Chinese, and Northern East Asian’s in general, tend to have fewer geniuses. Europeans have a lower average IQ than NE Asian’s, but the tail end on the right side of the bell curve extends further out—Europeans have more geniuses.
Explosive technological progress is entirely dependent on having a critical mass of geniuses. It’s really that simple. Below average people, average people, even very bright people, don’t event technologies that create a paradigm shift(to use the cliche).
Those with an outlier IQ—high abstract reasoning, but also high creativity, a sort of autistic, maverick attitude, are the ones who make earth shattering technologies and discoveries. The spirit of independentness may also be a factor in the gap between East and West. NE Asian’s might lack psychological traits of independeness and high creativity. Ot at least they may lack them to the degree that Europeans have them.
The European gene pool seems to have reached the peak of this genius sometime in the later 19th century and has been slowly declining since then. This explains the deceleration of progress.
holy citation needed batman! among other serious issues with this perspective, variance in capability has many input factors; while genetics is involved, memetics and material circumstances also make a significant difference—guns, germs, and steel all can serve to amplify or reduce effective intelligence. society has been on a 12k-year energy availability growth process since the start of farming, and there have been many variations on the way—I don’t deny that there may be genetic differences. but I don’t think we can even conclude there’s been a deceleration in overall rate of insight with the deceleration in generally useful insight.
my view is that almost any human brain is theoretically capable of strong generalization and genius, given training data tuned for that human’s learning capabilities. which means that memetic contribution by a smart person can make everyone who encounters their knowledge smarter, and can lead to future contributors producing even more enlightening knowledge—though there’s no guarantee that new things retain all benefits of old things, the highest usefulness knowledge generally overrepresents new insights about how to better encode old knowledge. and as a result, it’s very hard to conclude anything specific about genetics.
Chinese, and Northern East Asian’s in general, tend to have fewer geniuses. Europeans have a lower average IQ than NE Asian’s, but the tail end on the right side of the bell curve extends further out—Europeans have more geniuses.
Explosive technological progress is entirely dependent on having a critical mass of geniuses. It’s really that simple. Below average people, average people, even very bright people, don’t event technologies that create a paradigm shift(to use the cliche).
Those with an outlier IQ—high abstract reasoning, but also high creativity, a sort of autistic, maverick attitude, are the ones who make earth shattering technologies and discoveries. The spirit of independentness may also be a factor in the gap between East and West. NE Asian’s might lack psychological traits of independeness and high creativity. Ot at least they may lack them to the degree that Europeans have them.
The European gene pool seems to have reached the peak of this genius sometime in the later 19th century and has been slowly declining since then. This explains the deceleration of progress.
holy citation needed batman! among other serious issues with this perspective, variance in capability has many input factors; while genetics is involved, memetics and material circumstances also make a significant difference—guns, germs, and steel all can serve to amplify or reduce effective intelligence. society has been on a 12k-year energy availability growth process since the start of farming, and there have been many variations on the way—I don’t deny that there may be genetic differences. but I don’t think we can even conclude there’s been a deceleration in overall rate of insight with the deceleration in generally useful insight.
my view is that almost any human brain is theoretically capable of strong generalization and genius, given training data tuned for that human’s learning capabilities. which means that memetic contribution by a smart person can make everyone who encounters their knowledge smarter, and can lead to future contributors producing even more enlightening knowledge—though there’s no guarantee that new things retain all benefits of old things, the highest usefulness knowledge generally overrepresents new insights about how to better encode old knowledge. and as a result, it’s very hard to conclude anything specific about genetics.