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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

>The value we place on the skills that IQ tests measure

It's not even that. Imagine there is an isolated population on a remote island that is legitimately very low on general intelligence, "nobody can ever learn to count past ten" kinda low, yet undeniably human.

What would be a reasonable policy toward such people?

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The same as you'd have to the severely mentally impaired in general, I imagine.

To apologise for such a unidimensional interpretation of intelligence? Maybe they harness their intelligence to survival in their environment. What would the measure of such an intelligence be? What if you've never been posed a logical puzzle before, or even had a written language, just oral tradition. Are we saying that the western definition of intelligence discounts all other forms of mentation and application of that mentation to significant survival advantage? Perhaps these people score low on "curiosity" rather than intelligence per se? How do we even define intelligence in these discussions? Is Elon Musk intelligent? By some measures, clearly yes. By others, clearly not. What is the point of these discussions of not to partition the room? Personally, I'd like to see a broad-spectrum array of measures relating to different modes of mentation. Then we may be able to get somewhere. Until then, whenever I see a discussion mentioning "whites", "blacks", "Asians", "Africans" as if these are a homogenous mass (which is utterly ludicrous), then I'll continue to suspect ulterior motives.

A lot of assumptions here. What intellectual advantages do chimpanzees have over humans? Their survival advantages over us are in other planes. Clearly at some stage between the last common ancestor and us there was an intellectually inferior, yet more or less human. Sure they could maybe sleep naked in the cold, run marathons in 1:30 or even, as a facet of mental ability, have superhuman reaction time, but they would just have no place in the human society. Your refusal to even consider a genetically defined human subset of inferior intellect is quite typical, I suppose because you don't like the conclusions for if it existed.

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