Questions you can't ask | Hacker News Reader

Questions you can't ask

michaelalanmiller.com

32 pointsquoderat52 comments

There should be a word for the phenomenon whereby people try to make things sound more interesting than they really are by pretending they're disallowed, banned or censored. The phenomenon is common enough and annoying enough that it'd be great to say "Oh, that's just [insert new word here]".

In this case, these questions aren't really "questions you can't ask". It's true that people are a little over-touchy on a few of them, but most of them are just fairly dull questions which are rarely asked because either:

(a) They're dumb suggestions (active population control, abolishing corporations)

(b) They're based on false assumptions (e.g. people are "anti-sex", whatever that means), or

A couple of the others (rights of AI, why people make decisions subconciously and then make rationalizations) are questions which get asked all the time.

That's an excellent point. We do need a word. How about "romples"? I think that's free.

Let me try: "this post is pure romples".

Not bad, but I'd prefer a verb form -- to romple?

"Dude, you're rompling. Stop it."

Romping. "Dude, you're on a major romp right now.

Yay I coined a word! (technically yould coined it)

I have never heard anyone ask about AI rights or free will/rationalizations to a politician.

What makes you think they get asked all the time?

It's because neither one is an ISSUE for a politician. What laws could POSSIBLY require thought as to either one?

AI rights? Yeah, save my Roomba.

Free will/rationalizations? Let's just assume that nobody has a choice in anything. Where's that lead us then? Nihilism? Dude, how exhausting would THAT be?

How about: Oh that's just conspiracy talk?

In any case, some of these questions are tedious and uninteresting, but some are not, and calling them dumb seems to be just a way of persuading others not to discuss them.

For example, I think active population control is one of those unaskable questions that should be discussed more. Even the crude, corruption-prone way in which the one-child policy was implemented in China seemed to have helped the nation modernize. Here in America, having children out of wedlock is linked to poverty, and our foster care system is a wreck, but we somehow don't care to entertain even the search for humane and effective policies along the lines of population control. No doubt this is because history is filled with cruel and paternalistic implementations, but this would seem to be exactly the baffle in the free flow of ideas.

1. No. First, because we don't know how genetics really works. Second, because it violates an individual's freedom.

2. Genetic and social aren't separate things, but parts of an evolutionary continuum. Google the Baldwin Effect. Yes, there are many theories. Read any book about evolutionary psychology.

3. No.

4. Citation, please.

5. No.

6. Yes, but not what you're thinking. No.

7. Stupid question.

8. Yes. None.

9. Nothing.

10. Nothing, none.

11. No. Market economics.

12. Evolution. That they aren't what they at first seem.

What a load of crap.

Agreed. A cursory examination of EP would answer a lot of these questions, and most of the rest are just kinda dumb. For instance, does anyone think IQ does not exist? IQ is just a test score. That's like saying 1600 doesn't exist.

And here I was thinking that the Baldwin effect was some kind of theory possibly resembling or in some way modelling the interactions between Alec Baldwin and his brothers.

On 11: Population Control. I'd argue that this is a specific instance in which market economics by themselves do not suffice to solve the problem -- unless you regard it as acceptable that miscalculations on the part of parents, such as having one too many kids, should result in one of the kids being allowed to starve to death years down the road. Probably the best solutions are going to involve lots of market incentives, and what they are going to be is what the question is asking.

Touchy topics, to be sure. I think they all can and should be asked. Whether each is really worth of much debate is a different question.

Most are worth debating, some aren't: depending on your audience. I think most people think these are things you "can't ask" because many folks lack an intelligent, informed opinion on the topic, and therefore resort to emotional closed-minded positions that result in little exchange of ideas.

So, intelligent people think: "Maybe I can't ask that question."

8. If AI can be created, should it be? What rights would it have?

What's wrong with this one? Maybe I live in my own mind, but this question seems to be asked a lot in my group of people.

That one struck me as well. I don't know anyone who considers that "off-limits."

The eugenics and race ones are the touchiest in my experience.

I don't see why eugenics should be a touchy issue. It's no different than any other argument between science and religion. The idea that the human race can be improved through eugenics is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support it.

The idea that the human race can be improved through eugenics is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support it.

The idea that unlike all species, humans cannot be selectively bred for various traits, is a purely religious belief, and I see no reason why any rational person would support it.

In almost every case, animals bred for specific traits end up with severe physical, mental, and emotional problems. The idea that humans are the one species that won't encounter these problems is a purely religious belief.

Humans often test for those traits. Couples from populations that have a high incidence of the same recessive disorders will frequently abort kids who test positive for those disorders.

And anyway, eugenics doesn't have to go that far -- what about policies that just reverse the dysgenic effects of low-education, low-accomlishment, high-crime types breeding more:

http://www.projectprevention.org/

OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with "a purely religious belief". None of the ideas mentioned above is a "purely religious belief", even though several of them are half-wrong and the others are half-right.

Animals bred for specific traits don't almost-always wind up with severe problems, unless said breeding is done over-zealously (trying to do too much in too few generations) or deliberately for traits which aren't necessarily beneficial to the animal. All modern-day farm animals are the product of a lot of selective breeding over the past few thousand years, and they don't have "severe" problems.

"OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with 'a purely religious belief'."

If you take the position that the human race can be improved through eugenics and call it a scientific belief then the burden is on you to produce the science. I'm not taking the position that eugenics absolutely can't work, rather I'm taking the position that the science to support eugenics just isn't there so people who do support it support it on other grounds. If you can produce some books or journal articles making the case that eliminating intra-species biodiversity can make that species as a whole more resilient then I'd gladly recant.

I'm not saying that it's a scientific belief, I'm saying that it isn't a religious belief.

There are many other types of belief, including:

* belief based on incomplete experience (The traffic on I-80 is going to be terrible on Friday)

* belief based on wild-assed guess (oil is going to be under $100 a barrel by the end of the year)

* belief based on the fact that somebody told you it was true and you haven't bothered to check (The Nissan GT-R produces 480 horsepower)

* belief based on not having thought it out very well (We should invade China!)

* belief based on wanting to have that belief purely to annoy others (I think we should kill poor people!)

* belief based on personal prejudice (McCain sucks!)

* belief based on wanting to conform with the beliefs of your peer group (Lisp is awesome!)

"Purely religious beliefs" are characterised by things other than just being unsupported. A necessary but not sufficient condition is that they should be both unsupported and strongly held.

Fair enough, I'll settle for non-scientific.

I would argue that eugenics is a valid belief so long as there is at least one trait that 1) is desirable, or correlated with something desirable (e.g. resistance to a disease, stronger work ethic, lower criminality, resistance to sunburns) and 2) is heritable.

So I think I've got one! Skin color: people with darker skin are less likely to get sunburns, and darker skin appears to be heritable. So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues.

I'm sure there are other examples. But given that humans are an evolved species, all I'm saying is that we might be able to outguess chance and know which traits could be useful down the road. In a country with a solid welfare system, the ability to delay gratification is a bad one for your future genes -- if you're busy going to school instead of having unprotected sex, you'll have fewer kids (and they'll have fewer kids, later in life, too). So maybe a eugenic policy would be to subsidize people who have kids above the replacement level after getting their degrees, or who get sterilized if they have a kid when neither parent is employed.

"So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues."

You can't just select for one trait and leave everything else untouched. DNA doesn't work that way. Pick up a copy of Animals In Translation the next time you're in the bookstore and skim the chapter on single trait selection, I think it's ch. 4.

Of course you can't select for one trait and expect everything else to stay constant. But you can expect that if the trait is significantly positive, and you screen for recessive disorders, selecting for it can be net beneficial.

I think there are a few basic issues here:

1) Selecting for any single trait, even without recessive disorders, is going to select for other traits as well. For example, selecting for IQ might make individuals more prone to heart disease. Humans are pattern matching machines, and most of the things we consider to be human traits aren't controlled by a simple genetic switch that can be flipped on or off. Even selecting for something as simple as skin color can cause all sorts of problems. For example, most black people are lactose intolerant. Even if it isn't melanin that causes this, selecting for this one trait is going to bring with it all the other traits of the population.

2) Even if there are some traits you can select for without damaging the individual, that doesn't mean society as a whole will be better off. Societies are an emergent phenomenon and you it's impossible to predict what a society will be like based on it's component parts.

3) Who gets to decide what's good and what's bad for an individual? Who gets to decide what's good and bad for a society? What if something good for a society is bad for the individual, or vice versa?

4) Eliminating massive amounts of biodiversity within the species makes humans more vulnerable to extinction. Furthermore, evolution happens in S-curves. By selecting the "best" individuals you are almost certainly eliminating whatever mutation would start the next S-curve. Look at peacocks for example. Each female peacock wanted to mate with the male with the biggest tail. So male peacocks evolved to all have really big tails. That's why today the only place you ever see peacocks is in the zoo. This is just a case of premature optimization; in this case they've basically optimized themselves out of existence.

If our technology today isn't even sufficiently advanced to make a college admissions test that predicts academic performance, how are we supposed to tackle infinitely more complicated issues like the above?

1) is simply silly, since it applies to any decision. Maybe getting a job instead of smoking weed and playing video games all day is too stressful, and maybe it will deprive you of a career as a video-gaming champ. But probably not. Maybe selecting for IQ will increase heart disease -- but a high-IQ population is more likely to deal with heart disease effectively, anyway.

2) Actually, people who model societies based on IQ (by, for example, taking a large sample of people and then randomly removing samples until the average IQ moves up or down a bit) have found that high IQ clearly makes things a lot better -- income is up, unemployment down, crime way down, etc. But this is complaint #1 again: "Why improve things without knowing all the side effects?" Because it's worth the risk, and progress is impossible if you don't.

3) The only serious example I've proposed is a private charity. I don't think there should be a philosophical objection to the government using eugenic policies to counter the dysgenic effects of welfare and tax systems. If you know that welfare makes irresponsible people breed, the only way to maintain equilibrium is to give them a reason not to.

4) There are plenty of extinct species that are pretty humanoid, but with smaller cranial capacities. often, it looks like the bigger-brained proto-humans just killed them off. In general, this optimization has worked out as a random mutation. And intelligence, unlike a peacock's tail, is about adaptability within an environment, not sexual selection within a group at the expense of the same. In fact, when you look at fertility rates compared to education (the best proxy I have, sadly -- but education correlates very well with IQ) you find that the educated ones reproduce less because they spend their time accomplishing other stuff.

If our technology today isn't even sufficiently advanced to make a college admissions test that predicts academic performance

You're referring to the low correlation between SATs and college performance, right? And you're ignoring that schools select people on multiple criteria, including SATs, such that everyone is at about the same level academically. So Smith's SATs show he's great at math, but a mediocre writer. And Jones' SATs show he's not too bright, but his admissions essay is jaw-dropping. Smith double-majors in math and CS; Jones majors in philosophy. They can get the same GPA even though they have different SATs, because the SAT is one of several criteria on which they're selected. The other obvious example is a student with high SATs and a poor GPA (smart, but no work ethic) versus the opposite; they could perform at about the same level, in the same school, but only because the high-SAT, low-GPA student is at the bottom of his SAT cohort, and the other student is at the top of his.

Also, it was nice of you to just focus on college performance. As far as I know, IQ test results predict income, fertility, crime and civic participation better than any other variable measurable from childhood. Could be environmental, of course, but most of the tweaks for raising IQ seem to be temporary -- the only known ways to raise IQ into adulthood seem to be having smarter parents and getting proper nutrition.

Of course, I don't think we should breed as a policy. It's enough to admit that such a policy is possible, probably beneficial, but perhaps not worth the total costs. I'm glad you're able to consider it rationally.

Human beings can be selectively bred for various traits, but I don't think this is the issue for any intelligent, educated person since science is pretty clear on the matter. I take issue with the idea that human being can be improved, specifically with the word "improved" or any other such term used instead. Improved is subjective at best and totally repulsive when one considers what "improved" might actually mean to those defining an improvement (Nazi eugenics program). Human nature is such that any human designed program to selectively breed human beings will ultimately become a gross perversion, since the program would require institutionalization, planned breeding, castration and outright murder. We humans tend to be somewhat ethical and decent on an individual level but on a social or national level we're repulsive, greedy, disgusting monsters. Frankly, we can't trust ourselves.

I support eugenics because it has been successfully used to reduce incidence of a really horrible disease in humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease#Prevention

To quote Wikipedia:

"The effort is not aimed at eradicating the hereditary traits, but rather at the occurrence of homozygosity. The actual impact of this program on allele frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection."

The word eugenics really describes two different things. Trying to reduce homozygosity, and long term breeding to select specific traits. While what you are describing is called eugenics, I think it's a little disingenuous since it's not the type of eugenics the original author was talking about. (The list was a list of taboo subjects, and there is clearly no taboo surrounding talking about blood testing for Tay-Sachs.)

I get that disease prevention is a non-controversial use for eugenics.

I'm just pointing out there is nothing "religious" about a belief that eugenics works. Eugenics is just a straightforward application of basic genetics, and has been demonstrated to work in humans and other animals exactly as the theory describes. There may be some engineering issues, but many human traits can be modified by eugenics.

Assuming for a minute that this is a person who honestly feels these questions are off-limits (as opposed to just trying to crank up the old hit machine) I think the questions say more about the questioner than the questions themselves.

In certain circles all of these questions are on the table -- including a lot more obnoxious questions than he thought about. In certain circles a lot more questions are off limits (I'm thinking of the former dean of Harvard and his simple suggestion that "Do the sexes learn differently?" would be a provocative question. Poor schmuck)

I liked #1 the best, about evolving the human genome. The reason why is that it seems so logical at the surface -- if people can be "bred" like cats and dogs, why not breed them for qualities we all hold dear?

The coolest part of that question is that we immediately hit Godwin's law and end up where all internet discussions lead -- Nazis. And for good reason! They had the same ideas. (I won't go into trashing the entire notion. Too easy to do. I would add that most attacks on it are a lot more emotional than rational though)

all of these focus on what the government "should" do. The government is broken. good luck getting it to do anything.

The government is like wikipedia. Some people focus on all the things it gets wrong, but personally I'm amazed that it works at all.

It makes glaring errors from time to time, and plenty of things it does non-optimally, but the fact is that almost every day I get up and find that the garbage gets collected, the streets get swept, the electricity is coming through the wires, the police aren't demanding bribes, foreign countries aren't invading, mobs aren't rampaging, and the little pieces of paper in my wallet can still be reliably exchanged for physical goods. How awesome is that?

I believe in small government, and I don't think the government should do many things, but you can't say that the government is incapable of doing anything.

i agree, as many problems as it may have today, one only has to look at some 3rd world countries to see how radically good governance can change things and how important it is. i'm not saying that just because we have it better than somwhere in africa or the middle east, we shouldn't complain or try to improve, but government, especially at the local levels, does a decent job.

most of what is associated with government, utilities, police, paved roads, schools etc. are all organized by the state government. I have no problem with state government, they are efficient (compare your state taxes to federal taxes, then compare what you get in return from each) in fact they should have a lot more power. federal power is the problem.

Just a bunch of nutcase, leading questions.

"If IQ doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist, then why is it the single largest statistical predictor of life trajectory?" Who says it's the largest predictor? Who says IQ does not exist or does not matter?

All of these "questions" were made to fit this guy's pre-conceived answers and arguments. And why can't you ask these questions in "modern political debate and polite society"?

Then you see the guy's blog subtitle: "Driving my truck through the flaws in capitalism" and you realize you've wasted your time reading gibberish from a guy people usually describe as "nutcase."

Creating questions to fit your pre-conceived answers is a cheap mental trick, nothing even close to the Jedi mind trick :-). I figure since nobody was asking him, he chose to ask himself the questions.

What does my blog subtitle, which I merely found amusing, have to do with the content of my musings and/or ideas?

You're right, some of the questions are leading -- though I really doubt you can predict my views from them, even though I am sure you think that you can. And, yep, it's my blog and that's the way it goes. However, they are questions that people shy away from, even though they matter.

But, if you require peer-reviewed evidence that IQ is a pretty good predictor of life trajectory, there's plenty of that for the IQ question you cited:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intellig...

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/322/7290/819

http://ijo.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/45/5/574

And then, anecdotally, there's people like Feynman who didn't have a particularly large IQ who still excelled. Make of that what you will.

I asked the questions not to satisfy my notions of their answers, but to get them out there. If the evidence is against me, then so be it. When the evidence changes, I change my mind. What do you do?

And, you're the first to call me a nutcase. Congrats! From you, it's a badge of honor.

If the questions were asked honestly, then you would have cited your sources. To be honest, I really don't care about neither the IQ issue nor about the answer. I just thought the questions themselves were very leading. The answers don't matter, the way the question is asked is the whole point.

As to the comment about me... Well, ok. If it makes you happy go for it, I'm glad to help make your day better. I'll give you a badge of honor, why not?

Ooh, is it shiny?

I think the issue is not whether IQ is a good predictor of success, within the system of it's application (for example the military screening new employees). The issue is whether this equates intelligence.

Rephrased: there would probably be less of an issue if it IQ was really "SP" (Success Predictor), not "Intelligence Quotient".

It might seem like the same, but I don't think it is: throw a Harvard graduate into the middle of the jungle, and he might fare rather badly. On the other hand, throw a perfectly successful jungle inhabitant into the middle of Harvard and he might also fare rather badly.

On the other hand, throw a perfectly successful jungle inhabitant into the middle of Harvard and he might also fare rather badly.

To the contrary, I think the denizens of Harvard might fare badly, not the perfectly successful jungle inhabitant. Professors got nothing on panthers.

That's what I said: the professor will get eaten in the jungle, the junge inhabitant will get run over by a car in the city.

Obviously IQ tests measure something: at the very least, they measure performance on IQ tests. The controversy starts when people claim to measure "intelligence".

Might be fun to design a "jungle IQ test".

It's not just Feynman -- there's a rumor that someone scored the whole Caltech physics faculty and they did mostly average. I think the flaw is that IQ tests look for people to find answers that correspond to the limited, simple mental models of the test makers (other people), very quickly and accurately, which is probably irrelevant, if not actively harmful, to the values that habits that make a good scientist.

> Why is there a deep-seated, cross-cultural tendency to be de facto anti-sex, even among the “liberal” left? What is the genetic or social basis of this tendency?

Who is anti-sex? I don't know any people who are against sex. Does this question mean something else? Or is this US specific?

This, like many of the other questions in the list, is a very leading question. It appears to coyly approach the topic of legalized prostitution, possibly legal age of consent laws.

Being opposed to sex is common on the American left. If you want names, Hillary and Joe Lieberman are two prominent ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod

Nonsense. You're talking about politicians jumping on a bandwagon that earned them cheap family values points, which is neither surprising, nor indicative of the attitudes of liberals in general.

I don't know of anyone who's actually opposed to sex. Plenty of people are opposed to sex at certain places and times, between certain pairs or groups of people, or in certain styles or orifices, or as part of a commercial transaction, or in front of other people, but I'm pretty sure that being opposed to sex in general is a fairly rare position.

(Insert your own "fairly rare position" joke here.)

Wow. They rerated GTA to 18+ because it contains a sex minigame? Violence is ok, sex is bad!?

1. No. You try to breed for egg laying chickens and you end up with super aggressive chickens. You select for Malaria resistance you end up with rickets. Life is not something you can linearly improve on and there is no goal to reach for.

2. Uh, what?

3. No. George Bush is a socialist.

4. Are you sure it is, what if your dad is Prescott Bush? I'd think who your parents are is an even better predictor then IQ.

5. No. But you sure should stop government subsidies.

6. All of humanity is more similar then just one tribe of chips. We are all descendant of a handful of people (5 women) who lived ~ 80000 years ago.

7. Maybe they have kids?

8. Yes. None.

9. Nothing.

10. Difference between individuals are HUGE, difference between large groups tiny.

11. China.

12. Nothing. Most people are simply more emotional then us rational geeks.

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