Brainworms > IQ
I'm getting culture pilled
I used to believe that if you gave everyone a +15 IQ boost, that would fix society. To me, this seemed obvious. “Most of our stupider decision making as a culture is downstream of the fact that most people are morons. Rent control is the average person’s solution to high rents.1 Most of our red-tape is designed to prevent the least able of us from shooting themselves in the foot. We got +5 IQ from removing lead and crime dropped like a stone. China has +5 iq across the board and it’s smoking the US. If everyone was just one or two standard deviations smarter, we would not be in this mess. And would you look at that, polygenic screening is right around the corner. If we can hold out a couple decades, then the next generation will (directionally) bring about a golden era. “
I was wrong. You see, the brainworms, they’re too strong.
High IQ people are as prone to stupid brainworms as anyone else. Grothendieck: the man was an intellectual titan, but he became a crazed hippy.2 Or consider the AI lab researchers--they’re brilliant people building the sandgod that has a good chance of killing us all, saving us all or (most likely IMO) doing something Weird. This ain’t irrational per se, or even necessarily evil, but the lack of public statements for a pause conditional on everyone else doing so is striking. Why? Because their culture doesn’t allow them to do so.
Reading through the history of science, you see countless examples of people who just won’t accept their pet paradigm is a dud in the absence of stupendous amounts of empirical evidence, and maybe not even then. These people were certainly brilliant, but only so brilliant--they were not solomonoff inductors, to instantly propogate every sense-datum through all their world models, seperate from their values. Beliefs bearing social loads, broken heuristics and more prevented that from happening. In order to overcome such things, even for people like Aumann3 one needs the right social environment, the right culture, the right brainworms.
At least, amongst baseline humans. Sure, who knows that happen if you make a man who is to Grothendieck as Grothendieck was to John Doe. He may well be clever enough to burst through the broken brainworms installed into him by his maladaptive culture. But a mere Grothendieck? I wouldn’t bet on it at this margin.
And that’s what we’d be getting at the extreme ends with + 1 SD. Perhaps a few dozen more Grothendiecks and a handful of Grothendieck+. On the median end we’d get someone who’s in the top sixth of their class. That’s not “everyone understands and internalizes micro-econ” levels of ability. Even pretty smart people find econ’s findings deeply confusing, probably because of how it clashes with our sacred cows, an inbuilt feature even though the particulars are downstream of our maladpative culture.
Yes, on the margins we’d be able to handle more complexity. But I worry we’ll just create more nonsensical madness to tie ourselves back. For instance, compare China and Taiwan. Same sort of demographics, 105 IQ on average, but one modernized way faster than the other because the culture of China’s ruling party wants stability i.e. total control, and that’s at odds with a free economy. That’s not irrational per se but, like, compare that to early-mid twentieth century American culture and tell me that it wasn’t more likely to lead to growth, prosperity and overall status than what China’s currently got loaded in.
When encountering a supply side problem, why in God’s name is humanity’s first instinct to focus on demand? No, really. This is Important.
This was somewhat confounded by him going absolutely bonkers schizo, but, y’know, it was the first example that leapt to mind and I gotta head to bed soon. Whatever.
A card carrying Judaist in spite of his excellent work on rationality e.g. “Aumann’s agreement theorem”.