"I find it interesting" Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it. If you are interested i

"I find it interesting" Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it. If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl. The West is no longer a dominant civilization on this planet. The US seems to be very afraid of the possibility that Chinese AI research will overtake the American one. I find it very short-sighted that a similar concern is absolutely absent when it comes to natural intelligence research. There is a shitton of underdeveloped natural intelligence around as, and if our political adversaries manage to actually develop it first, the AI race may not matter at all. Of course, that is a big "if", much like with railguns etc. Some technologies never bear fruit. But historically, we have seen extreme concentrations of brain power in some time-and-space limited regions (Hungarian "Martians"?), which indicates that there is a lot more underdeveloped talent than we think and that it could be, given the right methods, developed to overwhelming dimensions. For Pete's sake, we cannot even recreate Bell Labs as they once were. No one precisely knows what was the actual magic that had them going, even though everyone has their favorite theory. It reminds me of alchemists doing experiments in the early 1600s. Aren't you a bit nervous about the fact that phenomena such as Bell Labs emerge on their own and disappear without us being able to create them on purpose? We must have wasted a lot of human potential by not knowing how to harness and develop top talents. "analyzing or evaluating ..." This is quite obviously a vicious circle. The topic of natural intelligence is taboo, scientists who try to attack it earnestly face a lot of hurdles in funding (see also [0], an interesting article), thus the amount of actual data is remarkably small, and, as you yourself say, even the definitions aren't really good. Which, in turn, leads a lot of people to cloak their disgust over the entire topic in a plausibly sounding word bubble like "there is not enough data, it is all so nebulous and murky, there is no sense in studying such a weird topic, don't spend any money on it and don't play with any dangerous hypotheses". [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...