5 ms·

The world is massively unfair as it is. Would anyone even notice already "privileged" societies becoming a little bit more privileged? Who knows, maybe our IQ

The world is massively unfair as it is. Would anyone even notice already "privileged" societies becoming a little bit more privileged? Who knows, maybe our IQ 120 overlords will be kind to make the tech available for everyone else.

legalcorrection 5y ago
A 120 average IQ population would run circles around a 100 average IQ population, even starting from a much lower position. Of course, there's still the question of whether society is organized such that people of exceptional talent rise to power, and whether they have the incentive to do great things. My main concern isn't the tech being inaccessible to poorer people or countries. International intellectual property protection has always been precarious, and I guarantee that e.g. India won't just accept having a dumber population because "oh well, an American company owns the patents and we can't afford mass licensing." Rather, Western societies have strong anti-eugenic impulses because of 1) the Christian legacy, 2) the popular fixation on WW2 atrocities, and 3) a political taboo against acknowledging population-level differences in mental (and to a lesser extent, even physical) attributes. I could see China being much more willing to embrace eugenic technology on a shorter timescale than the United States. And that could be the death blow to the US.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  A 120 average IQ population would be normalized to a 100 average IQ population.
  - legalcorrection 5y ago
    Is this a joke? Yes, by definition an IQ test is normalized to 100 for the population it's targeted for. But that doesn't mean that you can't compare intelligence across different populations, by not doing that normalization.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Average IQ will always be 100, but 100 today is not the same as 100 50 years ago. Renormalization is about 3 points per decade, so you have to take that into account when you compare IQ results across longer time spans. So a person that would have scored '100' on an IQ test 50 years ago would be expected to score about 85 on a test administered today. Note that I'm not a fan of collapsing everything about human intelligence to a single number, but if you are going to use that number then you at least should be aware of how it is defined and how it develops over time.
      - bpodgursky 5y ago
        Redefining what 100 IQ means is a distraction (which feels like a malicious distraction) from the actual topic here.
- unsupp0rted 5y ago
  The average IQ in Singapore is 105 and next door in Malaysia is 88. Singapore does run circles around Malaysia on most measures. The hard part is attributing any of this to average IQ, or determining if average IQ has been measured accurately enough.

legalcorrection 5y ago

A 120 average IQ population would run circles around a 100 average IQ population, even starting from a much lower position. Of course, there's still the question of whether society is organized such that people of exceptional talent rise to power, and whether they have the incentive to do great things. My main concern isn't the tech being inaccessible to poorer people or countries. International intellectual property protection has always been precarious, and I guarantee that e.g. India won't just accept having a dumber population because "oh well, an American company owns the patents and we can't afford mass licensing." Rather, Western societies have strong anti-eugenic impulses because of 1) the Christian legacy, 2) the popular fixation on WW2 atrocities, and 3) a political taboo against acknowledging population-level differences in mental (and to a lesser extent, even physical) attributes. I could see China being much more willing to embrace eugenic technology on a shorter timescale than the United States. And that could be the death blow to the US.

jacquesm 5y ago
A 120 average IQ population would be normalized to a 100 average IQ population.
- legalcorrection 5y ago
  Is this a joke? Yes, by definition an IQ test is normalized to 100 for the population it's targeted for. But that doesn't mean that you can't compare intelligence across different populations, by not doing that normalization.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Average IQ will always be 100, but 100 today is not the same as 100 50 years ago. Renormalization is about 3 points per decade, so you have to take that into account when you compare IQ results across longer time spans. So a person that would have scored '100' on an IQ test 50 years ago would be expected to score about 85 on a test administered today. Note that I'm not a fan of collapsing everything about human intelligence to a single number, but if you are going to use that number then you at least should be aware of how it is defined and how it develops over time.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      Redefining what 100 IQ means is a distraction (which feels like a malicious distraction) from the actual topic here.
unsupp0rted 5y ago
The average IQ in Singapore is 105 and next door in Malaysia is 88. Singapore does run circles around Malaysia on most measures. The hard part is attributing any of this to average IQ, or determining if average IQ has been measured accurately enough.