I live in Cambridge in England. It’s a small town which until recently was dominated by its famous university. Everyone here is very clever (the local bar staff are usually writing up PhDs, the local juvenile delinquents are the sons and daughters of academics). And it’s lovely.
Every time I go somewhere else I’m just bewildered by how stupid people are. And I really hate it. Whenever I leave Cambridge for more than a couple of days I pine for it and long for proper conversations where people can think straight.
It’s probably true that if I went and lived somewhere else, then qualifications that are commonplaces here would grant me some sort of raised status for free, and I can believe that might lead to a long-term increase in happiness. But there’s no way I’d ever be able to do it. Within a week of arriving here I knew I’d probably never leave.
Are you sure? For myself, I should say that moving to a world where everyone’s two standard deviations smarter than me might be a blow to my pride, in fact it would be a huge blow to my entire self-concept and conceived role in existence, but I’d expect the fringe benefits to more than make up for it.
I am not sure, of course, since I don’t trust my ability to imagine such a world too much. But the simplest model I have is that my status would be such as the current status of people having IQ around 85, with all consequences: difficulty to find decently paid work, perhaps chronic unemployment, risk of being legally declared mentally retarded and possibly locked up in some institution… I am not sure about the fringe benefits, but I care a lot about status and it’s not only because of pride.
When you consider this, consider the difference between our current world (with all the consequences for those of IQ 85), and a world where 85 was the average, so that civilization and all its comforts never developed at all...
Even if it were true that average IQ 85 meant that civilisation never developed at all (an assumption I find dubious), being a chief in a neolithic tribal society still doesn’t sound dramatically worse than being a village idiot in a civilised society.
Also, saying that I would profit from a marginal decrease in average IQ at level 100 doesn’t imply that I would profit from similar decrease at any level. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want everybody else being dramatically different from me, thus there is some point below which I wouldn’t like the average IQ to plunge. This point may lie quite above the level where civilisation of any kind becomes impossible.
My understanding was that pre-contact or historical primitive societies had fairly decent dental health, with low tooth decay—such problems being more of a sugar-heavy modern society issue.
I am not an expert, but isn’t the entire reason we have two sets of teeth that we could be reasonably expected to lose much of the first set anyway by the time the others appeared? By what mechanism would the second set last significantly longer?
Gwern is correct here—paleolithic populations tended to have excellent dental health if skeletal evidence is anything to judge by, and the case of modern forager groups is often determined mainly by the degree to which they now consume high glycemic-index commodities. Chukchi and Eveny groups in Russia have appalling dental health statistics due to poor nutrition and lots of refined sugar (to the point that one Eveny nickname for sugar is “the white death”—they have really high rates of diabetes too). Khoisan folks in South Africa, on the other hand, tend to have excellent teeth when they eat something like their traditional diet.
That’s plausible, but what about wisdom teeth? They appear when the jaw is already full-sized; I have heard that they wouldn’t historically be a problem because you’d have lost teeth and there would be room for them.
Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve been taught that they’re vestigial, and that our ancestors had bigger jaws. But they can in fact grow into the space left by an extracted tooth. It happened to me, a few decades ago. I had a bad back molar, and instead of making a crown or something, the dentist pulled it, saying the wisdom tooth behind it would replace it. And it did!
True, but when they do, they surely must suffer horribly… and of course it’s not just about dental care, but medical care in general. For example, the first time I had a bladder infection, at twenty-something, it was very bad (peeing blood and all). I really think I might have died without antibiotics.
And of course, there are lots of other things I’d miss about modern society. Books, the internet, showers...
Hitting somebody on his head by a baseball bat is likely to make him dead and the perpetrator imprisoned, which is certainly not the outcome I prefer. Not to mention the difficulties with applying this en masse. You should come up with much better methods.
It’s not just pride and self concept. Your relative status in society would take a huge hit.
Everyone smarter than you by two standard deviations? You’re the stupidest human in the world, by two standard deviations? Let’s just confine ourselves to conscious humans without brain damage. I can’t think you even mean that.
Let’s go even higher and just take 2 sd as the lower bound, from which you are 2 sd lower. You’re fine with being in the bottom 0.003%?
If everyone else is that smart, then we will probably soon no longer be in a scarcity economy, and we’d probably be functionally immortal to boot. At that point, I’d take it, period. Even if I was just effectively some ordinary person’s pet, I’d still be waaay ahead of where I am now.
Being an immortal pet might get rather depressing. I don’t think that’s how you dreamed your future life, and regardless of dreams, I don’t think a lot of your basic drives will be satisfied as a pet.
But better to be alive as a pet, than dead. If that’s really the trade off, then I might take it too. But that’s practically what it would take for me—a choice between being alive as a pet, or dead/
Exactly. I like life enough to suffer degradation in one aspect to reap super-massive benefit on the ‘being alive’ front. Plus, if I can hang in there, then they may be able to enhance my cognition up to parity eventually. I don’t see this situation as being permanent.
And remember, living in a world in which the average person is as smart as an upper-level computer programmer still isn’t nearly as humbling as the fact that a well-organized cubic centimeter of carbon could be millions of times smarter than anyone.
I figure this to be a good general rule on these matters: unless you designed your own brain, you should not be proud of your own brain.
You can still enjoy what intelligence you have, and acknowledge your superiority if it’s accurately gaged. But being proud of your in-built mental acuity strikes me as nearly as absurd as being proud of having extraordinarily efficacious liver. Though it’s an unavoidably brain-state, pride is a bit masturbatory. I’m sure it has some evolutionary function, but it might be as arbitrary as proud ape-men were better able to convince ape-woman they were ape-men of accomplishment.
Sadly, in our world, the influence you have over yor brain is quite small compared to environmental and old-age factors we have no control over. So you can take pride in taking care of your brain, but it’s hard for you to be very effective right now, even on the scale of existing human variation.
For me at least, that’s the primary / most effective source of points in the first place. Doing some meta related to that earns them even more points from me just because of the apparent scarcity (i.e. I rarely see people outside LW do any of it).
It’s not just a matter of pride—ISTM that people with very different IQs usually find each other boring (EDIT: see johnlawrenceaspden’s comment—his experience is pretty much the same as mine). Now if I have IQ 120 it doesn’t matter under this aspect whether the average IQ is 100 or 140, but if I had IQ 90, moving to a world where the average person has IQ 140 would mean that it’d be very hard for me to find suitable conversational partners, as everybody else would find me terribly stupid and uninteresting, and I would find everybody else hard to understand.
Changes made to future generations don’t deprive you of conversational partners less than 20 years younger than you. And they can invent ways to bring you up to their level.
Changes made to future generations don’t deprive you of conversational partners less than 20 years younger than you.
Changes don’t guarantee one conversational partners, either. Do you see very many current retarded adults hanging around their kid peers all day? For that matter, the elderly hang around their grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the modern world probably less than at any time in humanity’s history...
All I meant was that most of your friends, colleagues, and mates are not going to be 20+ years younger anyway, which limits the loss if it is hard to keep up with and understand some of the young whipper-snappers.
I am used to the current world and not completely immune to status quo bias, so I am not sure. But as far as I can imagine a choice in which maintaining current friends and relatives wasn’t at stake, the optimum would be a world where my overall mental capacities would ensure my being part of the global intellectual elite; that would certainly require the global IQ average lower than today (not sure how much), if my brain had to remain unchanged.
Edit: all that holds ceteris paribus; if I had the option to gain status otherwise, e.g. by inheriting an awful lot of money, I’d prefer that to acquiring status by intelectual superiority over others.
That’s a convenient assumption. Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics? Maybe it’s just correlated with being better at the dark arts.
Greater choice of occupations like asteroid miner
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
There’s an arms race between politicians and voteres. The politicians try to convince the voters to vote for them, promising to do something while in office. The voters try to correctly predict what they will really do once in office.
If both sides become smarter, then the techniques both sides use improve. The politicians become better at convincing and lying, and the voters become better at predicting behavior and perhaps detecting lies.
Why would this lead to more reasonable debate? Let’s make sure we think of the same thing when we say “reasonable”.
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
Or if applied to voting, you have rational voting, where voters vote based on their best prediction of politicians’ behavior in office; not e.g. on how tall they are, their party affiliation, or their speech mannerisms. They want politicians to approach the ideal of making every decision in office the way the voters would want it made.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
It’s true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion—both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it’s not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It’s correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one’s own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn’t say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn’t, since it’s behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don’t feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
That isn’t especially related to my original point, because it seems specific to the current structure of U.S. politics; it’s not very applicable to countries that don’t have a few large long-lived political parties. For instance, in Israel, many people were born before the establishment of the state, and no party has survived since then.
We need to look at aspects of U.S. political belief to make good U.S.-specific predictions. And in that, you are surely better informed than I am. So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs. But the specific reasons and dynamics that lead to that seem highly contigent.
Yes, the first-past-the-post geographical constituency system has quite different effects on partisan structure than many other electoral systems, and other countries have more fluid partisan identity.
“So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs.”
I think the belief point holds much more broadly. Similar studies have been done with data about other political beliefs from European countries, e.g. by people in Deary’s lab in the U.K.
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
I was thinking of something more in that ballpark, though not particularly in terms of explicit goals; more in terms of the content of political debates (candidate vs. candidate, or politician vs. journalist), where cheap shots, simplifications, righteous indignation and misdirection would be less effective, and nuance, complex models and discussions of tradeoffs and incentives would be more effective than they are now.
Complex models provide more room for complex rhetorical and logical maneuvers that trick or mislead your opponent in the debate.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn’t force them to be more honest. Unless you think that with higher intelligence, defense will become stronger than offence (i.e. it will become harder to decieve than to expose deception and prove it to a third party observer).
I’m not claiming the politicians would be more honest, I’m claiming we would see less idiotic arguments, which to my eyes counts as “more reasonable political debate”.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn’t force them to be more honest.
Again, the biggest effects doesn’t come from improving their intelligence, but improving the public’s intelligence: even if those two people stay completely dishonest, a smart public shifts the topics they can talk about; instead of birth certificates and conspiracy theories and Jesus they can talk about fiscal policy and other substantive issues (even if they lie just as much as before!).
So instead of idiotic arguments, they’d be presenting cunning, apparently sane arguments that are actually full of misleading lies and traps. I prefer the idiotic arguments—at least then I can easily tell they’re wrong, and they’re not wasting anything but the time spent arguing.
Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics?
The Bryan Caplan link by Carl Shulman below and some other similar material. Plus, it takes some time to go through arguments. Even that level of input requires factors that are generally associated with a high IQ.
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
Sorry, an old childhood dream surfaced here. My more general point about greater choice of occupations holds.
Eliezer spoke of being born in such a world, not moving to it. The appropriate comparison to make is therefore between the life of someone at your percentile level in this world and someone at the same percentile level (hence around 40 IQ points higher, depending on what happens to the standard deviation) in the hypothesised world.
Eliezer spoke of being born in such a world, not moving to it.
Fair enough. I have been assuming the context of discussion about eugenics and thinking about younger generations being genetically modified for higher intelligence while older generations remaining the same. My fault, I should have read more carefully.
That could indeed be a problem (so in this context, something to put into the novel as part of the world-building), depending on how fast the eugenics programme had effect. 60 year old grandparents outstripped by their 10 year old grand children, and not just by the latter growing up with stuff that’s still a novelty to their elders. Individual prodigies, people can handle, but when every child is noticeably smarter than their gramps there’s going to be some social friction.
If I happen to have IQ, say, 120, moving to a world with average IQ 140 isn’t going to sound like a good news, at least to me.
I live in Cambridge in England. It’s a small town which until recently was dominated by its famous university. Everyone here is very clever (the local bar staff are usually writing up PhDs, the local juvenile delinquents are the sons and daughters of academics). And it’s lovely.
Every time I go somewhere else I’m just bewildered by how stupid people are. And I really hate it. Whenever I leave Cambridge for more than a couple of days I pine for it and long for proper conversations where people can think straight.
It’s probably true that if I went and lived somewhere else, then qualifications that are commonplaces here would grant me some sort of raised status for free, and I can believe that might lead to a long-term increase in happiness. But there’s no way I’d ever be able to do it. Within a week of arriving here I knew I’d probably never leave.
What happened?
Lots of tech startups mean that there are now things to do here that aren’t university related.
Are you sure? For myself, I should say that moving to a world where everyone’s two standard deviations smarter than me might be a blow to my pride, in fact it would be a huge blow to my entire self-concept and conceived role in existence, but I’d expect the fringe benefits to more than make up for it.
Hell yeah.
That said, don’t overestimate IQ relative to other important cognitive and behavioral traits.
I am not sure, of course, since I don’t trust my ability to imagine such a world too much. But the simplest model I have is that my status would be such as the current status of people having IQ around 85, with all consequences: difficulty to find decently paid work, perhaps chronic unemployment, risk of being legally declared mentally retarded and possibly locked up in some institution… I am not sure about the fringe benefits, but I care a lot about status and it’s not only because of pride.
When you consider this, consider the difference between our current world (with all the consequences for those of IQ 85), and a world where 85 was the average, so that civilization and all its comforts never developed at all...
Even if it were true that average IQ 85 meant that civilisation never developed at all (an assumption I find dubious), being a chief in a neolithic tribal society still doesn’t sound dramatically worse than being a village idiot in a civilised society.
Also, saying that I would profit from a marginal decrease in average IQ at level 100 doesn’t imply that I would profit from similar decrease at any level. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want everybody else being dramatically different from me, thus there is some point below which I wouldn’t like the average IQ to plunge. This point may lie quite above the level where civilisation of any kind becomes impossible.
Until you get a toothache.
Few people spend most of their lives having toothache, even in primitive societies.
In primitive societies, few people spend most of their lives having teeth.
My understanding was that pre-contact or historical primitive societies had fairly decent dental health, with low tooth decay—such problems being more of a sugar-heavy modern society issue.
I am not an expert, but isn’t the entire reason we have two sets of teeth that we could be reasonably expected to lose much of the first set anyway by the time the others appeared? By what mechanism would the second set last significantly longer?
Gwern is correct here—paleolithic populations tended to have excellent dental health if skeletal evidence is anything to judge by, and the case of modern forager groups is often determined mainly by the degree to which they now consume high glycemic-index commodities. Chukchi and Eveny groups in Russia have appalling dental health statistics due to poor nutrition and lots of refined sugar (to the point that one Eveny nickname for sugar is “the white death”—they have really high rates of diabetes too). Khoisan folks in South Africa, on the other hand, tend to have excellent teeth when they eat something like their traditional diet.
I’ve always thought the reason we have milk teeth is that there’s just no room for adult teeth in a small child’s jaw.
That’s plausible, but what about wisdom teeth? They appear when the jaw is already full-sized; I have heard that they wouldn’t historically be a problem because you’d have lost teeth and there would be room for them.
Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve been taught that they’re vestigial, and that our ancestors had bigger jaws. But they can in fact grow into the space left by an extracted tooth. It happened to me, a few decades ago. I had a bad back molar, and instead of making a crown or something, the dentist pulled it, saying the wisdom tooth behind it would replace it. And it did!
True, but when they do, they surely must suffer horribly… and of course it’s not just about dental care, but medical care in general. For example, the first time I had a bladder infection, at twenty-something, it was very bad (peeing blood and all). I really think I might have died without antibiotics.
And of course, there are lots of other things I’d miss about modern society. Books, the internet, showers...
del
Hitting somebody on his head by a baseball bat is likely to make him dead and the perpetrator imprisoned, which is certainly not the outcome I prefer. Not to mention the difficulties with applying this en masse. You should come up with much better methods.
It’s not just pride and self concept. Your relative status in society would take a huge hit.
Everyone smarter than you by two standard deviations? You’re the stupidest human in the world, by two standard deviations? Let’s just confine ourselves to conscious humans without brain damage. I can’t think you even mean that.
Let’s go even higher and just take 2 sd as the lower bound, from which you are 2 sd lower. You’re fine with being in the bottom 0.003%?
If everyone else is that smart, then we will probably soon no longer be in a scarcity economy, and we’d probably be functionally immortal to boot. At that point, I’d take it, period. Even if I was just effectively some ordinary person’s pet, I’d still be waaay ahead of where I am now.
Being an immortal pet might get rather depressing. I don’t think that’s how you dreamed your future life, and regardless of dreams, I don’t think a lot of your basic drives will be satisfied as a pet.
But better to be alive as a pet, than dead. If that’s really the trade off, then I might take it too. But that’s practically what it would take for me—a choice between being alive as a pet, or dead/
Exactly. I like life enough to suffer degradation in one aspect to reap super-massive benefit on the ‘being alive’ front. Plus, if I can hang in there, then they may be able to enhance my cognition up to parity eventually. I don’t see this situation as being permanent.
And remember, living in a world in which the average person is as smart as an upper-level computer programmer still isn’t nearly as humbling as the fact that a well-organized cubic centimeter of carbon could be millions of times smarter than anyone.
I figure this to be a good general rule on these matters: unless you designed your own brain, you should not be proud of your own brain.
Do people get any points for taking good care of their brains and stocking their brains with ideas and information?
You can still enjoy what intelligence you have, and acknowledge your superiority if it’s accurately gaged. But being proud of your in-built mental acuity strikes me as nearly as absurd as being proud of having extraordinarily efficacious liver. Though it’s an unavoidably brain-state, pride is a bit masturbatory. I’m sure it has some evolutionary function, but it might be as arbitrary as proud ape-men were better able to convince ape-woman they were ape-men of accomplishment.
Sadly, in our world, the influence you have over yor brain is quite small compared to environmental and old-age factors we have no control over. So you can take pride in taking care of your brain, but it’s hard for you to be very effective right now, even on the scale of existing human variation.
When a good brain becomes unusable for a while
For me at least, that’s the primary / most effective source of points in the first place. Doing some meta related to that earns them even more points from me just because of the apparent scarcity (i.e. I rarely see people outside LW do any of it).
But what would I have designed my own brain with?
It’s not just a matter of pride—ISTM that people with very different IQs usually find each other boring (EDIT: see johnlawrenceaspden’s comment—his experience is pretty much the same as mine). Now if I have IQ 120 it doesn’t matter under this aspect whether the average IQ is 100 or 140, but if I had IQ 90, moving to a world where the average person has IQ 140 would mean that it’d be very hard for me to find suitable conversational partners, as everybody else would find me terribly stupid and uninteresting, and I would find everybody else hard to understand.
Changes made to future generations don’t deprive you of conversational partners less than 20 years younger than you. And they can invent ways to bring you up to their level.
Changes don’t guarantee one conversational partners, either. Do you see very many current retarded adults hanging around their kid peers all day? For that matter, the elderly hang around their grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the modern world probably less than at any time in humanity’s history...
All I meant was that most of your friends, colleagues, and mates are not going to be 20+ years younger anyway, which limits the loss if it is hard to keep up with and understand some of the young whipper-snappers.
Would you prefer to move to a world where the average IQ was lower than the current average?
I am used to the current world and not completely immune to status quo bias, so I am not sure. But as far as I can imagine a choice in which maintaining current friends and relatives wasn’t at stake, the optimum would be a world where my overall mental capacities would ensure my being part of the global intellectual elite; that would certainly require the global IQ average lower than today (not sure how much), if my brain had to remain unchanged.
Edit: all that holds ceteris paribus; if I had the option to gain status otherwise, e.g. by inheriting an awful lot of money, I’d prefer that to acquiring status by intelectual superiority over others.
I guess I am in the range of 110-115 and a world with an average of 130-140 sounds great.
Much better movies and media in general.
Much more reasonable political debate.
A decently higher standard of living just because of the inventions that could happen.
Longer lifespan, maybe.
Greater choice of occupations like asteroid miner
I guess I may not have my choice of mates, but the bots should more than make up for that. :)
That’s a convenient assumption. Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics? Maybe it’s just correlated with being better at the dark arts.
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
The biggest effect would be from the IQ increase in voters, not in politicians.
There’s an arms race between politicians and voteres. The politicians try to convince the voters to vote for them, promising to do something while in office. The voters try to correctly predict what they will really do once in office.
If both sides become smarter, then the techniques both sides use improve. The politicians become better at convincing and lying, and the voters become better at predicting behavior and perhaps detecting lies.
Why would this lead to more reasonable debate? Let’s make sure we think of the same thing when we say “reasonable”.
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
Or if applied to voting, you have rational voting, where voters vote based on their best prediction of politicians’ behavior in office; not e.g. on how tall they are, their party affiliation, or their speech mannerisms. They want politicians to approach the ideal of making every decision in office the way the voters would want it made.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of “moderate”, so that opinions you label as “unreasonable” would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don’t see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/intelligence_ma.html
It’s true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion—both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it’s not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It’s correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one’s own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn’t say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn’t, since it’s behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don’t feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
That isn’t especially related to my original point, because it seems specific to the current structure of U.S. politics; it’s not very applicable to countries that don’t have a few large long-lived political parties. For instance, in Israel, many people were born before the establishment of the state, and no party has survived since then.
We need to look at aspects of U.S. political belief to make good U.S.-specific predictions. And in that, you are surely better informed than I am. So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs. But the specific reasons and dynamics that lead to that seem highly contigent.
Yes, the first-past-the-post geographical constituency system has quite different effects on partisan structure than many other electoral systems, and other countries have more fluid partisan identity.
“So I accept your conclusion that in that context, intelligence is causative of rational and of moderate beliefs.”
I think the belief point holds much more broadly. Similar studies have been done with data about other political beliefs from European countries, e.g. by people in Deary’s lab in the U.K.
I was thinking of something more in that ballpark, though not particularly in terms of explicit goals; more in terms of the content of political debates (candidate vs. candidate, or politician vs. journalist), where cheap shots, simplifications, righteous indignation and misdirection would be less effective, and nuance, complex models and discussions of tradeoffs and incentives would be more effective than they are now.
Complex models provide more room for complex rhetorical and logical maneuvers that trick or mislead your opponent in the debate.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn’t force them to be more honest. Unless you think that with higher intelligence, defense will become stronger than offence (i.e. it will become harder to decieve than to expose deception and prove it to a third party observer).
I’m not claiming the politicians would be more honest, I’m claiming we would see less idiotic arguments, which to my eyes counts as “more reasonable political debate”.
Again, the biggest effects doesn’t come from improving their intelligence, but improving the public’s intelligence: even if those two people stay completely dishonest, a smart public shifts the topics they can talk about; instead of birth certificates and conspiracy theories and Jesus they can talk about fiscal policy and other substantive issues (even if they lie just as much as before!).
So instead of idiotic arguments, they’d be presenting cunning, apparently sane arguments that are actually full of misleading lies and traps. I prefer the idiotic arguments—at least then I can easily tell they’re wrong, and they’re not wasting anything but the time spent arguing.
The Bryan Caplan link by Carl Shulman below and some other similar material. Plus, it takes some time to go through arguments. Even that level of input requires factors that are generally associated with a high IQ.
Sorry, an old childhood dream surfaced here. My more general point about greater choice of occupations holds.
Eliezer spoke of being born in such a world, not moving to it. The appropriate comparison to make is therefore between the life of someone at your percentile level in this world and someone at the same percentile level (hence around 40 IQ points higher, depending on what happens to the standard deviation) in the hypothesised world.
Fair enough. I have been assuming the context of discussion about eugenics and thinking about younger generations being genetically modified for higher intelligence while older generations remaining the same. My fault, I should have read more carefully.
That could indeed be a problem (so in this context, something to put into the novel as part of the world-building), depending on how fast the eugenics programme had effect. 60 year old grandparents outstripped by their 10 year old grand children, and not just by the latter growing up with stuff that’s still a novelty to their elders. Individual prodigies, people can handle, but when every child is noticeably smarter than their gramps there’s going to be some social friction.
It is to me—but if I happened to have IQ 90 it definitely wouldn’t.