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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I think this also highlights the importance of HBD.

If anything, I'd say it demonstrates the exact opposite.

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'

It just goes to show that culture matters.

How convenient, it's just the culture. Will you also argue that culture can make a chihuahua into a hunting dog? Will an improved culture of running put Europeans at the top of the 100m sprints? Will changes to black culture mean they start getting many Fields Medallists or STEM Nobel Prizes?

Genetics is real. Evolution is real. These things will remain real regardless of what you think about them, that's the beauty of material reality.

Will you also argue that culture can make a chihuahua into a hunting dog?

It takes culture to even determine that there should be "hunting dogs" at all, and to start the project of breeding them. We are the product of the cultures of yesterday - who they decided to reward, what traits they regarded as high-status, etc.

Who would have thought in 100 AD that at some point the world's top scientists would be from Britain and Germany?

The Germans often inflicted crushing defeats on the Roman Empire (most famously at Teutoburg but in many other battles), persuading Rome that they shouldn't try to conquer that territory. If the armies of sub-Saharan Africa obliterated two entire American or British divisions that would be very strong evidence that they were peers of British or American civilization.

Furthermore, there has been considerable demographic change in Britain since 100 AD. Anglo-Saxons weren't even there yet.

The German victories over the Romans happened back when despite huge differences between the two sides, they were not very different in military technology. So the German victories over the Romans cannot be directly compared to modern clashes between European and African armies. An African army of the ancient Roman time period would probably have defeated a Roman army in some cases too, especially with the advantage of terrain such as the Germans had at Teutoburg.

The Romans respected German bravery and military prowess, but I think that very few Romans of that time period would have thought it anything but extremely unlikely that the backwoods savages east of the Rhine would eventually lead the world in science and technology.

To me it seems that the Koreans genes have sharply diverged around the mid 1950-s. So is with the German genes in the mid 1940s

North Korea has excuses. Being cut off from world markets and having your trading ships stolen by the US does causes problems with energy production, as does 70 years of Stalinism. Maintaining an extremely large military with a nuclear missile program does distort their economy.

What excuse does South Africa have?

What excuse does South Africa have?

The same that Moldova, Serbia, Albania and Bosnia have despite being lily white? Corruption and incompetence sometime in tandem with the case of south africa a bad case of revanche desire that couldn't be either ignored or satisfied.

People that win power and people that best use power is two different sets. Especially if the formerly oppressed majority don't have the administrative capacity to run the country. So everyone in power started stealing - the same happened in every slavic country in the eastern block. We couldn't fall as far as south africa not because we were smarter but because EU invested quite a lot in us and they just didn't want too much chaos on the borders.

I don't think that the majority of SA problems are because of the IQ gap between the populations. There are enough black people there to produce equally smart as number and IQ people as the indian and white minorities

Human populations don't (only) cluster genetically based on skin color. Race is a bad, lossy, over used heuristic. Grab a group of 130+ IQ Serbs, or Arabs, or Nigerians, and you'd have a much performance along most metrics we value. Indians in the US e.g.

Is there urban cholera in Moldova? Have there been semi-regular power outages for over a decade in Albania? Serbian unemployment rate is about 10%, a third of South Africa's. And then there are the crime figures, which speak for themselves.

Russia is doing far better than South Africa, despite the ire of the international community and a lack of EU funding.

There's dysfunction and then there's DYSFUNCTION.

The same that Moldova, Serbia, Albania and Bosnia have despite being lily white?

They're swarthy, though.

But in any case corruption is as explicable by HBD as IQ.

They're swarthy, though.

But in any case corruption is as explicable by HBD as IQ.

Yes.

100IQ barely literate swarthy and greasy mobsters handing suitcases full of cash - third world corruption.

130IQ well educated lily white political operatives, businessmen, academicians and experts handing book promotions, well paid lecture tours, exclusive investment opportunities and business deals, prestigious academic or think tank jobs etc... - Western freedom, democracy and rule of law working as intended.

I can see you're being facetious. I'm pretty sure that outside of some HBD strawmen, nobody claims that only genetics matters for group outcomes. Unlike the mainstream narrative, we simply claim that it's important and claim trying to analyze and predict outcomes without even considering genetics is a doomed endeavor. It certainly leads to stupidity like the endless hunt for ever more subtle systemic racism (racism of the gaps, as I prefer to call it), when genes-blind attempts to mitigate the disparity fail.

Am I? In history we have couple of unwilling experiments when a nation is split in half by culture. But we also have the formation of ethno states of Europe with massive population swaps after wwI and the fall of ottoman empire (and even before that - 1860-s/70-s). And until communism came the slavic ethnostates were chugging along somewhat nicely and in pack and catching up to the western european societies. Something that we couldn't reproduce after the fall of the iron curtain. Of course big part of the old elites were slaughtered, but they were also slaughtered during ottoman times.

I believe in HBD as in your genes influence your IQ, but when I look around the world to me it seems that the culture matters quite more on a state level.

I can see how lower average IQ can easily cripple a state if you don't produce enough talented people to run the place, but from mine first hand experience - it is corruption that matters much more.

I believe in HBD as in your genes influence your IQ, but when I look around the world to me it seems that the culture matters quite more on a state level.

I can see how lower average IQ can easily cripple a state if you don't produce enough talented people to run the place, but from mine first hand experience - it is corruption that matters much more.

I have some bad news for you - the culture is also a product of genetics. Culture does have a role to play, but I highly doubt you were talking about rates of cousin marriage and the prevalence of manorialism several centuries prior. You can actually get a pretty accurate idea of the levels of corruption in European countries by determining whether they fall inside or outside the Hajnal line, which also correlates with a bunch of other features. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the following article: https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/

Yes it's the culture. The same country, comprised of the same people, and subject to the same material and economic constraints can be a dynamo under one regime's leadership and a complete basket-case under another's.

Ironically your dog example only reinforces my point, you really should have chosen a Pomeranian or a Yorkie because chihuahuas are hunting dogs. The material reality is that the difference between Paris Hilton's Purse Puppy and a Mexican Rat-Catcher is in the upbringing rather than the breed.

Chihuahuas are not meaningfully hunting dogs - they're tiny! A quick search will show this. They lack the physical qualities needed for hunting, it's not what they're for, not where their comparative advantage lies. That's why they're not routinely listed as hunting dogs. Catching rats is not what people mean by hunting.

South Africa worked relatively well when it was run by whites and works poorly now that it is run by blacks. That's not a cultural change, it's a change of who is in control. If it was a cultural change, what was the cultural change? If the cultural change that caused the deterioration is 'a popularization of the idea of letting blacks run the country' then what use is the concept?

Dachshunds are also tiny, and yet the name means "badger hound" and they were explicitly bred that way in order to get down in badger warrens and drag those ferocious pests out by the entrails.

Great - but chihuahuas were not bred for hunting, they were bred to be companion animals (or food). Everyone classifies it as a toy dog, or companion dog.

Yes! But my point was that it could become a hunting dog with less effort than you'd think (though it would take directed effort or a long-ass time and a lot of random luck) to get it there.

Chihuahuas are not meaningfully hunting dogs - they're tiny!

And yet they hunt.

Ah Hlynka, the next time a hunter advertises that they're looking for a hunting dog, you're welcome to show up and sell them on a chihuahua. After all, they hunt! What is a deer but a very large rat after all?

While I am tempted to point you towards @arjin_ferman's posts I am going to refrain, and instead point out that the concept of what constitutes a hunting dog is culturally constructed.

The obvious question being what are you hunting, and what are you looking for in a dog? Are you looking for an affable and kind companion who will fetch you the ducks you've shot? if so you're looking for some flavor of retriever. If you are looking for a dumb bitch who'll make a lot of noise and flush the prey out of the bush, you're looking for something like a basset hound or beagle. If you are looking for a vicious little bastard who will chase your prey down a narrow passage through wich you cannot follow than some breed of terrier or a chihuahua is your go to.

Accordingly, the obvious question that must be asked is what exactly do you think being "a hunting dog" entails beyond being a hunter?

Oh boy... have you considered that a nerdy doctor transhumanist getting into a pissing contest about hunting with a gun-toting redneck might not end well?

If I was in the States, you bet that I'll be packing. God made me a nerd, Samuel Colt made me equal.

If it's me with an AR-15 and my dogs versus Hlynka with his hunting chihuahua..

I'm sorry, are we talking about a pissing contest about hunting, or are we talking about an actual no-shit duel? Samuel Colt makes good guns, but he can't change the way god made you.

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And yet they're not hunting dogs.

I'm still eager to hear what you think the culture change was in South Africa. Come on, be specific!

I'm still eager to hear what you think the culture change was in South Africa. Come on, be specific!

I'm far from an expert on this, but didn't the majority of post-colonial Africa succumb to CRTesque grievance politics?

What is a "Hunting Dog" if not a "Dog who Hunts"?

Control doesn’t imply culture. Just because the right decisions were made previously doesn’t mean culture engendered those decisions.

It sorta does. Will to power is a cultural variable.

No doubt they intersect somewhat but will to power is not the same as culture. I guess what I’m getting at is that you have two populations (A and B). Both populations could have similar cultures today and yesteryear but which culture is in charge can change leading to a different out come. So it wasn’t so much a change in culture but whose culture mattered.

Granted, changing whose culture matters probably affects each populations’s culture somewhat. But I still think who decides is more important than simply saying culture.

Can you please elaborate on your reasoning here? We have a situation that looks to be a total confirmation of HBD premises - the predictions that HBD theories would make on this topic have been proved correct, and you view this as evidence that HBD is wrong? I'm not trying to be glib here, I really cannot understand your reasoning. It also looks like you forgot to include the > for the second quote as well.

Can you please elaborate on your reasoning here?

I will try.

HBD as typically expressed here on theMotte is a strong normative belief in biological determinism. This believe is in turn used to justify opposition any cultural or social intervention that isn't explicitly configured along racial and intersectional lines.

"it's all genetics" they'll say, "teacher quality has pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes" they'll say, and these claims will be used to explain why teaching black kids to read is a waste of time, and why rationalists need to make dysgenics a priority. [To be clear this isn't a straw man, it's the baseline] (https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/63701)

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes, they blame the melanin content of the other guys skin rather than a result of the defect-defect equilibrium that they've been actively rooting for.

What we are seeing in South Africa now is a failure of basic civic structures and trust, this has fuck all to do with skin color but it does have a great deal to do with social cohesion.

The skin color of the leadership seems pretty important to SA.

There are some caveats to full HBD. North Korea, East Germany, etc. These show that poor government can hold good populations back. SA is an example of a good minority government even benefiting a probably less talented country as a whole. But also demonstrates a soft-HBD possibility that there exists certain populations that are incapable, or at least less capable of good governance in a democracy of democracy adjacent regime.

The skin color of the leadership seems pretty important to SA.

And yet somehow less important than whether the leadership are a bunch of Marxists.

Necessary but not guaranteed

Nothing outside death gravity and taxes is ever guaranteed, and even taxes leave a fair bit of wiggle room.

Human society being complex is hardly a novel idea, nor something with any real explanatory power.

Above you said:

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'

This statement makes little sense. No on is in favor of that for them (although, I think full evacuation of the white population is probably best for them long term). It is that the majority is ungovernable without large amounts of repression by a population that is distinct from the majority in many ways. I don't think these rulers and managers and train runners have to be white, simply I don't think there are enough people in the native black population to staff all those roles competently and with the disposition to do so with enough of an iron fist to run the country.

Unclear. Is it because the leadership are Marxists that they don't have the state capacity to prevent rampant pillaging of powerlines? There have been Marxist societies - Stalinist Russia, or Mao's China, or Kim's Korea - that were capable of protecting state infrastructure and harshly punishing those who, without approval from the relevant political authorities, harmed it.

Is it because the leadership of SA are Marxists that they have a turbo-charged affirmative action system (called "Black Economic Empowerment") which crippled many major businesses and state enterprises? It's more LBJ "Great Society" than "all power to the proletariat."

Is the SA leadership's Marxism the reason that they appear to be functionally innumerate?

I don't know, and I have a hard time believing it's not a larger issue, of which culture/ideology is one aspect.

that were capable of protecting state infrastructure and harshly punishing those who, without approval from the relevant political authorities, harmed it.

So there was this one time I was at work, and a friend of mine arrives extremely late. No biggie, we're all IT dudes, and there was nothing urgent, but it was unlike him, so we ask him what happened, and he says: "well, here I was, sitting on the bench at the station, waiting for my usual train when I hear the announcement 'due to theft of the overhead power lines, all trains in the direction of <<city>> are cancelled'". It was already after communism though, so maybe it's beside your point.

Is it because the leadership of SA are Marxists that they have a turbo-charged affirmative action system (called "Black Economic Empowerment") which crippled many major businesses and state enterprises? It's more LBJ "Great Society" than "all power to the proletariat."

That's the same "Cultural Marxism does not exist / isn't Marxism" cope all the Marxists always use. The answer here is yes. Marxist oppressor-opressed analysis is what's responsible for affirmative action.

Is the SA leadership's Marxism the reason that they appear to be functionally innumerate?

That one might come down to post-modernism.

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes

HBD recalibrates what we ought to consider pro-social behavior. The mainstream "we should all mix until we are all a shade of brown so we can focus on our Constitution and Conservative values and put all this race stuff behind us" perspective is the anti-social perspective. Just because it gets you more praise from an adversarial elite does not mean it is pro-social behavior. "White people have no racial identity in a meaningful sense, and whites have had no ethnically-particular influence on America" is not pro-social, it's anti-social.

Someone who understands HBD also understand pro-social behavior to be just that: behavior that improves the quality of society. Tripling down on race denial and ignoring the elephant in the room of dysgenic spiral is anti-social behavior even if it's expected in polite society.

HBD as typically expressed here on theMotte is a strong normative belief in biological determinism.

These aren't strawmen, but they are weak men. Biological determinism obviously falls to North/South Korea. And yes, there are better and worse ways to teach kids to read and teachers prefer the worse ones. None of that means there aren't genetically dumb and genetically smart kids, and that this matters a lot. Nor that some populations are on average a lot smarter, and this matters too. Even if Communism (or totalitarianism in general, but Communism has certainly been the most successful form) is a debilitating disease that neither the high nor low IQ can always resist.

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes, they blame the melanin content of the other guys skin

This, on the other hand, is a strawman.

Biological determinism obviously falls to North/South Korea.

"Biological determinism" does not mean "nothing else except biology has any effect". By your reasoning nothing whatsoever is biologically determined. "The difference between an oak tree and a cow is not biologically determined since you can burn them both and the piles of ashes look pretty much identical."

Perhaps the terms are wrong, but there seem to be a few weakmen around who believe something close to that. That if you have a society of one ethnicity, it will be a certain way, and if you have a society of another ethnicity it will be a different way.

People who believe things like that seem to believe it in the sense that ethnicity determines how good the society can get--not how bad it can get. You can make anything bad with enough destruction.

these claims will be used to explain why teaching black kids to read is a waste of time

Teaching black kids is clearly NOT a waste of time. Trying to teach black kids as we currently do in many if not most majority black schools IS CLEARLY a waste of time

I find this very surprising, because I consider myself a fairly strong HBD believer and none of this matches to what I actually believe.

This believe is in turn used to justify opposition any cultural or social intervention that isn't explicitly configured along racial and intersectional lines.

I've found that the HBD "position" on issues like this is more that as g is unevenly distributed among population groups, that it will naturally manifest as a difference in outcomes even in the absence of explicit racial discrimination. It isn't that teaching black kids to read is a waste of time, but more that recognising that as a group they're going to need different environments, teaching styles and expectations to thrive - and that any plausible interventions that are designed to bring them up to the same standards as another population with a different g distribution curve are going to fail. This can definitely lend support to the argument that black people and white people should have separate education systems, but not that "teaching black kids to read is a waste of time". The closest I can come to seeing that argument in HBD is to use it as a justification, i.e. "It's going to be expensive to educate a separate, low-performing population with differing requirements and aptitudes, so why not just not have that separate population instead and save money?" - but that's not really the fault of HBD itself.

HBDers dismiss pro-social behavior as stupid and counterproductive and when this leads to poor outcomes,

This one really mystifies me - unless you think that pro-social behavior consists of affirmative action, diversity officer sinecures and well-meaning but fatally flawed rectification efforts. HBD doesn't really have anything to say on pro-social behaviour, and the closest I can come to understanding your position here is "HBD says that certain interventions are useless, but I don't think they're useless, ergo HBD is bad".

What we are seeing in South Africa now is a failure of basic civic structures and trust, this has fuck all to do with skin color but it does have a great deal to do with social cohesion.

I don't think that's actually the case. To the best of my knowledge, the HBD position on South Africa would be something along the lines of "Many of the economic and governmental mechanisms, frameworks and bodies set up to manage and organise SA society require a certain baseline level of g in the population, alongside certain heritable qualities in temperament (differing levels of MAOA-L alleles etc). When the administration of society was handed over to a population which did not meet what are effectively the human capital prerequisites, the result was a slow disintegration of the prosperity and social capital accumulated by the prior administration." That matches incredibly well to the outcomes we're seeing, and it isn't a particularly novel view either.

You're right when you say that there's a failure of basic civic structures and trust, and this does technically have fuck-all to do with skin-colour, but that's because skin-colour isn't actually what HBD cares about. In fact your position there fits very neatly into the HBD framework - I feel very confident saying that if you gave the entire black population of South Africa the Michael Jackson skin-colour treatment, the outcome would be identical in all the ways that matter.

Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'

How does believing in HBD equate to wanting any of that? HBD is a descriptive theory; understanding that the differential in human capital between the white minority and the black majority does not suggest any particular course of action or policy recommendation for the country. In fact, the knowledge that the current precipitous decline in material and cultural standards is a direct result of the dispossession and disenfranchisement of whites can easily lead to a belief that the country needs more international investment and intervention by foreigners, given that it’s blindingly obvious that the native blacks are not ever going to be able to maintain anything close to the first-world standards that prevailed in the country during apartheid.

It's not descriptive at all. HBD as it is espoused by yourself, @RandomRanger, @Folamh3, @self_made_human @SecureSignals Et Al is not about describing a position it's about justifying a position. It is normative through and through.

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I don't recall ever endorsing HBD, except if you're referring to my belief that IQ is mostly genetic rather than environmental (i.e. a descriptive stance).

I'm pretty sure that I've never claimed that HBD itself is normative. I consider it both true and useful for the purposes of further policy choices, in the same manner that 1+1=2 being true has downstream consequences in the field of economics.

Obviously, HBD is relevant because it can justify or refute a position. I think what you mean is that our "post-modern racism" came first, and we just cling to HBD to justify something we already wanted to believe, and that was partially true at the beginning although probably not in the way that you think...

My politics pre-HBD were probably closest to yours among anyone else in this community, of a broadly libertarian-conservative persuasion. Believe me when I say I understand where you're coming from because I used to think exactly like you in many ways (I know that's insulting, sorry, but I mean it).

My interest in HBD was initially, admittedly, because I saw it as bolstering some pervasive criticisms of Free Market idealism:

  • HBD sinks the theories that persistent wealth inequality and inequality in various social outcomes is driven by market failure, or aftershock effects of racism.
  • HBD provides a strong anti-welfare argument in the presence of open borders (yes, my initial interpretation of HBD pegged it as an argument against Welfare rather than an argument against immigration/open borders).

Given that the chorus of Systematic Racism was in a massive crescendo post-2016, HBD sparked my interest because it seemed plausible and to provide the best libertarian-compatible (or so I thought) explanation for those patterns of social behavior.

Of course, though, that didn't last long as @DaseindustriesLtd recently described, accepting HBD as true and taking a few steps beyond questions of economic efficiency quickly led to a broad, systematic collapse of my previously held beliefs (again, which were basically aligned with yours).

On Dissident Right Telegram I recently saw an informal poll with a decent sample size indicating that about 50% of the respondents previously identified as libertarian, so my experience is likely common among those in that sphere.

On one level, you're right that interest in HBD was motivated by an attempt to bolster a political viewpoint, but at the time it was as a defense of moderate system values against the Systematic Racism rhetoric which exploded post-2016, rather than motivated by an a priori desire to be a political dissident, which was unimaginable at the time. I know you don't want to believe that our political beliefs followed our acceptance of HBD rather than the other way around, but that was certainly my personal experience.

Thank you. I despise the subtle consensus-building here about the Imperatives of the Implications of Noticing, but I didn’t have the words to say it.

Absolutely, HBD is simply a fact, what policy you wish to enact about it depends on your ideology.

A white supremacist might crow at the evidence showing their superiority and demand extradition of underperforming minorities.

A woke person (who miraculously comes to accept it), might still want AA or desire that the topic be suppressed so as to prevent the former from winning in the court of public opinion (this might already be the case, at least for some of the smarter HBD deniers).

Me? I see it as a glaring reason we need to work on somatic or germline cognitive enhancement, so that skin color and other phenotypical features become utterly uncorrelated with performance, in the same manner that the paintjob of a F1 car doesn't really change its performance. (Barring brand liveries of course, I'm sure some teams have better cars and drivers)

Me? I see it as a glaring reason we need to work on somatic or germline cognitive enhancement, so that skin color and other phenotypical features become utterly uncorrelated with performance, in the same manner that the paintjob of a F1 car doesn't really change its performance. (Barring brand liveries of course, I'm sure some teams have better cars and drivers)

I have some unfortunate news for you: the face predicts the brain. The appearance of one's face is derived to a significant degree from the neural crest, and differences between brains actually do lead to differences in faces in such a way as to make it possible to accurately determine a wide variety of mental and personal qualities about people from their face. Just looking at someone's face gives you enough information to make fairly reliable predictions about their political affiliation, levels of dominance, kindness, sexuality, trustworthiness etc. While skin-colour might be something you can arbitrarily adjust (and albinos do make the case that this is possible), facial features do actually reflect the brain behind them in significant ways. So while you might be able to change skin-colour with no particularly long-lasting consequences, those other phenotypic features are going to be an issue.

I hardly see this as an insurmountable problem, especially when more advanced plastic surgery makes aesthetics entirely a matter of choice. It all seems tractable to me, but then again I'm not overly beholden to the human form, if the cost of raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible requires sacrificing some facial diversity, I couldn't care less!

raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible

You don't want that anyway.

Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.

It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.

Someone's got to clean the toilets

Dawg, what do you think the robots are for? We're operating under very different impressions on how a society with an IQ floor of 150 will operate. If they can't manage that, then I doubt they were at the IQ range in the first place.

If it happens that making robots to clean toilets is more trouble than assigning people to toilet duty, I expect the 150 IQs to clean toilets.

If

If assigning 150 IQs to toilets results in a "mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top," then that seems to mean it causes quite a lot of trouble. I'm not sure that making robots to clean toilets is less trouble, but I would guess that a society filled with 150+ IQs would be able to accomplish this level of robotics without too much trouble, likely less trouble than comes about when a mass of 150-IQ angry losers applying their smarts to manipulate society to place themselves at the top. Then again, perhaps a mass of 150-IQ angry losers wouldn't be much trouble at all if the rest of society is all 180-IQ or something.

Hard to say without seeing it play out empirically which will actually be more trouble.

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if the cost of raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible requires sacrificing some facial diversity, I couldn't care less!

Sufficiently advanced plastic surgery is a good response, and I don't think it is necessarily MORE magical than perfect germline editing for intelligence anyway - we're already in science fiction territory here anyway.

That said, I do find the idea of raising everyone as close to "maximum intelligence possible" to have a few other issues... what levels of autism/aspergers/other disorders are you willing to tolerate in exchange? There've been a lot of discussions on here and in other HBD spaces about how IQ isn't actually an unalloyed good, and I think the "maximum" intelligence reachable is more a matter of making certain trade-offs rather than just assembling every single high-IQ allele. There's even a specific mutation which boosts IQ but also causes blindness - if you're going for the maximum IQ, do you have that mutation?

I fail to see how it's "magical" in the least, if you're willing to grant that scientific progress exists and there are no fundamental physical limitations preventing it. Science fiction seems to be doing quite well, since we have reusable rockets, AI and millions of other things that once upon a time didn't exist, were speculated to exist, and then did exist. Someone in the 1960s reading their best hard scifi would be doing a lot better at predicting the modern world than someone who dismissed it all out of hand.

what levels of autism/aspergers/other disorders are you willing to tolerate in exchange?

Quite a lot, if it was strictly unavoidable (which I strongly dispute). High functioning autism is an entirely different beast than the low IQ form. Most of them are functional and productive individuals, even if they might be better off without it.

here's even a specific mutation which boosts IQ but also causes blindness - if you're going for the maximum IQ, do you have that mutation?

Given that I expect cybernetic eyes on par with real ones to be very plausible, in that case why would I care? I don't even care about being biological at all, and even our current AI which outperform the average human in most cognitive tasks are not autistic in the least. In a world where we didn't have eye replacements, I wouldn't take that tradeoff.

We also already know that there are people with very high IQ figures who are clearly not autistic, so at the very least my approach is directionally better, even if we need to halt before true "maximum" intelligence at the cost of being a brain in a jar (something I would personally be fine with).

I fail to see how it's "magical" in the least

I was using magic in the Arthur C. Clarke sense, hence why I said "sufficiently advanced". Sorry if I was being unclear, I just wanted to establish that when we're talking about this perfect germline editing tech then super advanced plastic surgery is probably within reach too and hence relevant to the conversation.

Quite a lot, if it was strictly unavoidable (which I strongly dispute).

I think that in many cases the social difficulties and the high IQ are separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon - you can't get one without at least the risk of the other. While there's definitely a decent amount of low-hanging fruit (and a lot of it doesn't even need to involve genetics - proper nutrition from conception and beyond, ensuring no oxygen deprivation at early ages, etc) I think that you're going to run out of low-hanging fruit and start running into the trade-off zone. As I've said before, IQ is not an unalloyed good - we can just observe the world and notice that there are environments which select for it and environments which actually select against it. Some of these tradeoffs we don't give a shit about in the future, like longer development times and nutritional requirements, but some of them we very much will care about (blindness, social difficulties, higher rates of neurological disorders as seen in Ashkenazim etc). There's a decent chance that we live in a world where you'd be able to get a baseline level of enhancement by clearing out the low-hanging fruit but eventually reach a point where you'd have to start taking risks - i.e. hearing a doctor present an option with "This configuration will result in an incredibly high IQ, but at the same time there'll be a moderate risk that they end up with disorder."

We also already know that there are people with very high IQ figures who are clearly not autistic

My personal theory is that autism/aspergers represent a developmental failure that grows more likely with certain combinations of alleles that lead to higher IQ. That supports both the existence of non-autistic individuals with a high IQ and the notion that there are risks associated with it. But that said it is just my personal theory and I haven't done any real scientific study on the matter, so take it with an awful lot of salt.

However there's another issue that we've walked into here by using the word intelligence rather than, say, g. Given that we know a lot of political beliefs are biologically heritable, there's a decent case to be made that the various moral foundations that give rise to political opinions are ultimately genetic in basis. When you're selecting for intelligence, are you going to pick the alleles that make people more conservative or more liberal? There are plausible arguments that either side represents an increase in functional intelligence in the world, though at the same time that's also dependent upon the environment (a gene that makes you a hawk is a great idea in a world with nothing but doves, but that doesn't mean being a hawk is the optimal strategy all the time). Similarly, you can make the case that the intelligence required to be a really compelling artist in certain mediums is actually qualitatively different and mutually exclusive with the cognitive traits required to be a world-class performer in other fields.g doesn't really have political connotations in the sense that it is pure problem-solving ability, but "intelligence" is a word with a much broader meaning that makes things a lot more complicated.

Given that I expect cybernetic eyes on par with real ones to be very plausible, in that case why would I care?

The blindness is neurological so this won't actually help.

I don't even care about being biological at all, and even our current AI which outperform the average human in most cognitive tasks are not autistic in the least.

If you don't care about biology at all then you don't need to bother with germline editing and just go straight to making the AI. On that note, I don't think you can really make a good comparison between our current AI and the human brain - they just aren't the same thing, and in either case I've definitely seen autistic behaviour from ChatGPT and various other LLMs. But at this point we've stopped talking about anything resembling current technology and entered the realm of magic/post singularity tech that we cannot talk about sensibly.

Thanks for the clarification, while I accept that in most times and places, pinning your hopes and dreams on technological advancement within your lifetime is certainly fraught, we're living at a particularly unusual time after all.

My personal theory is that autism/aspergers represent a developmental failure that grows more likely with certain combinations of alleles that lead to higher IQ. That supports both the existence of non-autistic individuals with a high IQ and the notion that there are risks associated with it. But that said it is just my personal theory and I haven't done any real scientific study on the matter, so take it with an awful lot of salt.

My own understanding is that autism is basically too much of a good thing. Some traits that by themselves are not on the spectrum, if present in both parents, and passed onto the child, will produce outright autism which becomes a net negative.

Compare this to being heterozygous for the allele that produces sickle cell anemia if homozygous. Having only one copy is very handy if you live in an area where malaria is endemic, hence its commonality in much of Africa, but having two copies produces a disease that outweighs the benefits.

This is something I dimly recall, and haven't double checked, but it sounds plausible to me. We know that assortative mating in high IQ individuals working in fields where autism-adjacent traits are valuable tend to have more autistic offspring, such as when two engineers or computer scientists have kids.

Of course there's also autism that occurs de novo from mutations or developmental anomalies, but I don't have figured at hand for which is more frequent in absolute terms. I suspect that high functioning autism is likely the former.

The blindness is neurological so this won't atually help.

Eh, I expect that to be solvable, but at the very least that particular state of affairs sounds rather unlikely to be actually true. Neuroplasticity is strong, hooking up an ordered stream of information into the brain almost inevitably produces the ability to interpret it, hence current trials of systems such as one where they use an electrical implant over the tongue that encodes visual images, which the blind come to recognize as a form of sight.

I wouldn't take that tradeoff if there was no available treatment, but at the end of the day, I suspect that we'll all end up on the pareto frontier where hardly anybody will be objectively better.

If you don't care about biology at all then you don't need to bother with germline editing and just go straight to making the AI. On that note, I don't think you can really make a good comparison between our current AI and the human brain - they just aren't the same thing, and in either case I've definitely seen autistic behaviour from ChatGPT and various other LLMs. But at this point we've stopped talking about anything resembling current technology and entered the realm of magic/post singularity tech that we cannot talk about sensibly.

I am certainly less fussed about our civilization's stupidity in not exploring avenues like genetic enhancement because I expect post-singularity tech to make it moot.

I still think we should be investing a great deal more into it than we already do (close to zero), as a hedge if for some unforeseen reason the Singularity fails to materialize on schedule. After all, if we refrain from creating ASI that isn't provably aligned, we could still get a great deal of utility from having smarter humans running around.

Same reason we should be working on fusion, commercial space travel and so on, they're amazing right now, even if it turns out that a future AGI can solve them in about 2 minutes of wall clock time.

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