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Comment by tesseracted | Hacker News Reader

Chinese people are also relatively intelligent. That is relevant, I think.

I think it has more to do with the culture around emphasis on education rather than pure intelligence

As an ethnic Chinese, I have to question that. Is this based on your observations of first and second generation Chinese immigrants in the West? In which case, wouldn't there be selection bias involved?

These sentiments are based on a 'scientific' world average IQ score; India is at 82 while China is at 105. I think most popularly, these were used by the White supremacist, Stephen Molyneux to justify the colonization of both India and Africa; it shouldn't be surprising to see it used in other dick-measurement... ahem 'eugenics' contests.

I'm Indian, and I think there's a strong case to be made that the Indian avg IQ is likely to be lower than 100. This is nurture though, not nature: a large % of Indians do not get sufficient micronutriants during childhood, and are anemic (40%~) [1], stunted (40%) [2], and much else besides.

[1] https://www.hospitalmanagement.net/comment/anemia-prevalence...

[2] https://www.indiaspend.com/38-of-indian-children-under-4-poo...

I'm actually Indian, have no interest in aggrandizing one group over another, don't know who Stephen Molyneux is, and don't care about white supremacy & colonialism or think it relevant to my point that intelligence and organized behavior is more apparent in China than it is in Africa. Many people who, admittedly after a lot of pretense and equivocation, agree that they care about what is effectively intelligence in hiring engineers are too arrogant to see that working in a factory and making sure the water mains are working also require thoughtful competence.

You may want to be aware that in western groups any talk about national or racial intelligence is usually considered pure racism. I assume it's not like that in India; I've also had a short discussion about this earlier with an Indian colleague when the topic of intelligence somehow came up.

If there is some sort of ethnic basis for differences in intelligence (independent of environmental factors such as poverty, culture, etc.) what would be the practical implications of this data?

It seems to me that in the future, economic value will be correlated with the ability to work with increasingly abstract things (which I assume IQ is trying to measure).

Wouldn't the natural tendency to value human worth based on their IQ? Of course not, you might say. But imagine there's some future with a permanent underclass of lower IQ people, subsidized by very high marginal tax rates / UBI. I can see our human nature justify some sort of social Darwinist policies.

Edit: what a weird tangent this thread has taken.

That’s assuming future values are current values.

If we keep improving AI at current rates, two things can happen at the same time:

1. The cost of running a full-brain simulation puts an upper limit on someone’s IQ-based pay — cost of power vs salary. This is something I would equate to slavery; I don’t like it, yet I expect it to happen.

2. Fully-synthetic AGI with little to no biological duplication (more like AlphaZero then Blue Brain) is probably going to equal the performance of low-IQ humans before high-IQ humans, and if it can do that for less than the cost of 2000 kcal/day then low-IQ humans can only be employed for non-intelligence-based tasks.

But that might just mean we mostly revert to manual labour jobs. I can’t forecast this — I’m not a psychologist, I don’t grok politics, and I am aware that I don’t think the way normal people think.

This is grade A racism

I worked in South Africa for 7 years. A large amount of those observations (about workers) were true in RSA too.

We'd usually hire someone that meets the various quota laws then a foreign contractor to do that full time persons job. This was not the original intention and we often reviewed hiring practices etc to ensure the local person was good enough but God damn.... What an 'interesting' labour market.

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