I’m gonna merge the thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518975 where you said: > * Encouraging hig

I’m gonna merge the thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518975 where you said: > * Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind. This is a schoolbook example of a eugenicist argument. Are you sure you want to go there? I’m gonna assume that you meant something different than what I took from this, and you are not a eugenicists. However I do want to speak a little about why eugenicists are wrong. The problem with trying to select for IQ is that there is no broad consensus about what constitutes a good intelligent trait. There are thousands of traits that work differently in thousands of situations. When there is no consensus, somebody must take authority. And if that authority has nefarious reasons, than we are pretty screwed. More likely no such trait, nor sets of traits exist. As Charles Darwin him self demonstrated, there is value in diversity. By not selecting for a single trait, and allowing our cognitive abilities to vary as much as possible, there is way more chances of something beneficial to our species to develop and be selected for. Now this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accommodate for disabilities. However it isn’t 1908 any more. We have better tests and metrics to detect disabilities, and we have better means of accommodating. IQ has run its course. We don’t need it anymore. The science has advanced, and the theory is obsolete. And this ties to the above post, and other posts you’ve done in this tree. You seem to think there is some scientific is pretty sound and there is some suppression going on: > 6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths. If you think that, you’d be wrong. Modern psychology looks for behavior, if a model predicts behavior, your pretty good. IQ does no such thing. So perhaps it is sociology, not psychology and is looking for population statistics, well... IQ is pretty bat at that too. There are number of other metrics which does that better. The simplest one being school grades. And to apply Occam’s razor, why invent an entire new construct intelligence when grades suffice. We don’t not discuss IQ. It has been done extensively for well over a century now. and IQ has simply lost to better theories. There is no taboo, just sore loosers that keep on and on about a theory that holds no relevance any more. Just look at The Bell Curve it’s been almost 30 years and we are still talking about it, despite it being a schoolbook example of how to do bad science. We finished talking about N-rays and phrenology a long time ago, it is time we do so with IQ as well. IQ is dead, it was never anything more than a bad theory which took way too long formally die.