5 ms·

Galton, Ehrlich, Buck – By Scott Alexander

1 points by mefengl 2y ago

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Both characters in the dialogue seem, like the author, to implicitly believe in the basic concept of eugenics improving IQ and that making the world a radically better place. I'd like to see the author's working for getting to that result, as this feels a bit like the pro-nuclear people who focus on safety concerns for an easy win to distract from the cost and timing and other awkward questions they don't have answers for. For example, most of the people in Africa are already born but are young and have their lives ahead of them, so even if the eugenic interventions worked perfectly, how quick a change would you actually see? The genetically engineered children wouldn't get a vote till they were 18 at which point they'd be a minority, might not even get a job until they are mid 20s after university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Africa (Very similar critiques apply to many ill thought rants on limiting population growth, it's mostly already happened and the growth in people being alive is mostly in people living longer so any intervention implies mass murder, even if the people proposing them don't realise that is what they are proposing because they've not looked at basic relevant facts before spouting off). Seems like feeding and innoculting and educating and not poisoning with environmental toxins the existing children would be a far faster route to a higher IQ population. But the kind of person who obsesses about IQ and sperm banks for nobel prize winners seems uninterested in the these basic fixes for already existing people. Is this just an attempt to reframe eugenics as not racist, by coming up with a totally implausible plan to fix Africa with it that wouldn't even start for decades and not have an impact for decades further? If so it feels like it's backfired as this just seems like a ill thought out fig leaf for whatever their real interests are.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the subtext here, but if it's that we know that 1.3 billion Africans have consistently deficits in IQ, we should be clear that the papers suggesting that are essentially fraudulent.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    The author of the link had an article earlier this year about how he learned to love those estimates and claims it is in fact racist to not believe them: "How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le... He sometimes hides it better than other times but he's consistently been very into this stuff for years. There's old emails when he's more explicit about it and then tells the person he's emailing to never tell anyone he believes this stuff. He's kind of sneaky about it public though, for example on genes Vs environment in the linked article: > Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%) Charles Murray of course wrote a really big book in which he consistently argued for not trying to raise the IQ of black Americans via interventions because that would never work, but constantly said he wasn't ruling out environmental causes as cover. I would argue that arguing against the interventions was in fact the main point of the book. Yet here he's portrayed as the reasonable centrist. The author similarly switched between unveiling his eugenics plan for Africa and his more recent post where he says actually I'll defend this racist talking point by claiming it proves there are lots of non-eugenic interventions that would work.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      An attempt in 2025 to rehabilitate Richard Lynn's country-by-country IQ numbers is basically disqualifying, given what we know about how those numbers were generated. It says something deeply disquieting about the author. What annoys me most of all is that he knows this, and that this kind of piece is really a sort of "tee-hee" provocation.

1 points by mefengl 2y ago

Both characters in the dialogue seem, like the author, to implicitly believe in the basic concept of eugenics improving IQ and that making the world a radically better place. I'd like to see the author's working for getting to that result, as this feels a bit like the pro-nuclear people who focus on safety concerns for an easy win to distract from the cost and timing and other awkward questions they don't have answers for. For example, most of the people in Africa are already born but are young and have their lives ahead of them, so even if the eugenic interventions worked perfectly, how quick a change would you actually see? The genetically engineered children wouldn't get a vote till they were 18 at which point they'd be a minority, might not even get a job until they are mid 20s after university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Africa (Very similar critiques apply to many ill thought rants on limiting population growth, it's mostly already happened and the growth in people being alive is mostly in people living longer so any intervention implies mass murder, even if the people proposing them don't realise that is what they are proposing because they've not looked at basic relevant facts before spouting off). Seems like feeding and innoculting and educating and not poisoning with environmental toxins the existing children would be a far faster route to a higher IQ population. But the kind of person who obsesses about IQ and sperm banks for nobel prize winners seems uninterested in the these basic fixes for already existing people. Is this just an attempt to reframe eugenics as not racist, by coming up with a totally implausible plan to fix Africa with it that wouldn't even start for decades and not have an impact for decades further? If so it feels like it's backfired as this just seems like a ill thought out fig leaf for whatever their real interests are.

tptacek 2y ago
I'm not sure I understand the subtext here, but if it's that we know that 1.3 billion Africans have consistently deficits in IQ, we should be clear that the papers suggesting that are essentially fraudulent.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  The author of the link had an article earlier this year about how he learned to love those estimates and claims it is in fact racist to not believe them: "How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le... He sometimes hides it better than other times but he's consistently been very into this stuff for years. There's old emails when he's more explicit about it and then tells the person he's emailing to never tell anyone he believes this stuff. He's kind of sneaky about it public though, for example on genes Vs environment in the linked article: > Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%) Charles Murray of course wrote a really big book in which he consistently argued for not trying to raise the IQ of black Americans via interventions because that would never work, but constantly said he wasn't ruling out environmental causes as cover. I would argue that arguing against the interventions was in fact the main point of the book. Yet here he's portrayed as the reasonable centrist. The author similarly switched between unveiling his eugenics plan for Africa and his more recent post where he says actually I'll defend this racist talking point by claiming it proves there are lots of non-eugenic interventions that would work.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    An attempt in 2025 to rehabilitate Richard Lynn's country-by-country IQ numbers is basically disqualifying, given what we know about how those numbers were generated. It says something deeply disquieting about the author. What annoys me most of all is that he knows this, and that this kind of piece is really a sort of "tee-hee" provocation.