Comment by hingisundhorsa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hingisundhorsa | Hacker News Reader

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"For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children."

Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.

"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."

Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.

"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."

Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.

I too am rather skeptical of the claim of 15 points per generation.

Look at the intense selection on the Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 1500 years which has only produced an average IQ of 115 (there are alternate theories for their high IQs).

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

Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.

Generally selection works quickly at first, by filtering the population for the desired trait. Then it slows dramatically as the process is limited by new beneficial mutations which are rare.

It is noteworthy that genes for high IQ seem to come at a price. Read up about Einstein's son Eduard for example.

Final point: maybe parents will not want to select for IQ. Maybe they would prefer to select for beautiful daughters for example?

>Selection of dog breeds for intelligence (German Shepherds, Jack Russell terriers, Poodles vs eg King Charles Cavaliers, Corgis) seems to have produced a large gap but it took a long time - dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years.

Dogs have been domesticated since the dawn of civilization (and probably before), but those specific breeds are relatively new. GSDs are just over a century old, Jack Russells slightly older, poodles several hundred years old and Corgis positively ancient at almost 1000. Note, too, that intelligence was not the sole quality they were bred for. The Russian Silver Fox is a great example of the massive changes that can occur in only a few generations if artificial selection for a single trait is performed.

That said, I agree with the gist of your argument: 15 pts of Iq per generation seems ludicrous.

The selection in Ashkenazi was not done in the same way proposed here - filtering took whole lifetimes. In this system, you compress the whole "live 50 years and have slightly more / fewer children" step into one procedure.

This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.

If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.

Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]

That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.

The Ashkenazi thing is bullshit. If you follow the references in the Wikipedia article looking for hard statistical evidence of higher IQ you end up with very thin sourcing from two iffy papers.

Wikipedia is not a reliable source, particularly on politically contentious matters such as this.

The Flynn effect in the U.S. already seems to be causing about 3 points of IQ gain per decade. If a generation is 25 years, that's 7.5 IQ points per generation. It doesn't seem unreasonable that if you explicitly selected for this trait you could double the rate of evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Rise_in_IQ

> dogs have been domesticated for ~5,000 years

That's way too low. It's somewhere in the 19-32k year range: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38279/...

> <dogs domesticated> somewhere in the 19-32k year range

I have read numerous different accounts. It appears that the selective breeding of different breeds is actually much shorter even than 5,000 years. Most breeds are less than 1,000 years old.

I'm having difficulty understanding your reasoning. To summarize what I have understood:

1. Author is arrogant, and by innuendo he is also sexist/racist.

2. ???

3. Author is wrong.

Step 2 is where I'm not following your logic.

It's not a causal chain. The author is racist, and he is also wrong.

I'm not following the reasoning for the (irrelevant) racism of the author either:

1. I once knew a guy who agreed with the author. He also had a non-white manager at roughly the same time he agreed with the author.

2. ???

3. Therefore the author if this article is racist.

2. The author writes a silly racist article celebrating eugenics and racial purity

This assumes what it aims to prove, namely that the authors argument is invalid.

The word 'racist' succeeds in generating an emotional swirl with unpleasant connotations while failing to communicate what is meant when it is used. It's just a lazy expletive.

In case anyone else is interested in becoming a virtuoso logician like quanticle and hingisundhorsa, here are some helpful links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion

Your masterful logician skills appear to have failed to notice that the author being wrong and being racist were unrelated. One can be racist and right, or non-racist and wrong, but in this case the author is wrong about where China is coming from and going to, and then later also keeps flashing his racist colors.

Not all observations are extrapolations from a single observation.

I agree. This type of racism should be punishable by law. I don't need science to confirm or deny any of this hate. It's just plain wrong.

What? Let's knee-jerk our way into legislating thought-crime, really?

No thank you. Free-speech also means speech you do not like, otherwise you don't actually have free-speech. But rather just, "state-approved speech".

That's a really sad world to live in, even more so with the state-sponsored and state-seeded social-ostracism we already have in place to control freedom of speech.

Are you being sarcastic?

And I recognize your username, do / did you post on a forum dedicated to a certain music genre?

> sets of IQ-predicting alleles

This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.

What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?

It's also worth considering that your hypothetical might be anything but! At extremely high levels of intelligence the rate of extreme social disorders skyrockets up to "most" (I recall the cutoff for 50% happening at ~165 IQ, but it continues to rise even after that, limited primarily by our lack of data on IQs much higher). I'm not entirely sure if this analogy is appropriate, but just as organisms with more cells are more likely to produce cancer, it seems minds with more thoughts racing through them are just as damaged by some small percentage of errant thoughts (some are extreme delusions, some are just the product of the isolation of a brilliant mind growing tired of a world, retreating from it, losing touch with how to interact with excellence and subtlety, and seeing even less subtlety in the world, simply growing more tired of it, ending with many extremely intelligent people simply unable to interact with others in any normal way).

>...but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?

1.3 billion bald, cat cradling, evil geniuses, all saying "mbwah, ha ha" in eerie synchronicity?

What about the assumption that intelligence can be reduced to an IQ number?

This. The generalization of intelligence to just a single number, or even a bunch of numbers, strikes me as a foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding of human intelligence.

So, let's say we have a number. It correlates with ability to solve a number of different puzzles, lines up with our understanding of certain dangers (iodine deficiency, etc.), is consistent, explains some variation of the success in certain tasks or areas that are not explained by experience or upbringing.

I'm not saying it captures every element of our experience, but surely we can point to it and say it represents some subset of our understanding of the idea we point at when we say the word "intelligence". It really isn't competing with anything that's remotely as useful. IQ, although it has faults, seems to be a relatively cheap, standard, well understood metric, that also explains quite a few other phenomenon. If you give me two regression analyses, one of them using IQ and one not, I cannot imagine what understanding you would gain by refusing to acknowledge the former -- and that mistake seems like precisely the type of "foolish over assessment of our current collective understanding" that you deride.

I'm not arguing that IQ doesn't measure anything, my point is simply that it is a one dimensional measure of something for which we do not know how many dimensions there actually are.

I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.

I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').

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