Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hermitian909 | Hacker News Reader

Probably worth calling out the two of the biggest observable negative effects of automation that have occurred over time:

1. We've decimated the bottom end of the skills market in developed countries. Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.

2. People who spend years or decades on a skillset see it devalued and their income drops. It is often difficult to get a "second shot" at a new career in your 40s and can be deeply disruptive to you and your family's lives. Growing up I watched this happen to the parents of several friends who'd made careers in things like printing that were obsoleted by digital revolution. None of those people achieved the monetary success they might have in an un-disrupted industry.

View on HN

Number 1 is my big concern. I have a son that is on the autism spectrum. He graduated from high school with a modified diploma when he was 20 and they decided to just send him along. He has managed to get a job doing baggage at the airport, which is pretty the limit of his abilities. What if all similar jobs were automated?

"Manual" jobs, per the OpenAI whitepaper, seem to be the least susceptible to being automated. The robotics just isn't there yet. Blessings to your family.

As in "Manual jobs that weren't made obsolete in the previous automation revolution" I suppose ? Like construction machines and lavor-saving tools ? On the top of my head I am thinking hair dresser, nail care (I wouldn't risk going to hair dresser or barber robot shop).

Manual mid-range jobs were the first that were automated, due to the industrial revolution, and later during the robotics revolution.

They've been automated for so long and so thoroughly that you didn't even think of them as 'having been automated away'.

Look at any commercial kitchen, any farm, inside any factory. Look at the grocery store, and its self-checkout machines. Look at parking attendants and toll booths. Look at the labour-saving devices employed at any construction site. Look at the demise of cottage industries - which used to be the economic driver of productive output, and are now limited to kitschy crafts on Etsy. Look at the cargo-container shipping yard, where a hundred dock-workers are now do the work that used to take tens of thousands. Look at the answering machine, and the utter insanity that is the modern automated customer support directory.

What hasn't been automated are jobs like janitors - where the work that they do is highly varied, and requires manipulation of different tools, in different spaces. We can automate a floor-mopping machine, or a vaccum cleaner, but we can't (yet) build a robot that will vaccum, and water the plants, and scrub a toilet, and clean up vomit, and refill the paper towel dispenser, all in one package.

> grocery store, and its self-checkout machines

Which aren’t automation or even new technology. The stores just cleverly moved the work that must be done to unpaid laborers. The self-checkout machines are an inferior tool with an escape hatch (customer service is on the way) to the real tool which must be operated by an employee.

Surely the ability to easily type and search for items is new technology. Customers do not have to memorize the codes, they can look them up.

I find self checkout very beneficial, as I frequently have few items to purchase, and there are more self checkout registers available more consistently than there would be staff.

For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.

> For the same ~20 to 30 items I normally purchase, it takes me very little time to self checkout. For people with cartloads of items, they can go to the manned conveyor belts. For everyone else, they can go to one of the many self checkouts.

Except if they have never used self checkout before. Or if they have 15 items in the store's cart but they haven't brought their shopping bags so they take 15 minutes to fill their arms and pockets and hats with their groceries.

Those people are eating time saved by self-checkout !

I tolerate the young ones who comes in pack of 6 individuals, especially if only one of them buy their unique can of coke. It makes the queue looks longer than it is and I am out sooner than the SUCKERS in the other queue.

HA ! (/s ? /s)

Sure, but in my experience, there are so many self checkout stalls that I never have to wait long.

The question seems to be, will those manual jobs be valued and economically rewarded, or will automation increasingly concentrate wealth into smaller and smaller groups while manual work will be low paying with low social mobility.

Depends on the supply of labor for those manual jobs. Jobs that require skill and/or have low quality of life at work such as requiring traveling/crawl spaces/outdoors/sewers/dangerous machinery/hazardous materials will probably pay well.

Manual jobs that are relatively safe, close to home, steady, and easy to learn will probably have a lot of people vying for them, hence lower pay.

The minimum level of cognitive ability necessary for employment providing a reasonable degree of autonomy is bound to rise inexorably. So this concern will be shared by ever growing numbers.

The contemporary habit of envisioning people as some sort of disposable artifice is dehumanising at its core and just serves to rid those in lucky positions of superfluence from responsibility.

Society needs to learn to recognize interpersonal differences in terms other than self-serving judgemental dismissal.

The scariest thing of all is how the average citizen is in a certain sense not reaping the benefits of automation.

You would think that automating your job would make you free to work less. No, of course not, you end up either unemployed or working at least as much as you used to or more.

A lot of the comments here on this thread are already pessimistic in relation to the automation because people low key know that in the last decades almost all societal changes have come to the detriment of general population.

Western ideology is mostly about taxing the salaries. While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods. But then again xUSSR "did't work" and capitalism "worked". How it even possible to reap anything from the automation if tax base is people's salaries and VAT?

USSR style communism was really an authoritarian dictatorship.

In capitalist west, capitalism was also about distribution of goods but literally being nice about it. Working together.

The language is meaningless gibberish. The tone and emotional spin, roleplay are what’s important.

In the US we’re enabling iron fisted oligarchs like the USSR once had. Those who refuse to share without extreme deference and idolatry, not because they’re that important to the well being of billions (they’re not) but because they’re important to the political actors that insulate them from taxation.

Nothing's so clear-cut as history lessons might have you believe.

The USSR et al had many more problems than most people in the west, at least of my generation, properly appreciate — the Holomodor and the irony of the Berlin Wall's official name (≈ anti-fascist protection barrier) being the most pertinent in my mind.

Conversely, while the USA was a symbol of hope and freedom in my childhood, that childhood was oblivious to the official segregation of the USA even in the 60s, let alone the unofficial segregation whose continued existence was the basis for the term "woke" prior to it being appropriated by all the political talking heads to mean everything and nothing.

The oligarchy in the USA today is not one I favour, but it is kinder than the… I was going to reference the events of the Homestead strike, but it turns out I must remember my own words, for that too is less clear-cut than I had heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

But yeah, reality is a complicated mess.

My opinion is that laissez-faire capitalism is BS, that the Roosevelt New Deal marked an end to that era for the same reason that the equivalent living conditions ended Soviet-style communism; that other forms of communism and capitalism exist; that both over-simplify human nature and that a superior alternative to both can be designed with careful effort; that such a thing probably won't be taken seriously until the current system is utterly broken because of those with power in the current system; and that by default AI and robotics is a lot closer to communism than anything else because "from each according to ability" requires much less personal consideration when everyone has a dozen droid servitors at their disposal.

Presumably the model for sufficiently wealthy countries would be to effectively tax the corporations either based in those countries or that wanted to sell to people in those countries. You then redistribute a subset of that as UBI or some other form of payment for either the subset affected by unemployability or to everyone.

In addition to UBI if we effectively taxed corporations we could have massive job programs for workers that either do get automated out of a job or work in a job that becomes obsolete. Just because you specialized in one thing and that thing becomes obsolete when you turn age 40 does not mean you do not have all kinds of other skills that will make it easier to start anew.

Property tax and inheritance tax can both be thought of as wealth tax, and are quite common. More general wealth taxes. Many European countries currently have or used to have more general wealth taxes. Lots of Americans support a general wealth tax. See Bernie Sanders.

I fail to see how wealth tax (my car and home is my wealth I suppose) going to 'reap' the automation advances. Please elaborate.

I fail to see how your example of basic requirements for normal life is wealth. Tax second and third homes, places with eleven bedrooms when the owners live elsewhere. People who own the robots that replace workers. Are you just trolling? This seems like a bad faith comment of unimaginable ignorance.

People have been brainwashed into thinking that normal requirements for living somewhere are investments

Comment I was replying is about wealth, article and my original comment are about automation. Yet somehow you are now talking about 11 bedrooms somehow. Anyways...

> While xUSSR was mostly about redistribution of the goods

Yeah, ask my grand grand father how great that worked. Oh sorry, you can’t, he was shot in the gulag in 1937 for anti revolution activities (and rehabilitated in 60s, saying it was a terrible mistake, that’s a relief, right?).

The failures of the USSR does not mean the US is succeeding. It is possible for more than one thing to be bad. Power/wealth imbalances are bad wherever they appear. The USSR no longer exists, but the US does, and its imbalance is growing worse rapidly.

I haven’t said US is succeeding. In fact I don’t like US either.

The USSR succumbed to the resource curse and an unstoppable arms race. In the 50s when they were still on somewhat friendly terms American newspapers were openly fretting that the Soviet economy was too efficient and growing too fast.

Its intrinsic economic woes were overplayed by western elites who were terrified of communist contagion.

Western ideology is about the primacy of property ownership. It's not economically efficient in the slightest but it's the only game in town these days.

Automation economic benefits should've manifested as deflation. That's what you'd expect to happen: the costs of doing things are coming down, so should the price. But the prevailing economic theory is that "deflation is bad".

The Fed and the financial class have been printing money relentlessly and have been squeezing all the juice of the economic benefits of automation by taxing it with inflation. The zero rates of the last 20 years have not reflected price stability, they reflected moving goalposts and strong technological deflation (which should've benefited the common people) coupled to high monetary inflation which was only allowed because of the technological deflation.

When you look at where did most of the money gained from technological innovation went - where all the newly found wealth was spent - the answer is obviously houses. The landlord / banking class have been printing money relentlessly inflating a bubble of the assets they hold, and they could only afford to do it because they absorbed the rising economic power of technology. You slave away while they get to print money.

We have effectively two tiered society. For the common people, a dollar is a dollar. For the financial class, a dollar is actually ten dollars, held with leverage and then bailed out by the Fed when it blows up.

Contrary point - technology enables people with disabilities to match or even exceed their peers?

Someone in a wheelchair 50 years ago could not do a lot of jobs vs now that's not even a factor in a software job.

Does that even matter when they still aren't being hired? Hiring statistics for those with disabilities are really horrible. We still hold biases about what makes one "productive" that stem from our very early hunter gatherer days, and these are still to this day negatively affecting the hiring potential of those with disabilities.

Government can/does provide aid to those with disabilities that prevent them from being able to attain and keep regular employment.

In the U.S. I believe it's through Social Security.

So as more jobs are automated and the base level of ability required to get hired goes up so does the need to expand who qualifies for social programs.

Productivity will be increasing with automation so it's a matter of distributing resources more efficiently and fairly than it is about making sure there is labor for everyone to get a job.

Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc.

If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.

Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.

You too over-generalize when extrapolating past behavior linearly into the future.

Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.

This presupposes one refrains from defeatist refusal to engage those problems of course.

How long have you been following politics and economics in a serious capacity?

> Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.

We sure ought to, I agree with you there.

The scariest thing is that they will eventually allow euthanasia for your child and others like him. Economically unpleasant people are not needed in capitalism. The governments are already starting to prepare laws on it .

I think it's scarier that you believe this.

Canada's MAID is well ahead of the curve on this. You can qualify just for saying you're depressed in some cases.

1. Utter nonsense, please scrub whomever told you this from your list of reliable sources.

2. Capitalists require consumers to actually buy shit, owning capital doesn't get you anything if you don't have proles to sell to.

> What if all similar jobs were automated?

Hopefully, we would reach a Star Trek-like utopia where people aren't required to work in order to live.

More realistically, the middle class just disappears, and we have nothing but the super-rich and the destitute left.

Yeah, I think something that gets missed by the decriers of pessimism is that over time we really do seem to be throwing a new strata currently at the bottom of the workforce onto the scrapheap.

The "optimists" might not take notice because they've been in the layers that can keep playing musical chairs and adjust, and things might even seem good - especially when the pool of money available gets more concentrated.

What has been a slow gradual frog boiling process could very well accelerate with AI reaching this level though. I can't think of earlier developments being as widely applicable and moving as fast as this before.

I worry for my kids generation, and personally wish I was 10yrs closer to retirement.

More generally the number of jobs hasn't seemed to drop drastically during any of these waves of automation, but the number of people employed in certain fields has including some jobs disappearing entirely. That means automation doesn't present a problem for the economy overall, but it does present a problem for individuals who need to exist in the transitioning economy. The US in particular has done an awful job easing those individuals during the transition. The economy becoming more efficient is good. We should use some of the surplus value of increased efficiency to care for the people harmed by that transition.

> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common. That's ~15% of the population who are close to un-employable.

Although I was completely unaware of this literature, I have spent the last few years essentially making the same point with regard to automation: you don't need a super-duper ASI to cause severe employment problems, all you need is something with an IQ of 85 that costs at most minimum wage to run (modulo robotics keeping up and being part of that price), and then 16% of the population are permanently and irreversibly no longer economically employable.

There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can: childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills. There will probably be more jobs like this in the future. Even now, people pay extra for handmade items when the technology to mass-produce the same thing for cheaper has been around for decades, so even if a robot can do your job, that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.

It’s safe to talk about EQ in addition to IQ regarding some jobs then. It’s more and more going to be about EQ jobs where AI feels lacking now, emphasis on the now.

Automation in theory SHOULD, in the process of destroying jobs, make many things cheaper so people are able to afford things that were previously out of reach, creating new jobs in those sectors.

Last I checked, no grocery store got price drops thanks to self-checkout.

Due to stickiness prices almost never drop, but they can grow slower than inflation, which in the limit has the same effect.

In addition to the other comment, the cashier is almost none of the price.

Assuming £10/hour and a cashier that can scan an average of 20 items per minute (which is probably 20 items in 20 seconds and then waiting 40 more for the customer to dig out their wallet), that's 20*60 items per hour = 1200 items per hour = 120 items/£1.

I assume it's mainly useful for other reasons?

This is why I put emphasis on the word "should".

> There are many things a robot with "IQ" 85 cannot do that a human with "the same" IQ can:

Only if you don't take IQ tests seriously — I think I've heard them dismissed as "only good at measuring your score on an IQ test".

If you do take them seriously, then by definition an AI which genuinely scores 85 (and isn't, say, just programmed to be good at that specific set of puzzles), then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.

In this case I mean the latter, what with it being a thought experiment to demonstrate why we get problems well before having to ask if the AI can take over.

Practical issues like "a native speaker with IQ 85 is almost certainly more fluent than an IQ 160 polyglot on their 53rd, but for an AI they're all equal", or "we can easily hard-code in an algorithm for winning chess and another for doing calculus" likewise don't really matter.

> childcare / elder care, social work, basically anything that requires garnering trust and a lot of social interaction, but not necessarily complex skills

One of the problems right now with ChatGPT is that people trust it waaaay too much, and it's not really even trying.

> that doesn't necessarily make your skills worthless.

worthless != longer economically employable

The arts have significant social value, and I suspect may be to humans what tails are to peacocks; but at the same time, painters and novelists and musicians and actors and playwrights are infamous in their collective struggles to earn enough to get by on those careers alone.

> then it must be able to do what a human of that IQ can do.

Has anyone ever said this about any test? Are there any tests that are so general that anyone who does better on it is better at every single task than someone who does worse? Is such a test even possible?

That's pretty much exactly the claims that the strongest proponents of IQ tests are making.

I lack the skills to determine that, so I am limited to trusting the people who tell me the tests are "pretty good but not perfect".

Source? Who is claiming the having a high IQ makes you better at for example athletics?

To pre-empt you expanding that to things like running speed, I considered it too obvious to bother mentioning that I'm taking about mental tasks.

For that specific example, athletics, there does appear to be a correlation. It may be any or all of A->B, B->A, and C->(A, B), but "healthy body, healthy mind" is a meme that appears to have a similar age as the concept of writing.

Finally, as I have been specifying IQ 85 as the "huh interesting" threshold rather than "high" IQ, I'll ignore your goalpost shift and say that your citation is me right now saying: I reckon IQ improvements in at least this zone (say +/- 0.5σ) is causal for better outcomes with regard to [avoiding injury, pushing performance limits, maintaining training regimes, learning techniques], all of which improve overall performance.

Another problem is, that minimum required IQ number keeps rising too.

A healthy society needs to have means to support people of all intelligence levels, we need the equivalent of jobs for ditch diggers, and those jobs need to be respected lines of work for people.

Work has more value than just money, and whether people like it or not, it gives value and meaning to peoples lives. The value we assign (and pay) for work shouldnt just be governed by the economic value it generates, it needs to be enough to meet basic needs, to engender respect.

The basic point I'll make here, using ditch digging is - have you dug a ditch? I have, its hard work, and mine was just a small one in my back yard.

Meanwhile, it's the knuckle-dragging cro mags who are having all the babies. I wonder how this ends.

Correlation!= causation.

Our default is "lots of babies"; women getting more education and economic liberty decrease that number. Poor places don't generally have significant educational budgets or opportunities for women, but as that specific set of things changes — education and freedom, not even always money — there is a corresponding change to number of births per woman.

It also means that rich couples in societies that lack women's lib still have more kids, even where you can infer high intellect without the convenient proxy of the women being allowed to go to university and giving you a test to score against.

In the short run, people can act against their own evolutionary fitness, but in the long run, evolutionary pressures should push those people to the wayside.

I've also seen two parents of below average intelligence make children who are of above average intelligence, and thats not even uncommon.

Well yeah in fact regression to the mean predicts that below average people will on average have children smarter than themselves while above average people will have children less smart than themselves (but still smarter than average).

That's not my point, my point is more that it's funny that people do things like going to college when this predictably causes them to have fewer children i.e. college actually hurts their evolutionary fitness.

I think if you're thinking about evolutionary fitness when having children, or deciding how many children to have, you should fundamentally reevaluate your moral and ideological system.

That line of thinking is the beginning or the road to eugenics, and it goes no place good.

Eugenics is about imposing a system on society where only a chosen group of people get to have offspring, not about your individual choices or your kids. Otherwise choosing a mate you're attracted to becomes paramount to eugenics.

Also, everyone is thinking about evolutionary fitness. Some people just do it explicitly (and others do it by instinct/intuition)

Do you also think women shouldn't be allowed to abort Down syndrome babies because "that's eugenics"?

Do you think that the state shouldn't be allowed to kill unwanted Down syndrome babies after they are born because "that's eugenics"?

What about Down syndrome adults, who are reliant on state benefits?

In case it's not clear, I don't support the killing of disabled people at any age, but I understand that different people approach these questions from a different set of assumptions.

My point is that adding scare quotes around "that's eugenics" doesn't stop it from being an accurate description, so your question is not the gotcha you might think it is.

I don't think the state should be in the business of killing anyone.

But a woman aborting a Downs baby is not the state killing anyone, and most pro choice people would say the woman isn't killing anyone either, since the fetus isn't a person in their view.

I understand that the market is mysterious and confusing, but it has always struck me as bizarre that our society is structured in such a way that automating a task away has ended up as a bad thing. The thing you were doing has been done, therefor society as a whole at least wouldn’t be harmed by just paying you (Your old salary - amortized yearly cost of the machine) to do nothing.

Paying someone to idle is certainly harmful to society if you could pay them the same to do something productive.

But it is strictly better than the pre-automation situation.

Maybe if you ignore the effects of competition. If you're paying someone you no longer need and your competitors (who have access to the same automation) aren't, they'll outcompete you.

This matters from the perspective of one specific competitor, but not from the perspective of society as a whole - the latter still has the same gross economic output and the same number of people to support it with. Therefore, the disconnect between the two is due to the way society is structured (i.e. who reaps the economic benefits and how), and not intrinsic.

> the latter still has the same gross economic output

Well no, if we still had the same gross economic output as 1000 years ago quality of living would be much lower.

The point of competition is that it drives up total economic output.

Of course it sucks for the people who get outcompeted. Certainly getting them productive again in another capacity is good for society. Letting them simply idle is not.

If we had the same gross economic output and the same population, quality of life would be the same, aside from environmental changes.

And on the time scales we're looking at here (millions of people losing jobs within a decade or so), population growth is not a relevant concern, and does not explain why people are worse off despite more automation. Not to mention that population growth is already negative in most societies most affected by automation.

I haven’t responded because int_19h seems to have perfectly understood what I was trying to say and made similar arguments to what I would have.

Just wanted to note that I didn’t propose a particular solution—you seem to have responded as if I’ve just said “we should have no automation,” which is not what I was proposing at all—it was just an observation about where things have ended up.

We could imagine lots of ways to not throw people to the wolves when their jobs were automated away, the idea of just continuing to pay them is sort of a lower bound (in the sense that obviously the economy could bear it, because it had just been bearing it, right before the automation was implemented).

I don't know to what degree automation was involved, but we also spent the last 60+ years socially devaluing jobs that don't require a college degree.

My grandfather is about as smart as I am, but he never went to college (nor did well over 90% of his cohort). Now about half the population goes to college, and more than a third graduate.

That's a massive transformation in two generations, and its exacerbated by the degree to which it segregates. I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college.

> I've never eaten lunch with an adult, my age or younger, who didn't attend college

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

It is completely wild to me how effectively society has self segregated to the point of just straight up never, not even once, interacting with the other group without even realizing it.

The college thing is a much bigger divide than politics for my friend group. My wife is about as blue-tribe as you can get. My best-man is pretty darn red tribe (and not Mitt Romney red-tribe, but "likely to vote for Trump in the next Republican primary" red-tribe).

They both have college degrees though. I have a few friends who dropped out of college, but none that never attended.

1. Is completely wrong. We have vastly grown the bottom end of the skills market by automating jobs to levels so simple that anyone can do it. They are bad jobs. But there are many of them. The problem is that we have people with normal IQs doing these jobs too, because there is not enough jobs above them.

You’re arguing in March of 2023 that the issue is a lack of jobs?

I'd summarize their comment as "the issue is a lack of skilled jobs."

The ratio of skilled : unskilled jobs. As well as the general decline in what constitutes a skilled job.

People with these IQs under 85 are generally not employable in some of the lowest end jobs available: warehouseman, packer, or package delivery. I'm not sure what jobs you're imagining that are simpler than those, but I think I'm going to agree with the data on this point.

You think 15% of the population is too dumb to deliver packages? More than 1 in 10 people is not smart enough to pack things?

I think the framing here has to be very careful: I agree with the general psychometric data that ~15% of struggle to get or keep a job delivering packages or packing things. This is not the same as packing something or delivering a package. Jobs require a certain speed of execution, ability to adapt to changing conditions, low rate of mistake, and a maximum training time.

Remember, even the army during war time, which requires people fulfilling botho f these services won't hire people with such a low IQ.

Alright this one annoyed me enough to look it up.

First of all Peterson’s claim is 83, not 85.

Second, The military does not test IQ. It has a different test with a decent correlation. This test scores in percentiles however. And the bottom 10% are not allowed in. This is not the same thing as 10% of all people cannot get in, as those taking the military test are probably a lower IQ subset on average.

Probably not by much. I would guess the military is current cutting off the bottom 8-10% of the population.

I can’t find much in the way of hard stats but I still feel pretty strongly that a 10th percentile individual is more than well equipped to be a delivery driver of a warehouse worker or whatever.

This is because we decide it's better to pay people to do nothing than to clean streets and medians and countless other things that need done.

And ironically by paying them just for existing, they are ending up as the only group capable of reproducing at higher than replacement rate.

We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.

>We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves.

The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.

I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.

Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:....

Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence.

I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.

>the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence.

Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics.

How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)?

EDIT: To be clear, I know Western culture has pushed a narrative that intelligence is an intrinsic thing that anyone can have, but in practice, it's a reflection of learned skills like reasoning and abstraction. That's the entire point of education, if you don't practice those skills (with some exceptions), you are likely worse at them.

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-does-...

immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs

Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education.

The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children.

The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.

There are enough teachers and doctors from other countries working as post delivery drivers in Germany because their education isn’t being accepted in Germany.

Sure, by no means am I trying to make some argument that immigrants or manual laborers are worse or inferior. In fact the opposite!

I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors.

Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was).

We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.

"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults."

I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.

We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies.

Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance.

We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable

For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me.

Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value.

Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.'

Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers.

But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).

> I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.

I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid".

I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.

Sure, but that's an argument against abstraction/specialization that is also somewhat hard to really buy into.

How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to?

Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things.

EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.

I saw that meme too, except the version I saw had the top comment included in the crop, which was something to the effect of "warnings are put on products in response to customer behavior, not as a preventative measure. somebody's parents tried to drink battery acid."

> The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people.

What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

So you get studies with very confident titles like this: Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic

Then you read the paper and you see:

A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent...

Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)...

Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants...

Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy.

So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why.

That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.

> our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs

Seems to suggest that intelligence has a lot to do with genes. Why do you think that part supports your view that intelligence doesn't? Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence?

I'm saying that the test was of 3,000 white British people born in the 1920's (they specifically excluded non-white people) and what they found was that distant relatives scored similarly on tests (that's what it means to share common SNPs, given the context).

I'd be impressed if they saw the same thing across two populations where we know people aren't related, but I'd argue they just back-solved Britain's class structure.

One has to think critically in science.

>Do you have any evidence that kids doesn't inherit any intelligence

Well, if intelligence is inherited, then why are IQ tests going up over time (and therefore being recentered on 100 constantly)? Doesn't that imply learning is the driver?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-12794-032

If you're interested in topic #1 here I highly recommend the book "Dignity" by Chris Arnade. It's not like this concept was literally new to me but the grace with which he talks about it and the specific stories he encounters made me see things in an entirely different light. x

No one talks about the lift attendants! «The person who operated the lifts (elevators) in old shopping houses or buildings was called an "elevator operator" or "lift attendant." Their primary responsibility was to manually control the elevator, ensuring that it stopped accurately at each floor and that passengers were transported safely. They would also assist passengers by opening and closing the elevator doors and providing information about the different floors or departments within the building.»

I think #1 is more attributable to the rising minimum wage. I read the other day that the one job that automation did successfully eliminate was the elevator operator, but I'm quite certain that - like the gas station attendant in states that don't mandate it - it fell victim to the rising minimum wage. It simply became illegal to pay people what these jobs are worth.

On the second point, it's a good warning to never rest on your laurels.

You're not owed that your profession stay relevant, and so you always have to keep an eye on trends, and if needed, adjust course.

>> Something often touted in the psychometrics literature is that the number of jobs for folks with IQ under 85 are quite rare in the US where once they were common

I think Jordan Peterson quoted the stats as people with IQ under 83 are completely unemployable i.e. even the army can't get a net positive out of them. I found that deeply concerning in several ways.

IMHO we need to work on reducing the cost of living so people can mostly opt-out without losing their home and dying. Instead it's always push harder, more growth, etc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com