I blocked him ages ago because he tweeted something weird. I unblocked him for the sake of manners after I posted, but in retrospect that was a mistake.
1st mistake of this post is to assume IQ is even a thing worth debating.
2nd is this part here:
>He’s ultimately wrong, but it does not really matter in this situation. The correlation between the average IQ of two parents and the IQ of their child is about 0.6; regardless of whether this correlation is genetically or environmentally mediated, if less intelligent people have more children then future generations will become less intelligent.
So A) Smart parents should breed smart kids is eugenics 101, and if it was right, anyone who was born countryside Germany would be the new Einstein nowadays. This nurture vs nature false dichotomy needs to stop: It is nurture. Intelligence is nurture, period. Good fitness does help, not rarely it is the deciding factor. The same as having good nutrition is. Is genetics what defines intelligence, no, non starter, no. We'd be discussing the semantics of it for a year, throwing papers at each other for days, and the fact will still be that given good fitness, intelligence can be taught, thanks to how we engineered education, period. Saying 0.6 of the results are on my side regardless of nurture or nature is the scholarly version of a "variables can be all I want and if you don't like it find a billionaire yourself to sponsor your own research";
And B) "if less intelligent people have more children then future generations will become less intelligent" they already do, you don't need future generations to see that, every numnum with a phone is living proof of that. However, the hype is that AI will further enable societal dysgenics, the same way that money increasingly allowed the worst among all people ever to have a chance to procreate. Calling it international dysgenics is just a way to be anti immigration (which is fine, everyone's entitled to a position here) but people don't really broad scale breed with interlopers since forever, and I think it is correct to question anyone making a projection that this will change, merely because culture matters.
>Wealthy people tend to be more intelligent than poor people. Is it really a mystery that the same occurs between countries?
If you indulge me in rewording that sentence: "Wealthy people are given better opportunities to ultimately promote more intelligent experiences than those less fortunate. At nation scale, while some would say this escalates, the fact is that elites and geopolitical interests ultimately promote and project whatever stats they want, so it is a mistake to generalize, particularly over long time periods."
East Asians have the highest average brain volume in the world (which, looking at twin studies is about 80% genetic and about 20% due to environmental factors like diet,…) and happen to have the best visuospatial reasoning ability in the world. Sub-sahara Africans have the lowest average brain volume & visuospatial reasoning ability. Following Stone's reasoning, I reckon he would also say that this is ‘a coincidence’ ? There's this thing called 'evolutionary selection'? Brains require a lot of oxygen, it’s impossible that one could evolve such a large brain without any evolutionary benefit.
This data is from people born in the mid-90s. In some sense it’s quite outdated yes? For instance Israel in the mid 90s had twice the TFR of Arabs as compared to Jews. Today Jews have more kids, and actually Haredi get the highest pisa and have the most kids. I’d guess today the Israelis don’t have dysgenic fertility but rather eugenic fertility. Arab population has dysgenic fertility but the Jewish one should have eugenic fertility.
Many of the countries in Latin America too were going through a transition at the time. Mexican tfr dropped among elites before the masses. But now it’s 1.5. I can’t imagine low IQ Mexicans still have tons of kids. If the masses converge to the same low level of the elites then dysgenics stops.
The data I can get on Israeli PISA scores only compares Haredi girls to secular/religious/arab peers, not specifically to secular ashkenazim (and I don't see any specific mention of data on boys.) That might still be net eugenic relative to mizrahim/beta israel/arabs etc., but I couldn't say it with confidence.
Well yeah. Given how bad the Haredi education system is, I think we can be pretty confident that even still the PISA scores are deflated compared to genetic potential. The mathematics scores are barely higher than the secular ones but the reading scores are pretty significantly higher.
Anyway, I think the apparent dysgenics from the 90s is mostly a result of Arab TFR, though I think within Jews Israeli TFR has also been getting more eugenic over time, that historically it was kind of dysgenic (Mizrahim had higher TFR than Ashkenazim) but now it's definitely eugenic.
This is part of a global pattern, as countries develop the TFR becomes more eugenic, as we have seen here. White Americans already have a eugenic TFR.
I'm a little confused by seb's data here, given that native swedish fertility seems to be actively eugenic with respect to income, although admittedly that's not equivalent to IQ? Anyway.
If you’re worried about dysgenics, then why not try aggressively subsidizing IVF and surrogacy for smart/college-educated people, especially low-income ones?
Hypothetically, over long enough time periods, maybe. But higher-IQ groups are likely to get access to this technology first, and even if every human population was enthusiastic about the idea (they might not be) equilibriation could take anywhere from decades to centuries.
It kinda depends on whether there's an upper limit on intelligence enhancement (Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns would tentatively suggest so, but it's hard to say what decades-to-centuries of conscious, concerted bioengineering might produce.)
I didn't even notice he wrote another post. But after I replied to his first post, he resorted to lying on Substack. Weird guy.
I blocked him ages ago because he tweeted something weird. I unblocked him for the sake of manners after I posted, but in retrospect that was a mistake.
Same.
Where does Lyman's Haitian IQ estimate at 100 come from?
Linking to twitter posts alone is dangerous, they can easily be taken down.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcae001/7595476
https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/mdo738/research/Doepke_Hannusch_Kindermann_Tertilt_Handbook_23.pdf
There are from crémieux’s posts.
1st mistake of this post is to assume IQ is even a thing worth debating.
2nd is this part here:
>He’s ultimately wrong, but it does not really matter in this situation. The correlation between the average IQ of two parents and the IQ of their child is about 0.6; regardless of whether this correlation is genetically or environmentally mediated, if less intelligent people have more children then future generations will become less intelligent.
So A) Smart parents should breed smart kids is eugenics 101, and if it was right, anyone who was born countryside Germany would be the new Einstein nowadays. This nurture vs nature false dichotomy needs to stop: It is nurture. Intelligence is nurture, period. Good fitness does help, not rarely it is the deciding factor. The same as having good nutrition is. Is genetics what defines intelligence, no, non starter, no. We'd be discussing the semantics of it for a year, throwing papers at each other for days, and the fact will still be that given good fitness, intelligence can be taught, thanks to how we engineered education, period. Saying 0.6 of the results are on my side regardless of nurture or nature is the scholarly version of a "variables can be all I want and if you don't like it find a billionaire yourself to sponsor your own research";
And B) "if less intelligent people have more children then future generations will become less intelligent" they already do, you don't need future generations to see that, every numnum with a phone is living proof of that. However, the hype is that AI will further enable societal dysgenics, the same way that money increasingly allowed the worst among all people ever to have a chance to procreate. Calling it international dysgenics is just a way to be anti immigration (which is fine, everyone's entitled to a position here) but people don't really broad scale breed with interlopers since forever, and I think it is correct to question anyone making a projection that this will change, merely because culture matters.
>Wealthy people tend to be more intelligent than poor people. Is it really a mystery that the same occurs between countries?
Nurture. Sponsorship. *Money*. Sponsorship. Nurture.......
If you indulge me in rewording that sentence: "Wealthy people are given better opportunities to ultimately promote more intelligent experiences than those less fortunate. At nation scale, while some would say this escalates, the fact is that elites and geopolitical interests ultimately promote and project whatever stats they want, so it is a mistake to generalize, particularly over long time periods."
East Asians have the highest average brain volume in the world (which, looking at twin studies is about 80% genetic and about 20% due to environmental factors like diet,…) and happen to have the best visuospatial reasoning ability in the world. Sub-sahara Africans have the lowest average brain volume & visuospatial reasoning ability. Following Stone's reasoning, I reckon he would also say that this is ‘a coincidence’ ? There's this thing called 'evolutionary selection'? Brains require a lot of oxygen, it’s impossible that one could evolve such a large brain without any evolutionary benefit.
This data is from people born in the mid-90s. In some sense it’s quite outdated yes? For instance Israel in the mid 90s had twice the TFR of Arabs as compared to Jews. Today Jews have more kids, and actually Haredi get the highest pisa and have the most kids. I’d guess today the Israelis don’t have dysgenic fertility but rather eugenic fertility. Arab population has dysgenic fertility but the Jewish one should have eugenic fertility.
Many of the countries in Latin America too were going through a transition at the time. Mexican tfr dropped among elites before the masses. But now it’s 1.5. I can’t imagine low IQ Mexicans still have tons of kids. If the masses converge to the same low level of the elites then dysgenics stops.
The data I can get on Israeli PISA scores only compares Haredi girls to secular/religious/arab peers, not specifically to secular ashkenazim (and I don't see any specific mention of data on boys.) That might still be net eugenic relative to mizrahim/beta israel/arabs etc., but I couldn't say it with confidence.
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/h1qodyart
Well yeah. Given how bad the Haredi education system is, I think we can be pretty confident that even still the PISA scores are deflated compared to genetic potential. The mathematics scores are barely higher than the secular ones but the reading scores are pretty significantly higher.
Anyway, I think the apparent dysgenics from the 90s is mostly a result of Arab TFR, though I think within Jews Israeli TFR has also been getting more eugenic over time, that historically it was kind of dysgenic (Mizrahim had higher TFR than Ashkenazim) but now it's definitely eugenic.
This is part of a global pattern, as countries develop the TFR becomes more eugenic, as we have seen here. White Americans already have a eugenic TFR.
I'm a little confused by seb's data here, given that native swedish fertility seems to be actively eugenic with respect to income, although admittedly that's not equivalent to IQ? Anyway.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1692995853399593278
Income and IQ only correlate at like .4
I'm aware, but it still seems paradoxical. Are swedish women selecting for high-income men that are low in intelligence, somehow?
I suppose the muslim population factors in as well, but it might be worth investigating.
I think more pertinently this data is very old. Isn't it for people born in the mid-90s? Right Sebastian?
Meanwhile https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1692995853399593278 is for people born 2016-2021. Of course in 20-25 years things can change a lot. This is basically a new generation. Also yes this is for native-born women.
If you’re worried about dysgenics, then why not try aggressively subsidizing IVF and surrogacy for smart/college-educated people, especially low-income ones?
Based on this data, it seems like a good deal to trade Romania for Turkey for acceptance into the EU.
Hypothetically, over long enough time periods, maybe. But higher-IQ groups are likely to get access to this technology first, and even if every human population was enthusiastic about the idea (they might not be) equilibriation could take anywhere from decades to centuries.
It kinda depends on whether there's an upper limit on intelligence enhancement (Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns would tentatively suggest so, but it's hard to say what decades-to-centuries of conscious, concerted bioengineering might produce.)