I’m a student of moral science at the university of Ghent, where I also started an EA group.
If you’re interested in philosophy and mechanism design, consider checking out my blog.
I also co-started Effectief Geven (Belgian effective giving org), am a volunteer researcher at SatisfIA (AI-safety org) and a volunteer writer at GAIA (Animal welfare org)
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.
It’s funded by the Pioneer Fund which according to wikipedia:
Something tells me it wouldn’t be very EA to give money to these people.
So what about the second source?
I can check Christainsen’s work since it’s in a reputable journal and thus available through my university. He himself says in the paper:
Cultural factors are harder to measure and thus get neglected in research thanks to the streetlight effect. Still we might sample a subsection of more easily measurable cultural interventions like eduction and see which way they point. We can use the education index to compare the mentioned countries. Countries like the USA, UK and Japan score high on it (0.9, 0.948, 0.851 respectively) while countries like Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait score lower (0.659, 0.802, 0.638 respectively). That seems like a promising indication, but can education actually increase IQ?
You cited Ritchie in this post, but he and his colleagues also have a later meta-analysis showing that education can greatly increase intelligence:
Now you might worry that this is not “true intelligence/g-factor” and a “hollow” gain, but I fear that here we run into the issue that there’s no consensus on what the “true intelligence” actually is. It may be hollow according to your definition but not mine. Even if there was consensus we might disagree about what IQ actually measures. The debate about what aspects of “true intelligence” IQ actually captured is summarized on wikipedia as:
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Yeah, I really wouldn’t trust how that book picks its data. As stated in “A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans”:
They’re not the only one who find Lynn’s choice of data selection suspect. Wikipedia describes him as:
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I suggest you remove the capital L typo, otherwise people might erroneously think Lynn had something to do with its discovery.
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That book has so many problems that instead of typing it all out I would like to direct people to this video which points out a lot of them. (It also goes over a lot of Lynn’s other scientific malpractices)
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I don’t think anyone thinks the environment explains 100%, but given that it’s much larger and has many more variables it seems reasonable to assume it can explain more of it. Since we profess ourselves to be effective altruists I would also like to see a price comparison between the interventions. This post doesn’t really discuss how high the prices for “genetic interventions” are, while environmental interventions like giving iodine are really cheap. Giving iodine used to be one of GiveWell’s top charities:
Iodine deficiency causes an average drop of 13 IQ points, which means we can gain much more than the estimated 9 IQ points of embryo selection at a tiny fraction of the cost.
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I think the real worry here is that the elites will use their (increased) power to ensure that the government doesn’t give subsidies to the poor so they can keep their relative power in society. A similar dynamic is already happening in education with the money for public schools vs private schools so I suspect this would also happen with other ‘intelligence-increasing interventions’.
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I would argue that’s a good thing. Like @titotal commented on the ‘most people endorse some form of “eugenics”’ post:
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I do feel some amount of warped-mirror empathy for the fact that you clearly spend a lot of time writing a long post with lots of citations on a politically unpopular position that doesn’t get a lot of karma. A similar thing happened to me albeit from the polar opposite side of the political spectrum, which is why part of me wanted to spend time giving you something I didn’t get, a rigorous reply. But another part of me remembers that the last time I spend time arguing IQ and genetics on this forum a bunch of HBD-proponents brigaded me and I lost karma and voting power.
So I obviously did end up writing this comment
because I’m an idiot,but I think I will leave it at that.Feel free to reply to this comment but I now feel exhausted and fear a back and forth will get me brigaded, sorry :/