tfw it is in you material interest to be hostile to any kind of sociological insight
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).
In 2002, psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their seminal book
Ah, “seminal” in the sense of “cum-bucket”
Their methodology gave conclusive and unquestionable evidence that people with caucasoid skull shape are innately and genetically predisposed towards knowing what a “regatta” is.
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.
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.
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
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.
