The whole idea of "IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people's IQ" seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there's always the same number of people with each score... agh, it's dumb for so many reasons

edit: wait, sorry, it's actually stupider than I thought:

Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite.... In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.

Literally just trickle down IQnomics

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 8 points 10 months ago

Exactly this.

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

People playing too many Paradox games.

[–] lessthanluigi@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

Don't you mean, "EA" games? (ba dum tiss)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago

And poorly at that. Intelligence is a mugs game, if you put your genetic points towards longevity you can keep your initial crowd of scientist/explorers as research leaders longer, which gives a bigger boost to research and more advantages.

At least until the robot god restarts the simulation and/or Paradox releases a new patch.

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 10 months ago

god, fuck, I don’t miss the days (like 3 years ago, so not even a long time) when The Bell Curve got ultra popular again thanks to the race scientists on the orange site, and all my coworkers kept casually referencing it to sound smart

[–] martinb@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 10 months ago

EA works on the hypothesis that in order to assist the most people, they have to amass as much money as possible in order to create mega altruistic (tm) projects which will assist done nebulous future generations of trillions, whilst ignoring the fact that helping everybody right now will be a greater benefit by increasing the likelihood that there will be people in the future to assist.

TLDR; Ultra-rich idiots trying to justify their greed by saying it's for the benefit of humanity.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 10 months ago

The case for the importance of IQ for numerous real-world outcomes was made in the controversial book The Bell Curve (1994) by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. They cogently argued

No, they didn't.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In 2002, psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their seminal book

Ah, "seminal" in the sense of "cum-bucket"

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Their methodology gave conclusive and unquestionable evidence that people with caucasoid skull shape are innately and genetically predisposed towards knowing what a "regatta" is.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Top comment by a large margin is an extensive 'your sources are bad and you should feel bad' by some Bob Jacobs, which would be encouraging, if wasnt for every. single. other. comment.

Not a bad read overall (the BJ comment), especially if like me you didnt remember off the top of your head who Lynn is and why he sucks, even if it suffers from the forced rationalist equanimity that dictates you treat obviously disingenuous bulshit with the utmost respect as long as it is presented in a sufficiently formalistic manner and doesn't call for genocide too overtly (I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about).

[–] Collectivist@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago

I wonder what the deleted Roko comment was about

Are you talking about his -18 karma comment? It says:

Long post on eugenics, -1 points right now and lots of comments disagreeing. Looks like this is a political battle; I'll skip actually reading it and note that these kinds of issues are not decided rationally but politically, EA is a left-wing movement so eugenics is axiomatically bad. From a right-wing point of view one can even see it as a good thing that the left is irrational about this kind of thing, it means that they will be late adopters of the technology and fall behind.

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Only an EA could take seriously someone who approvingly cites journals like "Mankind Quarterly" and crackpots like Richard Lynn, Steven Hsu, Jonathan Anomaly, and Emil Kirkegaard.

The author considers himself a "rationalist of the right" and a libertarian who enjoys Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander. He describes ten tenets of right-wing rationalism, 8 of which are simply rephrasings of various ideas promoted by scientific racists. It would be an understatement to say this guy is monomaniacally focused on a single topic.

(Oh, and he publishes his brain farts on Substack. Because of course he does.)

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 10 months ago

in which stupendous racism is the most effective possible altruism

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Of course EA eventually hit eugenics, both rely on the idea that they have sufficient foresight and that no amount of evil now is immoral when compared to future gains as a result of it.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 10 months ago

eventually

pretty sure it was a journey of a few millimetres

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Paraphrasing from the comments 'sure IQ values are bad, but they are the best measures of IQ we have' Oof. That is pulling an battle winning argument that will lose you the entire war if you think about it.

[–] locallynonlinear@awful.systems 8 points 10 months ago

It's also, probably wrong. Modern views of intelligence (see Multiple realizability of cognition and Multi-level competency collective intelligence and Free Energy Principle models) suggest you are better of measuring intelligence by measuring it's metabolism or through perturbation and interactions.

Which isn't reductive enough for these people.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 10 points 10 months ago

tfw it is in you material interest to be hostile to any kind of sociological insight

[–] inlandempire@jlai.lu 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Imagine unironically using IQ as a measure of intelligence in a study

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

with numbers from RICHARD FUCKING LYNN

[–] carlitoscohones@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I confess that I had to google the guy. Richard Lynn was a self described scientific racist. I mean, what in the actual fuck.

[–] Collectivist@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

From the top comment:

Yeah, I really wouldn't trust how that book [by Richard Lynn] picks its data. As stated in "A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans":

For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a, b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)'s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic.

They're not the only one who find Lynn's choice of data selection suspect. Wikipedia describes him as:

Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" [...] He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal.

[From earlier in the comment] I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven't opted to include this one, weird... So should I pay money to see this "Mankind Quarterly" publication?

When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics. [...] Something tells me it wouldn't be very EA to give money to these people.

[–] carlitoscohones@awful.systems 8 points 10 months ago

A 42 minute read to prove that someone doesn’t get correlation vs causation as well as a junior college stats class.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago

noted on this site in comments, but the EA forums have so much material.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 6 points 10 months ago

Not Just zhe Autobahn, but zhe Highest Altruismus: Zhe Effective Altruist Case für Replacing Degenerate Stock vith Herrenvolk

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 10 months ago

didn’t think I’d quote myself so soon but