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Comment by DarkKomunalec | Hacker News Reader

Good for them. Hopefully after we reduce the gender tech gap, we can focus on fixing the far below-replacement-level fertility in Europe, North America, and Russia. Personally I find it to be more pressing, but it gets barely any press...

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Why? It's not like we are in risk of running out of humans on the planet.

IQ is highly heritable[1], and if smart people are having zero or one children, that should be of concern to everyone.

It's possible that nutrition + butts in school seats created the Flynn effect, where the population's IQ rose. The next century might see the reverse.

[1] Per gwern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729085

Are you saying people in Europe, north America, and Russia are smarter than people in the rest of the world?

Across East Asia birth rates are also well below replacement levels. A lot of the world's population growth is coming from rapid increases in Africa.

I mean the fact that you went and registered a throwaway to head down the path you're intending to gives away what you are really thinking.

Well if you try a different path - if low birth rates occur when societies are highly developed, what happens when this effect reaches Africa?

It slows as it has been doing for quite some time.

How does they say this?

Smarter people get fewer children. IQ is inheritable. This only says we get more and more dumber people around the world in general. Maybe parts of the world with more births get the m faster than the rest, but still everyone gets them.

The OP said they are concerned with birth rates in those countries and they replied to the question why with a post about IQ.

I think this stems from the idea that smart people are having less children in those countries, not that those countries have smarter people. Who do you think is more likely to have 7 kids, an engineer or an unemployed person in rural Alabama?

Smarter, better educated, the result is the same.

No, he is saying that they have worse "nutrition" and less "butts in school", which increased the population's IQ in the past century. So if they predominate (and developed countries diminish) the general IQ might go down too.

Isnt malnutrition a pretty huge problem in Russia?

Compared to developing countries in Asia/Africa?

I don't think so.

They are if you are willing to accept IQ scores as a proxy, the Wikipedia article for »IQ and the Wealth of Nations« [1] has a world map of average IQ scores. This whole topic is of course highly controversial because in some sense it is right around the corner of racism. There is substantial debate about the accuracy of the data, the magnitude of the effect, nature vs nurture, appropriateness of measuring IQ, biases in the methodology, the direction of the causal relation and so on.

But if you stay away from the details behind the effect and just look at the measured data, you see an unequal distribution of average IQ scores across the globe. The effect may not be as large as the referenced book claims, but the difference has been confirmed by critical responses albeit with reduced magnitude. It is pretty hard if not impossible the get an unbiased picture of this topic, so I will leave it at this and ask you to dive into the rabbit hole yourself, I don't want to accidentally spread false claims because I am certainly no expert on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

But the majority of the world that is overpopulated does not have the standards of nutrition and schooling of the west. If those are the reason behind the Flynn effect, then when those countries become more developed, their intelligence should come up to parity. I you don't acknowledge this, then it sounds like you believe those in the west are genetically superior to those elsewhere.

Because people also care about their particular culture not dying, a worry to which whether the planet has enough of other peoples is irrelevant.

That could explain one of the three.

The sad part is that all cultures with industrial-level populations could easily sustain many generations of sub-replacement reproduction rates without any risk of disappearing, if it wasn't for outside breeding pressure. It would be a shame if we ruined our planet only due to an unconstrained outbreeding race. Should we maybe accept borders (like the ones Japan naturally enjoys) for environmental reasons, to make it easier for cultures to abstain from participating in that destructive race?

And another thing: would shrinkage really be that bad, in the long term? In any case it could never be very difficult to ramp up reproduction again when needed: all future generations, no matter how low the reproduction rate of the ones before, will be descendants of a direct line of ancestors who all did reproduce, against the odds. An environment that makes it easier to resist the reproduction drive could only make that drive stronger in the next generations, due to selection.

Being from Europe myself, I suppose I'm biased to wanting to preserve Europeans, and am not satisfied with merely preserving humanity as a whole.

Then why the concern with America and Russia too?

Because Russia is Europe?

Is it really part of the European community? And what about America how does that fit in?

Because America and Russia are part of western civilisation?

Russia is western now?

You think it isn't?

Last time I've checked the map, most of the Russia was in Asia.

Russia is a European country that expanded East. The majority population is Slavic, and descents culturally from Greek/Byzantine influence

In terms of geography, yes. In terms of population, culture, and history - no. Out of 144 million, 110 live in European Russia and they're predominantly Caucasian (roughly 115 million are ethnic Russian). If you were to draw the border on European continent Russia would end up being the biggest European country, both in terms of population and geography.

They are European nation, but over the centuries they expanded their territory to the East http://i.imgur.com/k0DzmyK.jpg

Why not? Aren't they worth preserving?

A better question would be why no concern for China and Japan. In case of China, it's because they consider themselves overpopulated. In case of Japan, I simply neglected to include them on the list - it was not meant to be comprehensive, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... for that.

Why?

(There are a number of different good answers to that, I'd imagine. I just don't know what they are.)

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