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Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, even more intense ethnic conflict.' I suppose this goes to show the power of nationalist feeling - it can override all other considerations.
I think this also highlights the importance of HBD. Some people on this forum have disputed its value, saying 'so what do we gain in the real world from this knowledge'? We'd gain useful information about the destiny of states that go from white rule (indigenous fighter jet programs, first heart transplant, nuclear program) to black rule (mass unemployment, constant power outages, ludicrously high crime/murder rate). We'd know it was unlikely that South Africa, along with Brazil, would be a meaningful part of BRICS, the source of future world economic growth. Useful investing information! And we'd know that since the situation in South Africa was very unlikely to markedly improve, future racial conflict is likely as the economic gap between black and white remains.
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 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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
The blindness is neurological so this won't actually help.
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.
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