3 ms·
That's pretty blunt, but you are pointing out something real: all traits including intelligence are normally distributed, and the average IQ is 100. Nobody wan
by api 11y ago
That's pretty blunt, but you are pointing out something real: all traits including intelligence are normally distributed, and the average IQ is 100.
Nobody wants to talk about this for the same reason that the abused wife and children who live under a borderline-psychotic alcoholic father don't talk about it: it's "reality," and we don't feel like there's anything we can do about it, and talking about it threatens our coping mechanisms. The human ability to not see is prodigious, probably an adaptation that has arisen precisely to help us cope with our condition. I once heard an anecdote from a psychologist about a woman who was raped by her father in the bed with her mother, and the mother claims to have seen nothing.
In our case the abusive father is "nature," a soulless chthonic process that did not think about the ethics of imbuing the agents in a Darwinian system with self-awareness, empathy, and consciousness. As far as we can see it just happened as a result of runaway evolution for central nervous system capability.
So nature builds random assortments of genes and throws them at the wall. Never mind that these "agents" experience their existence. If you happen to be born with no legs, then... well... you are born with no legs. If you happen to be born with a less efficient brain that makes the world a bewildering haze of incomprehensibly complex systems that all seem arrayed against you, then... too bad. You're just a trial permutation in an algorithm.
Watch the film Dark City. That is the human condition, only it's not being done to us by creepy aliens but by an unconscious natural process.
I happen to think we might be able to do something about this this century, and that Silicon Valley might have some part in that. But the irony is that the sort of folks who write screeds like this Medium piece would be the first to shriek and condemn any attempt to interfere with holy Nature and its blessed bell curve distribution of genetic traits. Even talking about it is threatening our coping mechanisms.
Society is getting more complex, but our genes are not changing that fast (if at all). Eventually a huge number of people are going to fall off a cliff where the economic value of their labor in a free market is <=0. That's actually completely disastrous for the entire economy, since it will cause the velocity of money to collapse and lead to political and social instability. Guaranteed minimum income is one way of dealing with this problem. Personally I think CRISPR is another. It's time to open our eyes and start doing something about our condition.
- thaw13579 11y agoMaybe it's not "threatening a coping mechanism" but remembering how eugenics played out last century?
- api 11y agoEugenics means curing the disease by killing the patient-- sometimes literally. That's the opposite of improving the human condition. It's also terribly totalitarian, and posits that some committee has the ability (let alone the right) to dictate what constitutes fitness or improvement. Committees of bureaucrats are demonstrably unable to centrally plan economies, so why should they be able to centrally plan a species? Even if eugenics were moral and desirable, doing it well would involve answering questions a lot harder than "how many light bulbs should be manufactured in July?" and states like the USSR failed consistently at that. I don't advocate eugenics at all. We shouldn't get rid of "inferior" people. We should empower them to improve themselves in the manner of their choosing. Actually we already do this. If I have no legs I can get a wheelchair. So all I advocate really is going further... a whole hell of a lot further. Radical transhumanism is really nothing more than the radical advocacy of medicine, so much so that I doubt the need for a new term. Guaranteed minimum income might actually be a stepping stone here, since it would empower those whose abilities are no longer economically valuable with both money and time. Some will waste it playing Halo and watching TV and drinking beer, sure, but some won't. What will they do with their free time? When interesting things are discovered by a few pioneers they spread virally through populations. It will also prevent the collapse of the modern economy due to collapsing monetary velocity. The Hunger Games is an almost accurate portrayal of a post-labor world that still clings to the Puritan work ethic, but for one detail: I doubt such a society could maintain high technology for long. I do wonder sometimes if our periodic freak-outs about "decline" (e.g. Naziism) aren't at some level psychotic reactions to un-shielded glimpses of the true reality of our condition. Coping mechanisms exist for a reason. When they break down at an individual level, things like suicide and psychotic breaks sometimes result. Historically humanity was utterly powerless to alter its condition, and when you're powerless coping is all you can do. The eugenics fervor of the early 20th century happened as religion started to break down and as we started to comprehend the nature of our "alien god": http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/ (Not a total fan of Less Wrong but that article is brilliant.) Another great film in the genre of Dark City is Life is Beautiful, which is an excellent allegory for the role of religion in human existence. We all live in a death camp called nature, and we have people like priests and philosophers who tell us it's all just a game and if we do real well we'll win a tank... or a trip to heaven. I believe humanity has historically used "gnostic" themed fiction like this as a safe way to examine its condition without truly "seeing" it.