently. Had not been back since 2007. The infrastructure is certainly impressive. The airports and train stations are quite amazing. The biggest change had been the behavior of the people. Much more orderly. Traffic in Guangzhou and Shanghai could pass for any U.S. city. Beijing is still more chaotic. I think mainly due to the massive overload of the roads. In the tourist places, there were just throngs of people. If the driver needs to get through, he has no choice but to cut in front of pedestrians.

There are no longer any pick pockets. People have better manner than I expected in the subways. No one toss trash on the streets. The roads, even high traffic areas like the Bund in Shanghai, are quite clean compared to the U.S. big cities.

All this should be credit to the omnipresent cameras and the fact that people don't carry a wallet anymore. However, I went to a bank to exchange some currency and left my umbrella there for a couple of hours, It was still sitting in the same place after I return. This would not have happened in 2007.

Effective punishment also helps. People are not sent to jail when they violate the rules, they are barred from riding the subway. All the entrances of the subways now have check points to correlate the picture taken there against the file picture from the ID. Not being able to ride the subways is a major drag in a big city like Beijing.

I believe underneath, people are still basically the same animal. There were reports of a park losing all of its lotus flowers (acres and acres of them) to looters who scale the fence at night to steal the flowers. Camera caught them to be mostly women and older men. However, the high probability of getting caught and the effective punishment changed at least the behavior. This is the start of the march toward the Singaporean model. When the older people die off, the younger generation will take the law and order to their heart as they are brought up that way.

What struck me about the Chinese government is their ability to get things done. Try something, does not work, try a different approach until one works. replicate nation wide. In the U.S., our government has lost this ability and has become a hindrance to progress.

Isn't it wonderful?

But this is just pleb stuff. The Chinese are still cheating horribly in governance, in crucial business and in science. It seems to require specific pressures for every single strand of the social fabric.

That's a ton of friction. Conscientious societies, in contrast, are almost frictionless – to the extent that your worst roadblock there is some moral busybody or a worrywart with red tape.

I don't think so. There's a reason for the aphorism "A leopard cannot change its spots". I suspect some people are basically dishonest in the same way others are basically stupid.

The thing about quoting aphorisms is that there's usually one that says the opposite.

Ok this isn't an aphorism, but quoting Shakespeare comes close:

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,

Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,

That to the use of actions fair and good

He likewise gives a frock or livery

That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence; the next more easy;

For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

"Almost"?

(And Hamlet may have said it, but Gertrude did not take his advice)

I mean, to be fair, modern society seems to be pushing against fertility by middle class pro social types and not affecting the underclass or high impulse types as much.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We have a good index to measure g but very poor indices to measure whatever single letter variables you want to assign to personal virtue. So eugenicists focus on g.

I'm a human environmentalist. I want homo sapiens sapiens to persist in their present form, forever. History is not on my side, as humans have already applied selection to ourselves several times. People who could not live pro-socially in a Dunbar's number tribe were weeded out somewhere between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago. People who balk at living in states are in the process of being weeded out and have been for the last ten thousand years; the last big tribes were forcefully sedentarized in the nineteenth century. I don't really know what direction humanity is currently self-selecting towards, but birth control is probably accelerating it.

The character of the human who thrives in this environment is sure to be quite different from what you see around you.

Unfortunately we can expect uncontrolled evolution to this effect even if you fight off the naive eugenics.

There's also the obvious issue that a generalised program of eugenics might have negative effects on the already poor fertility rate, since if you're using negative eugenics methods you're excluding a large proportion of people of reproductive age from having children.

I'll be controversial and play transhumanist for a second. Maybe all of this is more evidence in favour of research into genetic modification. With genetic modification there is no such issue, and you're given a very fine level of control over the traits you want. You could attempt to optimise for a constellation of pro-social traits, and to the extent that there are tradeoffs a desirable balance between them could be struck (of course there's some risk of catastrophic failure in the near term due to a lack of knowledge of the potential downstream effects of any gene edit, but over the long run it is a net good, and an inevitability).

A common fear I see expressed is that it would lead to a class divide between those who can afford modification and those who can't, thus exacerbating intergenerational poverty, but I see no reason why the cost of such a program wouldn't be subsidised by the state. It's obviously a net benefit to have every member of your society as functional as possible, and due to continuing developments in biotechnology the next generation would be more productive than the last (creating exponential growth and possibly resulting in an intelligence "explosion" of sorts). Arms races between different states might also fuel such an explosion.

There's a question if what would come out of the other end would be particularly human, of course. On one hand, the idea inspires a very instinctual disgust in many people. On the other, I can't imagine an outcome where humans remain the same indefinitely - it's not as if evolution has suddenly stopped applying to humans in the absence of modification. I say shaping ourselves directly is a better outcome than simply being acted upon by the impartial forces of natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow, and using modification just to keep us exactly where we are now is inherently unstable due to the fact that you can't universally enforce a rule that prevents your competition from "elevating" themselves relative to you. Any society that tries to keep themselves baseline would be assimilated into one that embraced transhumanism.

It's obviously a net benefit to have every member of your society as functional as possible

I don't see a net benefit to give your janitors, for example, high-end mental enhancements (other than pruning "boredom" and "ambition" nodes). My worry is that there will be a class divide between those who get the upper-class mods and those who get the service-class ones.

Where we're going, we don't need janitors.

It already feels like we're getting within sight of a technological singularity, and this kind of transhuman intelligence-enhancing technology would get us there even faster.

And in this alternate world where everyone's intelligence has been elevated, whatever menial jobs that (briefly?) remain will probably be very well compensated (since the pool of people qualified to scrub toilets is now no larger than the pool of people qualified to design microchips). So rather than thinking in terms of a "145 IQ janitor", it might make more sense to imagine someone who puts in a year as a janitor to make a huge pile of money so he can buy a big house and be financially secure to spend the rest of his life pursuing his passion of writing papers about statistical mechanics.

It already feels like where we're going, we won't need big brain 145 IQ contemplators and artists, either.

I don't see a net benefit to give your janitors, for example, high-end mental enhancements (other than pruning "boredom" and "ambition" nodes).

I'd say that retoolability counts as a benefit. Operating off a strict genetic caste system based on assigned social roles is unsustainable since it requires you to somehow be able to reliably forecast your future needs (like what ratio of janitors:scientists you would need in X amount of years). If and when skilled roles unexpectedly open up that need to be filled, it'll be very difficult for anyone else to fill them.

The only way this remotely works is if it's possible for forms of mental enhancement (genetic or mechanical/technological) to be applied to service-class mods later in life so they can operate at the same level as those modified as embryos, allowing a society to react to circumstances as they arise. But even if that can happen, radically changing someone at a later stage of development would likely inherently be more difficult and time-consuming than embryo editing and introduces a huge amount of unnecessary lag and unwieldiness into the system. The simpler and more optimal solution would be to make it so that people can pliably adapt to a range of jobs from the outset.

Also, there's automation (which likely would develop in tandem with other technologies like genetic modification), and that would make a lot of "janitor"-type jobs irrelevant in the first place.

EDIT: added more

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