Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories. Emphasises Richard Lynn fandom in the comments. Front-paged.
Effective Altruism is when you want to spend money on genetic engineering for race-and-IQ theories. Emphasises Richard Lynn fandom in the comments. Front-paged.
Original post: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/the-effective-altruist-case-for-using …
The whole idea of "IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people's IQ" seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there's always the same number of people with each score... agh, it's dumb for so many reasons
edit: wait, sorry, it's actually stupider than I thought:
Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite.... In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.
Literally just trickle down IQnomics
32I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.
14Exactly this.
8
People playing too many Paradox games.
12Don't you mean, "EA" games? (ba dum tiss)
7And poorly at that. Intelligence is a mugs game, if you put your genetic points towards longevity you can keep your initial crowd of scientist/explorers as research leaders longer, which gives a bigger boost to research and more advantages.
At least until the robot god restarts the simulation and/or Paradox releases a new patch.
5
god, fuck, I don’t miss the days (like 3 years ago, so not even a long time) when The Bell Curve got ultra popular again thanks to the race scientists on the orange site, and all my coworkers kept casually referencing it to sound smart
7
EA works on the hypothesis that in order to assist the most people, they have to amass as much money as possible in order to create mega altruistic (tm) projects which will assist done nebulous future generations of trillions, whilst ignoring the fact that helping everybody right now will be a greater benefit by increasing the likelihood that there will be people in the future to assist.
TLDR; Ultra-rich idiots trying to justify their greed by saying it's for the benefit of humanity.
20The case for the importance of IQ for numerous real-world outcomes was made in the controversial book The Bell Curve (1994) by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. They cogently argued
No, they didn't.
20In 2002, psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their seminal book
Ah, "seminal" in the sense of "cum-bucket"
19Their methodology gave conclusive and unquestionable evidence that people with caucasoid skull shape are innately and genetically predisposed towards knowing what a "regatta" is.
6now looking for places to use "we found the lacrosse gene"
1
Top comment by a large margin is an extensive 'your sources are bad and you should feel bad' by some Bob Jacobs, which would be encouraging, if wasnt for every. single. other. comment.
Not a bad read overall (the BJ comment), especially if like me you didnt remember off the top of your head who Lynn is and why he sucks, even if it suffers from the forced rationalist equanimity that dictates you treat obviously disingenuous bulshit with the utmost respect as long as it is presented in a sufficiently formalistic manner and doesn't call for genocide too overtly (I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about).
15I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about
Are you talking about his -18 karma comment? It says:
Long post on eugenics, -1 points right now and lots of comments disagreeing. Looks like this is a political battle; I'll skip actually reading it and note that these kinds of issues are not decided rationally but politically, EA is a left-wing movement so eugenics is axiomatically bad. From a right-wing point of view one can even see it as a good thing that the left is irrational about this kind of thing, it means that they will be late adopters of the technology and fall behind.
6
Only an EA could take seriously someone who approvingly cites journals like "Mankind Quarterly" and crackpots like Richard Lynn, Steven Hsu, Jonathan Anomaly, and Emil Kirkegaard.
The author considers himself a "rationalist of the right" and a libertarian who enjoys Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander. He describes ten tenets of right-wing rationalism, 8 of which are simply rephrasings of various ideas promoted by scientific racists. It would be an understatement to say this guy is monomaniacally focused on a single topic.
(Oh, and he publishes his brain farts on Substack. Because of course he does.)
13in which stupendous racism is the most effective possible altruism
10
Of course EA eventually hit eugenics, both rely on the idea that they have sufficient foresight and that no amount of evil now is immoral when compared to future gains as a result of it.
12eventually
pretty sure it was a journey of a few millimetres
14
Paraphrasing from the comments 'sure IQ values are bad, but they are the best measures of IQ we have' Oof. That is pulling an battle winning argument that will lose you the entire war if you think about it.
10It's also, probably wrong. Modern views of intelligence (see Multiple realizability of cognition and Multi-level competency collective intelligence and Free Energy Principle models) suggest you are better of measuring intelligence by measuring it's metabolism or through perturbation and interactions.
Which isn't reductive enough for these people.
8
tfw it is in you material interest to be hostile to any kind of sociological insight
10A 42 minute read to prove that someone doesn’t get correlation vs causation as well as a junior college stats class.
8Not Just zhe Autobahn, but zhe Highest Altruismus: Zhe Effective Altruist Case für Replacing Degenerate Stock vith Herrenvolk
6noted on this site in comments, but the EA forums have so much material.
6
