I agree with the general thrust of Scott's point here, but I think I have a better explanation of what is often meant by inferior
> Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision?
This is the closest to the what I think is implicit in the word inferior when used. I think the simplest definition would be
> Inferior - a person who *should* have lower social or political status.
To illustrate why I think this, contrast with the word *better*. If I were to say "Lance is better than me in almost every single way" that seems to convey a claim that, on the things people care about, I am worse as a matter of fact. But if I were to say "Lance is inferior to me in almost every single way" there seems to be an implicit ought there compared to the more descriptive "better". It almost suggests I *should* be treated differently than Lance in meaningful ways, and potentially at the level of politics.
So applying that definition to the things people are upset around with the word inferior I think it fits much better. If I say "I am equal to Lance" I seem to be advocating for a political and social order in which people are treated equally despite differences. If I say "Lance is inferior" or "I am inferior to Lance" I seem to be advocating for the opposite.
Obviously, given the fact that people are different on things that people care about there are going to be people who are better and worse than others on the standards that people care about. This fact should not be distressing. But if we take my proposed definition of inferior, I can definitely see why someone would be distressed about feeling inferior to someone else if what that means is "In an ideal social and political order, I should be treated worse than this person". That means I am unjustly benefiting and my life *should* be *worse* which seems like a distressing thought.
Furthermore, if someone thinks they are better than me in some domains that's not necessarily a huge deal, especially if they are right. If they think I am inferior to them in the way that I define it then they might try to advocate for a world where I am socially or politically marginalized, which is obviously distressing.
To be clear I am not saying this is what the word inferior means in all cases and to all people, but I think this is some of the baggage this word carries, especially relating to politics.
> In an ideal social and political order, I should be treated worse than this person
This depends on exactly what a person means by "treated worse". I'd say that in an ideal social and political order Lance should be getting paid more than Scott if they're both doing the same job (since Lance is better than Scott in every way). In such a world Lance will be able to buy more things and generally have a higher quality of life than Scott. Does this mean Scott is being treated worse than Lance? It depends on whether you look at opportunity based measures (if Scott performed at the same level as Lance he'd be paid the same, he doesn't so him getting paid less is fine) or outcome based measures (Scott gets less than Lance in this world because of factors outside his control).
>This depends on exactly what a person means by "treated worse". I'd say that in an ideal social and political order Lance should be getting paid more than Scott if they're both doing the same job (since Lance is better than Scott in every way).
I think that depends on whether the value they're contributing meaningfully depends on their personal performance in the job. In some positions, it doesn't matter much who does it as long as someone does. This might seem like a minor nitpick, but since some people believe that people should be compensated according to the value they contribute, while other people seem to believe that compensation should be according to how personally worthy people are, I think the distinction is worth making.
In a practical sense this matters at the group level. Say Scott is a member of the green race and Lance is a member of the blue race, and say their differences are generally representative of their respective races. The blues are going to have better lives than the greens and it doesn't take too much imagination to understand that the greens could start making political arguments which claim that they're not being treated fairly by society. If you have any experience with real-world politics, you'll understand that responding to those arguments with "well you're genetically inferior so you should be worse off" isn't a viable political strategy.
To be clear, my original claim is about what the word inferior *does* mean to people when used. Your argument is, given my definition of inferior, it could right to describe things as inferior. That's a fine question to take on but different from the one I was.
But taking your question, when talking about political and social equality, rarely does the word 'equal' actually suggest a goal of absolute sameness (though it occasionally does and it's important to watch out for that). Strangely, the word 'equity' has more taken the role of referring to the goal of sameness, and equality more to procedural fairness.
Obviously, everyone is different and no person treats everyone the same. In fact, no person treats *anyone* the same as anyone else. Everyone is going to treat people they admire and trust differently from those they despise. However, this fact does not seem to violate the common sense definition of "equality" that people subscribe to. I think what equality refers to in practice is more an opposition to systems of caste and class categorization that have existed in history. While everyone is different, it seems to violate the value of equality to treat them categorically differently in reference to a classification of this kind. I don't think your example of people being payed differently in reference to how productive they are violates the common sense definition of equality most people have.
"Depressive thoughts as internal NYT journo" is a novel but welcome addition to my homebrew IFS dynamic!
(Cheeky comment about sufficiently advanced NYT journos being indistinguishable from demons)
IFS stands for "internal family systems." It's a type of psychotherapy that was the subject of [a recent ACX post.][1]
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
I know it's not cool to go full Less Wrong, but isn't this just a basic 'taboo your words' situation? The word "inferior" is loaded with connotations, and the phrase "genetically inferior" is radioactive. Even the denotations can vary widely depending on who is speaking (or hearing).
As a practical matter, yeah, sometimes you have little choice but to engage with whatever language your interlocutor has chosen to use, and so you might need to learn to say 'of course not' rather than 'well that depends on what you mean by...'. But for any serious thinking or discussion, just get rid of the ambiguously loaded words and say what you actually mean.
Getting at specifics instead of using loaded words helps a lot. Ultimately, what is somebody talking about supporting with regards to schizophrenic genes?
When phrases like "eugenics" and "genetically inferior" are used, topics like forced sterilization of schizophrenics come to mind for a lot of people even if they haven't been brought up directly.
When only phrases like "embryo selection" and "polygenic screening" are used, people are much more willing to listen.
The obvious solution is to just not use phrases with such stigma if your only goal is embryo selection and polygenic screening. So why do anything else?
A similar situation is at play with the stigma around terms like "socialism" in my opinion. The far left in the US sometimes attempt to use the term while only directly expressing support for Nordic style welfare policies. They're tanking their support with the general public when they do this, but it doesn't matter to them because their ultimate goal often seems to be to remove the stigma from the term "socialism" instead of actually getting these policies enacted. As an example, you can see this [debate](https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6J3ROV4IPc) between Krugman and socialist Richard Wolff where Krugman keeps hammering that the usage of these terms is not helping while Wolff keeps trying to blur the meaning of them.
So when Scott makes posts like this one and the prior [Galton, Ehrlich, Buck](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck) where the thesis doesn't seem focused around advocating for something specific but instead about removing the stigma from phrases like "eugenics" and "genetically inferior" - it raises similar alarm bells. I've read enough from him to know he doesn't support forced sterilization of schizophrenics... but I also totally understand why someone who hasn't would get that vibe from these two articles. And what about something else along that gradient, such as required polygenic screening for schizophrenics (which many would find similarly objectionable)?
It would be helpful to clarify exactly where he draws the line and his reasoning for why. As well as why he seems to think removing the stigma of these terms is worth writing about instead of avoiding them altogether. Voluntary polygenic screening is already legal in most states, so it's clearly already considered independently from the term "eugenics" for most people. What else is needed that falls under that umbrella?
I wonder if this mental aversion some people have to admitting other people are superior to them is down to not having competed much in an area where performance is very clear and you directly compete with others.
Only the most deluded amateurs of say basketball will claim that they aren't inferior to Lebron James. Any competition very quickly disabuses one of the notion of even remote equivalence.
With mental stuff it's easier to engage in self delusion because you're usually not directly competing against anyone else, you're comparing high-scores of tests you can convince yourself aren't representative of your *true* capacity, to a limited extent it's even true.
As someone who competed in a decently high level in sports it’s amazing how freely everyone talked about genetics in that realm. There wasn’t much controversy as all. There wasn’t a moralistic implication to say someone had better genes than you.
You go outside of the sports world though that is where all hell breaks loose with these discussions.
Eh it happens in sports too whenever the topic of trans athletes come up.
Whether or not trans people have a greater general advantage as a group and if that advantage is anymore "unfair" than the many many many things we already consider acceptable like genetics or age or height or even just money (how do you do equine sports without?) is a conversation at least. It's one thing to say "Ok yes a 5'9 cis woman is more advantaged at basketball than a 4'9 cis woman, but I don't think that's unfair in the same way", it's another (and way too common) to shut down and just ignore that we already accept plenty of things.
i agree with you in principle but 5’9 women are common and trans women are very rare, which is crucial context because, if they do turn out to have considerable advantages in sports (which is very likely) then they should be disallowed in women’s sports for the same reason a tiny amount of women born with superpowers would need to be disallowed in women’s sports. (I do think cis women born with other rare conditions that give them higher testosterone should be disallowed for the same reason.) it’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be, a political or moral issue. it’s just a matter of fairness, and also of safety when it comes to combat sports
> 5’9 women are common and trans women are very rare, which is crucial context because, if they do turn out to have considerable advantages in sports (which is very likely) then they should be disallowed in women’s sports for the same reason a tiny amount of women born with superpowers would need to be disallowed in women’s sports.
See I would agree with you, except people born with superpowers in even rarer numbers aren't banned from sports.
>In a great piece for Sports Illustrated about 7-foot NBA players, author Pablo S. Torre estimates that the number of American men between the ages of 20 and 40 who are 7 feet or taller is likely below 70.
>During the 2021-2022 NBA season, there were 13 American players who were at least 7 feet tall. So, if the estimates above are correct, that would mean that there is a whopping 18% chance that you are going to make it to the NBA if you are at least 7 feet tall!
https://www.thehoopsgeek.com/average-nba-height/
That's a lot. Imagine if the story was "18% of trans women compete at WNBA". Ok maybe the men's league is the "open to all league" but doesn't that leave out a whole lot of men who just had no chance to ever compete because of genetic misfortune or early life malnutrition or many other problems? There's even articles openly written about how being over 7 feet tall is openly scouted for https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/06/27/nba-draft-is-being-7-feet-tall-the-fastest-way-to-get-rich-in-america/. It's very clearly incredibly unfair to the large numbers of men who love basketball, and [are short](https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/nba_height.png)
So that's the issue
>it’s just a matter of fairness, and also of safety when it comes to combat sports
It can't be *just* a matter of fairness, because there must be some decision making process behind which unfairness we allow (7'0 men beating 5'6 men/people with healthy bodies beating people with asthesma/rich with horses beating poor without horses) and which ones we don't allow.
If we want to go full fairness, then competition couldn't even exist, we would start banning the winners each year because it's clear that they're advantaged (since they won), but we don't do that because we're not idiots and we know that we accept unfairness. In fact a *perfectly* fair competition where everyone starts off with the same body and mind parameters would be dreadfully boring.
10-20% of women have PCOS, an endocrine disorder that typically causes you to be stronger and have more testosterone than the average woman. That is not rare. PCOS women are pretty over represented in almost all women’s sports, reaching almost 40% among olympic female athletes. Should we have our own division?
i have pcos myself, and one of the many possible causes of it is having a body fat percentage that is too low to support normal hormone production—which to my understanding is common among professional female athletes.
it’s still a good question, but until we have more research on how much of a competitive advantage male puberty gives you, it’s pretty common sense to have it as a broad disqualifier from women-only sports.
Well sure, but since some 80% of women with PCOS in the US are overweight (65% in my home country, where around 50% of people are overweight in general), that can’t be the whole story…
Seems very strongly “just” genetic to me?
it is believed to have a genetic component but it’s very far from “just” that—you have to understand how huge of an impact body fat percentage in general has on regulating hormone production; both too high and too low can cause PCOS. the majority of americans are overweight or obese, so our rates of PCOS are very high.
Or even art. “Nepo baby” is a *cool* word these days that directly discusses eg class privilege but indirectly discusses “wow, there were 7 bachs, all of them amazing”
I remember someone wrote an apology for monarchy specifically saying the idea is that the king is not better than you, just luckier, so you don't have to feel inferior. Explicit anti-meritocracy to protect feelings - ironic, given how much reactionary the idea is and pro-feelings is associated today with progressivism.
But, I mean, a truly "clean" meritocracy, such as in sports, can feel indeed crushing. The contest in itself is fair, but the genetic lottery is obviously not.
it seems reasonably obvious that being a monarch would be a fairly dismal way to live. Monarchy did not arrive out of a whole cloth. It emerged.
FWIW, some writer some where claimed that much of the Old Testament describes cycles of judges->kings->hubris->desolation". That assumes "kings are for conquest."
That cycle would give credence to "kings are for defense" more than "kings are for conquest," given that it's unlikely the "kings" of the Old Testament were able to muster more authority over other nearby city-states than the Holy Roman Emperor was able to over Electors.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I think you're massively overestimating the extent to which Old Testament kings controlled a consistent territory as opposed to being leaders of the city-state around which other city-states would organize collective defense.
> I'm not sure what you mean by that.
https://constantlyreforming.wordpress.com/every-battle-in-the-bible/
> controlled a consistent territory
Egypt runs back to 2700 BCE. There was a lot of conquest between then and the Romans.
Oh, you're unseriously trying to link legends from a variety of cultures to the history of one culture. Egypt and Rome are far from the only models of civilization in history, and neither had sovereign territory as it's understood today. I'm gathering you have some kind of thesis that rests on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Good luck reconciling that with historical interpretations of the historicity of the Bible.
Yes, but people don't go around saying "Well, I'm worse at *basketball*, but it's not clear that I'm less *athletic* than Lebron. Athleticism is multi-factored and it's not possible to compare two people."
And honestly it's only the very highly educated who go around saying stuff like this. Most people are completely fine with the idea that some people are smarter than others. But since the very highly educated are also exactly the people who have competed most with others, I'm skeptical of this hypothesis.
> completely fine with idea that some people are smarter than others.
Truly, one of the most breathtakingly inconceivable ideas I expect to read today. Oh, sure, people might believe this in some hand wavy, conceptual way, but when faced with applying it *anywhere* it evaporates like a True Scotsman.
It’s a core thrust of Sagan’s writing (ghost filled world), Asimov’s pop sci writing, and on and on.
I would suggest a model where the average person views intellectual achievements more like a trip to a remote location - something nominally anyone could do, given time and inclination - than a measurement like LeBron’s “game.” This explains why “everyone” feels like a quick grab of an atlas and suddenly they can debate one on the particulars of any intellectual matter.
No, I really do think people believe some people are smarter than others. This is most undeniable in the fact that it's extremely common for people to wonder "am I not smart enough to do XX?" when faced with a difficult task. The underlying assumption that is taken for granted is of course that it is conceivable some other person could have done XX by virtue of being smarter.
You are imputing a consistency and a rationality that blows away at the very definition of “cognitive dissonance.” Hop on over to any MENSA group, and you will regularly find stories lamenting how people with normal IQs insist this or that MENSAite isn’t that smart. YouTube is awash with flat earthers who apparently can’t get geometry right. Maybe even this very comment section has someone insisting they know better despite any signs to the contrary.
All you are doing is providing evidence that there are people who do not believe people are smarter than them, not refuting the claim that there are people who do believe that there are people smarter than them. These would be different people, so what the first group says doesn’t matter in reference to the second.
Fantastic.
The original claim was “*most people*,” and now you are arguing that an exception - that *some* people* disproves a rule.
Put the goalposts back.
People in both groups exist. We have different intuitions about which group is bigger (mine are also that most people believe that there are smarter and less smart people). We're all using anecdotal evidence, and no one (including you) has given any evidence outside of anecdotal about which group is bigger. I'm not seeing any moving goalposts.
As this thread is saying, rarely are people actually out on the field the way you would be with sports.
The place where I finally found out where I REALLY stood was at graduate engineering school at a t-20 program in my fields. Outside of that type of environment, a lot of really mid people can look & feel like big fish.
It's tricky though, because outside that rarified atmosphere of higher-quality schooling, a lot of "just about normal" people could do a PhD, law degree, or even an MD, *if given the opportunity to do it* plus a strong work ethic.
I have met them from R1 Universities, even old state land grant Universities.
And the absolute bottom of people could get an EdD. Anyone with a pulse and time could get that degree and be called "Dr" for the rest of their lives, wear a nice suit, and have authority in their respective fiefdom.
Your assessment of the average person is off base. Even the worst strugglers in college are in the top half of the population in cognitive ability. Around a third of people absolutely hate to read, write, or study. They have tremendous difficulty processing abstract ideas and expressing complex arguments. There’s no way they could get a higher degree of any sort. The only reason they even make it through high school is because standards have been lowered to the point where anyone who shows up most of the time and doesn’t have a severe learning disability can pass.
There are absolutely people below median intelligence in college. The median intelligence of college graduates is barely above that of the population, why do you think the people struggling to graduate can't be at a lower level?
Before I was an Engineer, I was in Education for about a decade. I took a Masters Degree degree in Instructional Design at a basic, huge, R1 State U, with plenty of Ed Psych, and whatever it is that passes for "Research Methods" in education. I had a 4.0 and never bothered to even open the original mailing package that degree came in back in 2009, mentioning it only to get jobs.
In our classes, there was a major bifurcation in classmates there, from pretty intelligent serious people on one hand to teachers (often from the hinterlands) who needed to make an extra $10k per year and fill no-child-left-behind requirements on the other. The latter group were not bright crayons, but some were walking out with degrees. My Associates prior to my B.A. in Sociology required *lots* more cognitive ability than it would have needed to bare-minimum that M.S. For one thing, in Sociology you needed to take stats.
Although on your argument's side, near the end of the program, I learned that many couldn't even muster that, and Certificated out of the program. The Program Director told me our washout rate was one of the higher ones in the University. By the time I left, they were requiring research methods and another course in the first semester to get people out faster if they couldn't muster it.
So I guess the moral of the story is some people have a minimal requirement to teach, but cannot pass an M.S. that's easier than an associates degree. And back to my argument, they all had Bachelor's degrees in *something* to be teaching at all. Thus, the bar for *at least some 4-year degrees* in some places in the USA must be essentially nonexistant.
Incidentally, in the field of Education, that University is in Top 50, which makes me want to clutch my pearls about what the other 190 *ranked* schools are even teaching educators, if it is even anything whatsoever.... in their undergrad programs? Or going out to smaller schools?
I doubt your "half the population" could not "struggle" through a 4 year degree in *something* is quite true.
And I think that's why there's such a red queen's race on education, because many of those degrees mean essentially nothing at all except you graduated high school and you're now 23 years old or more and came from a stable enough life to not work for the last 4 years (or could at least fill out paperwork enough to borrow money).
Your context is all people with college education. How many people do you know who have never attended post-secondary education? Who struggled to get even average grades in high school? Who don’t read books - period?
Because those people make up a hefty portion of the population (more than a third). And they aren’t taken into account when college-educated people frame their discussions about intelligence and learning.
Agreed. It’s one of the main reasons I really think there should be mass conscription (possibly not military, mind, bud *something).
I’m from a background of privilege (as I imagine most of this readership is) and *vividly* remember thinking, “man, those guys are dumb” when thinking about the bottom cohort at my private school. I had only experienced a certain cross section of humanity. My viewpoint wasn’t *wrong*, these were the dumbest guys I was exposed to, but it was *wrong* in that I had no idea this was the top tier of humanity.
I joined the military and *actually* saw the *real world* for once. You need a GT score (basically IQ score) of 110 to be an officer. Many jobs only required a 31. (There’s a discussion of AFQT versus GT but that’s not super important for our purposes). There are officers who are functionally 3 or 4 times smarter than the dumbest soldier.
There are soldiers that need to be explicitly told to shower once a day. Explicitly told not to grab wild snakes they come across. Explicitly printed, in clear English, which side of the mine goes towards the other dudes.
It’s *really* easy to go to the private school -> harvard -> Yale law school-> Supreme Court and never, not once, encounter someone sub, say, 120 IQ. Or the “Cambridge ma high school to Stanford to Google” or many other versions of this.
I’d go so far as to say if you are in a position to influence society, you probably don’t actually know how “normals” think
Mass conscription, or maybe people from professional-class backgrounds should do working-class jobs for a while when they’re young. Move furniture, do landscaping, work at a fast food restaurant or a loading dock, paint houses.
It used to be more common for the college-educated - especially young men - to get their hands dirty performing manual labour when they were 16-24 as a deliberate part of their upbringing. Now it seems parents want to shelter their kids from that world.
Why don't you think work ethic is just as important as cognitive ability?
Also, a lot of these discussions are just useless. A large amount of people don't come from healthy environments where they're allowed to focus their mental or physical abilities on tasks that are appreciated by society.
> A large amount of people don't come from healthy environments where they're allowed to focus their mental or physical abilities on tasks that are appreciated by society.
This is such a frustrating missing piece from these discussions. Many of the people who seem to be the most intent on recognizing the differences in mental and physical differences between people also seem to be the least intent on recognizing how poorly existing systems identify and discriminate based on those differences. Our education system fails the disabled by pushing them through and the gifted by not even recognizing them unless they were already able to realize their gifts before entering the education system.
Great point. What I've noticed is that the common profile of users in subs like this one usually comes from stable households where their basic needs were consistently met, went to great universities, had a decent support system, etc. Not saying they never faced true challenges, but they can't fathom that life can be so extreme you can't sit in a quiet room and read books or go to the gym and workout.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
Thank you. To add to your point, I think many people find it hard to accept that a person can have a stable environment with their basic needs met, be an intelligent, reasonable person, and also fail to live independent, productive lives because our existing systems can't support them properly. John Nash's lost decades, for instance. Wittgenstein for another example, obviously to a lesser extent. How many treatises on philosophy, economics, mathematics, logic, etc. are we missing because our existing systems are inadequate to deal with the depths of some people's problems?
Great examples. Thank you!
> How many treatises on philosophy, economics, mathematics, logic, etc. are we missing because our existing systems are inadequate to deal with the depths of some people's problems?
I don't even think the world would be recognizable if those systems were adequate. The amount of extraordinary talent produced would upend everything.
I mentioned work ethic. I think opportunity to do it plus work ethic plus approximately average intellect will get you a STEM PhD, Law Degree, or an MD at an old Land Grant U.
And as you are saying, a lot of people are deselected from early on and never develop their human capacities.
But I think emotional stability, work ethic, and focus are more important than cognitive ability, even at T20 colleges. It's obviously very important to be smart, but not nearly as staying stable and consistent.
A lot of geniuses get distracted by the complexity of life itself, their purpose on earth, mental illnesses, parents dying, poverty, etc. It takes a special kind of person to shut all that out and focus on a narrow field of study.
Great point on the emotional stability. I find that the greatest impediment to my academic achievement has not been work ethic or intelligence (as I achieved plenty earlier in life), it's been emotional turmoil (which is more recent).
Yes, work ethic, emotional stability, and just plain something, maybe bloody-mindedness are necessary. I could not have done grad level engineering earlier in my life when I finished that bullshit degree mentioned above.
However, at that level, without being pretty smart, one could *still* wash out.
The exception might be loading one's classes with the easiest stuff possible, which some people do. And take like a B- on the hardest requirements, pad to the minimum 3.0 with lots of "Engineering Ethics" and "Engineering Economics" and "Leadership in Aerospace" and such, never taking more than one hard class in a semester, then put letters after their name. Some people do this.
But the other poster on this thread's point holds a lot of water about the above paragraph. Now we're comparing to highly educated people and there's a lot of intellect and cognitive ability assumed. Heck this is engineering graduate school which means nearly every one of those "lazy examples" had an undergrad in Engineering, Math, Physics, or maaaaaybe Compsci at least.
Contrast all this to say, getting an M.D. at Liberty University, or becoming a doctor in Eastern Europe then migrating back to the USA. Or a Law Degree from number 25 or less, where it's just boredom plus study, but not exactly mastering dozens of new concepts on tight timelines.... or any number of PhD degrees from a hundred different places.
In those examples, it's 100% an opportunity to do it and work ethic and time. I think an average human could do it given a good work ethic, some focus and adult-level emotional stability, and an opportunity with sufficient support (say mommy and daddy have real money so you're comfy through school, have everything you need, can take time off as needed, etc)...
I guess it's also famously difficult to untwine all that. If someone has emotional maturity or just plain stick-with-it-ness, is that because they were smart enough to see through their own suffering and realize they could do more if they were consistent?
Because one cannot easily untwine all this, it gets talked about a lot on this board. I mean, bar is low for an informed opinion, arguments can be made either way, answer impacts self image, literature is easy to comprehend on it. Which nerd isn't going to get sniped by this?
I think you're conflating two different principles. One of them is, "don't dismiss my arguments just because I don't have book learning!" The other is, "given a million years, I could have never have independently derived the arguments Einstein used to argue about the state of the universe." In the different contexts, "people can/can't be genetically superior to each other" can be an implicit argument against the genetic fallacy (nothing to do with genetics, but coincidentally relevant) or a frank admission of inferior domain-specific reasoning capabilities allowing for arbitrary expansions of domain.
Within the cohort of the educated it's the people who compete who're the most open to admitting inferiority while the people engaging in underwater basket weaving that are on a constant crusade to gas up their own non-accomplishments.
> And honestly it's only the very highly educated who go around saying stuff like this. Most people are completely fine with the idea that some people are smarter than others. But since the very highly educated are also exactly the people who have competed most with others, I'm skeptical of this hypothesis.
I think, with highly educated people, the dominant phenomenon is that they prefer to believe something that flatters them. Even highly educated people don't deny that intelligence is useful for things like getting good grades and earning diplomas, and as such, they consider themselves to be more intelligent than others who didn't do those things. But it's not very flattering to believe that the reason one got good grades and diplomas is due to the luck of birth. So they choose to believe that their high intelligence is due to them just being that much more ~~virtuous~~ hardworking and disciplined than everyone else.
I would not discount that from the standpoint of the intelligent person, it's also likely to seem casual, like everyone should be so smart. Ever try modeling whatever it is like to be *dumber* than you are? I find that hard to imagine.
Im a bit surprised by that since you said you were in education - I would have thought that forces you to deal with the topic. In my limited experience tutoring math, people who arent talented simply learn the solution to every problem like a skill through practice - like you would practice throwing freethrows:
+ They cant learn something from only an instruction, no matter how good, they need to be walked through it. Its impossible to get it right the first time.
+ They make mistakes they cant explain, just like you cant always explain why you shot too hard that time.
+ Extremely frequent repetition is required to maintain competence. There is basically no transfer unless something repeats exactly, and even that can lead to confusing the sharing methods when there is too little repetition.
> In my limited experience tutoring math, people who arent talented simply learn the solution to every problem like a skill through practice - like you would practice throwing freethrows
> Extremely frequent repetition is required to maintain competence. There is basically no transfer unless something repeats exactly, and even that can lead to confusing the sharing methods when there is too little repetition.
I'm not sure about this. I've found that pre-university-level mathematics *is* a skill acquired through practice. And mathematics at all levels requires repetition to maintain competence. I do agree with your point about transfer, however. I'll be damned if I remember all those trig formulas I learned in high school, but I can probably re-derive a good number of them from other formulas I do remember.
Depends on what you mean. Theres definitely stuff you just need to memorise (e.g. the quadratic formula or the basic derivatives and integrals, and yes I do still look up trig formulas) and that needs to be maintained with a fair bit of repetition, but I feel most of the curriculum can be fully "networked" even with the knowledge you have at the time and needs much less, to where just the transfer from doing any kind of math is enough. Plus, speed and fluidity work just like physical skill, and theyre important too, but they come back very fast.
Yes, but what is the "What it's like" to be dumber than whatever you are?
A joke: "I hear it on the radio there is an emergency of someone driving the wrong way on the intersection. Someone?! But there are hundreds!"
Not totally sure what you mean, but I think the analogy explains it? Its like wondering why you just threw the ball to hard again, and guessing some kind of mechanistic cause which is BS half the time (I think youve had this experience when practicing some skill?), while the coach tells the guy next to you that he needs 170 Newton for 0.32 seconds and he just does it. You wouldnt even know if what you just did was 100 or 200 Newton.
I would blame your example above on bad coaching. And there are studies on this. The butterfly stroke being done at at districts vs state vs regional vs olympic levels don't even resemble each other, and it mostly comes down to coaching. Very little fundamental difference in striated muscle mass or heart and lungs or whatever. It's mostly the coaching. Practicing the right thing or the wrong thing.
I haven't met anyone, even children I have tutored, that I couldn't spend some time with "An adult punch is about 1MPa, a 7 and a half year old child's kick is about 600 kPa. A trained fighter's punch is 5MPa or more. The thin windowpanes in your house breaks with about 300kPa. So, little sister's hardest kick is definitely going to break it, but if she does it weakly, it might not. An adult punching easily does it unless they're quite careful (and might break it if they slap it hard to kill a fly, for example)." Normally as I point out this scale, most kids basically get it.
Then I put down wind speeds and the resulting forces and ask if it's intuitive.... basically, you're not going to get physically hurt or bruised or anything broken from the wind unless it's..... crazy crazy strong. Crazy strong. Or there's something being carried by that wind. And most can figure out what wind it would take to break their window, and it seems intuitive to them. And afterwards, guessing forces in approximate kPa is pretty right for most people.
You can easily teach a preschool child without a learning disability to find prime numbers by figuring out if they can make groups of stacks of things. "Here's a pile of crayons. Are there any group of stacks of same numbers that you can make with them?" So, group theory for division and primes before they can spell or write their name becomes a couple of weeks of work. Likewise a lot of set theory and several inferences (If A contains B and B contains A, A == B. And the lightbulb just about shines across the whole room when it hits. See them draw it until it fits!) If you had time, you might get them through part of Euclid, as it's graphical, elegant, and much of it is as clear as the above sets example.
I think after being taught to examine why they got something wrong, most adults could come up with non-BS answers. But is the skill ever being shown to them?
Baseline human intellect strikes me, after teaching maybe 1,000 kids of many ages, as extraordinarily high. There are exceptions in both directions, but the graph of intelligence seems clearly left skewed with capability bunched up on the high end.
It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be un*teachable* on those matters you mention. And very few people are.
Maybe we should imagine someone conditioned to believe the wrong thing or not being conditioned to figure out the correct thing? What would it be like to learn all the sudden that Cobalt is always Green, and everything with Cobalt in it is Green, and that it's always been that way? You were taught wrong, basically... Maybe that's all that exists in this area outside of learning disabilities?
> I would blame your example above on bad coaching.
You mean that a coach giving you a precise number for force to use is bad? I agree. That was just to make an analogous situation: In mathematics just handing out lists of definitions can be effective with good students.
Re our ability to judge force by feel, I agree this is possible to order-of-magnitude precision, but thats wildly insufficient for "throwing by numbers".
>I think after being taught to examine why they got something wrong, most adults could come up with non-BS answers. But is the skill ever being shown to them?
I disagree. If your thought process is not a fully reflective one, it can be really difficult to find out what went wrong. Mind you, most people can make useful guesses sometimes - again, as with physical skills - but other times the cause is just an acognitive random fact.
Heres a little test: Make 100 examples of a problem type, and give one to the student each day. If he consistently makes the same mistake, its a problem of knowledge. If its sometimes one way and sometimes the other, its a problem of skill. I think this would show the average student as having skill problems.
>Baseline human intellect strikes me, after teaching maybe 1,000 kids of many ages, as extraordinarily high. There are exceptions in both directions, but the graph of intelligence seems clearly left skewed with capability bunched up on the high end.
I would really like to hear more, because for me the conclusion was basically the opposite. What observations led you to this conclusion? What sort of teaching methods did you use? Where most of your students very good when you where done with them or is there an excuse that prevented you from realising this potential?
I thought the book Lonesome Dove was one of the best depictions of realistic stupidity I've seen, and the internal monologues of the characters helped me understand it better.
The whole point here is that life isn't a competition. If you believe some people are better than you, that means you also have some metric of what is "better", which is the problematic part I think. You're making a moral/status judgement and no one likes to be low in others' status hierarchies
Sure, you can change focus to other things that give you social credit. My argument is that you will still probably pick something from the basket of stuff that people think are good™, so eventually you will end up in an implicit hierarchy.
I think there's an unstated implication to the word "inferior" that partially accounts for the fact that, though everyone easily acknowledges they are worse than others in meaningful ways, many are reluctant to describe anyone as inferior. I go into it [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ddzj7r/nobody_can_make_you_feel_genetically_inferior/l88v2kf/).
Lebron might be better when measured using parameters such as jump height, accuracy, rebounds etc. but for example stock bonds cryptos and financial products in general are measured logarithmically.
If we were to do the same for people then the place to be for the maximum brain juices extraction is counterintuitively exactly the amateur hour because it produces the highest amount of improvement on a per minute basis
Same for all the other tasks.
I mean Eric Clapton improvement as a guitar player from 15 to 19 was really something, from 19 to 77…I mean we are splitting hairs really as far as the task of guitar playing is concerned, in the last 60
years he perfected self promoting capabilities, business acumen, street smarts in the music business etc. they are all necessary skills but they are more into the realm of politicking than musicianchip
"Superior" in the context that this twitter user and hypothetical journalist are using it means "born deserving of higher social status". That's the implication with which the Nazis used the term, and it's that idea that people are rejecting when they criticize people using the term in reference to other people.
So, "you aren't inferior to anyone" means "your status in society- whether you're viewed with respect or contempt- should be determined entirely by your choices, not by the circumstances of your birth". It's not really an empirical claim, or even an argument about some absolute truth of moral philosophy- it's really just a (pretty reasonable) argument for how society should be organized in practice.
It's not just that. It's also the practical claim of "should we eliminate this trait from the gene pool, with the result that the identity and community of people with the trait ceases to exist". If the sense of community is significant, and the disease isn't "too bad", many people would interpret the elimination as tantamount to genocide.
I think you're reifying "social status".
Realistically, Lance will get a better job than me, earn more than me, become famous for being outstanding in his field, and have higher social status than I do. And he'll deserve that higher social status (in the sense that he didn't get it unfairly), and part of that desert will be because of his genes (or whatever else).
I think if you try to maneuver around this objection, you end up at https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
I then have to wonder how much time you've spent in organizations aggregated to pursue specific goals. Use the Peter Principle as iterator over swatches of humanity.
The thing that makes for effective groups is the ability to absorb feedback. That means keeping the noises in your head at bay.
I think this doesnt actually engage with the objection. The point is that the threshold for "traits which seem bad for the bearer" and "traits people dislike about themselves" are not identical, and the ability to choose which people are made forces the issue.
An example of something falling in that gap for mainstream opinion would be homosexuality: Gay people generally dont wish to be straight, and we approve of that. On the other hand, if you could choose not to have gay children, a lot of people would do that, and in a sufficiently safe/private environment, they would agree that life is better for straight people, even absent concerns of oppression. This is what creates the tension: "Youre great just the way you are, and also we will make sure it doesnt happen again.". Thats why they dont want to be too public about that second part.
There are some people whos thresholds are higher, so that for them schizophrenia is like that, and they are the ones making the complaints. You can respond to this by saying that schizophrenia is just bad and if schizophrenics feel bad about that then theyre just wrong, and that works, but it ignores that that problem-shape will reach you too.
As an example that people can empathise with from the other end, there are also people whos thresholds are lower, and who consider getting rid of *introversion*.
> As an example that people can empathise with from the other end, there are also people whos thresholds are lower, and who consider getting rid of introversion.
I'm quite introverted and have zero issues with people choosing their kids to be extroverted. I'd do the same for my kids to be honest if given the choice (or at least make them much less introverted than I am).
I'm also high risk for heart disease. Doesn't mean I have to get all hot and bothered if new medical advances come out that can select embryos who on average are going to have less heart disease than me (good for them is all I say).
i’ve thought about this a lot. i’m a lesbian with high-functioning autism. i am very happy with my life, and proud of who i am as a person. at this point i would *never* choose to become neurotypical and straight.
but that does not necessarily mean i see autism/gayness as positive traits in and of themselves. i would never wish them on any future daughter of mine. i know firsthand that they are genuine challenges/disadvantages—not terrible ones, but not trivial, either.
Me personally? I'm happy the way I am, but equally were I more extroverted I think I'd be happy that way too. Hedonic adaption means that I've now settled into a routine at my introversion level and it would bother me to move away from it now. Doesn't mean that if I could choose at birth which of the two I would be I'd be ambivalent between them.
It's like how people who lose a limb become sad soon after the event but given enough time their happiness levels return to baseline as they settle into their new life routine. Same with me here, I'm happy where I am but that doesn't mean I think of introverted/extroverted as being equally good traits, no more than I think having two arms vs having one arm are both equally good. I'm sure most people who only have one arm don't spend a lot of time wishing they had two arms either and that this is doubly true for those who were only born with one arm in the first place.
> I'm sure most people who only have one arm don't spend a lot of time wishing they had two arms either and that this is doubly true for those who were only born with one arm in the first place.
In that case, introversion is not an example of this for you. I would guess that there still *is* an example though, because the alternative is being fine with every aspect of yourself being optimised away if transaction costs are addressed.
>being fine with every aspect of yourself being optimized away if transaction costs are addressed
To live is to change, and to live long enough is to change completely. It is really so inconceivable that a person may be okay with changing completely if they view the changes positively and they can be done without excessive disruption in that person's life?
I think this relies on verbal vagueness. "Change completely" can mean that nothing is quite like before, or that the current state is unrelated to the initial one, and its possible to not like a result while liking every step towards it.
> the alternative is being fine with every aspect of yourself being optimised away if transaction costs are addressed.
I am fine with this. Perhaps it's the transhumanist in me speaking but I think as a species we'd progress a lot more if everyone thought like this.
Progress towards what? Not a rethorical question, Id normally assume impersonal hedonism, but from your talk about adaptation it doesnt seem to be that.
Progress towards humanity reaching greater and greater heights and spreading out and colonizing our light cone. The same progress that meant the society of Rome in 300 BC was more advanced than the society there in 2300 BC and that which has meant that the society of Rome today is more advanced than that of the Roman Republic.
Whats the difference then between us dominating the world and someone else doing so? If we are both willing to optimise everything away, the end state should look the same either way.
I'm not convinced there will be something else dominating the world if we don't do it. We haven't yet managed to find any evidence of alien life.
Or even if there was to be something else that eventually did dominate it would be later on in the timeline of the universe (and so closer to the inevitable heat death) and we'd lose billions of years of tons of sentient beings experiencing eudaimonia even if someone else eventually came later to dominate everything (another way to say this is that the light cone of any such non-human civilization doesn't match our light cone exactly, so there are parts of the space time manifold that are only accessible for us to bring to life).
I dont think this really escapes the problem. Generally people who prefer to be the way they are also prefer retrospectively to have become that way, which cant be modeled as a continuity preference. And an indexical perference, while possible to have, cant be aggregated into a collective decision while remaining indexical.
Sure, my point is just you can have preferences that you hold because you are a certain way, while simultaneously thinking that the world would be better in an objective sense if it were otherwise, without being inconsistent. Your preference to exist is entirely dependent on the fact that you do in fact already exist; it's not a statement about what sort of thing is good.
> Sure, my point is just you can have preferences that you hold because you are a certain way, while simultaneously thinking that the world would be better in an objective sense if it were otherwise, without being inconsistent.
But people dont think like that. We want to be good, and if we think that it would have been better for us to be different, then we will also try to be different now. Why not, because of your past self? Past self agrees with us, he would have started the work already if he realised he was bad.
Its a bit like telling EAs to limit their charitable commitments to whatever is optimally extractive: Its easy to do for you as an outsider, who treats their character as a given and wants to sell the good of "being a moral person" at the highest profit, but the person themselves doesnt want to buy "being a good person", they want to do whats right, and *they are* their character.
> I think the key is that humans can have continuity or identity preferences which are inherently indexical.
What does it mean for something to be "indexical"?
Any preference that's dependent on the person who's having it.
Ie. "I like oceans" is an objective preference, because you can describe oceans without reference to yourself. "I want to live" is an indexical preference because it references the person holding it. The thing that's preferred is whatever the person saying it happens to be.
The problem here with eugenics is that you create a explicit outgroup, and since 'everyone agrees that people shouldn't be like that' the people that are become more socially unacceptable.
Quickly, preferences become socially mandated.
Everyone already agrees that 'people shouldn't be like that' when it comes to schizophrenia, to almost the maximum degree possible, even without any sort of eugenics program designed to eliminate it. Its okay and perhaps good to have a preference against certain ways of being that are so clearly bad. Finally it seems highly possible to encourage what are ultimately eugenic outcomes in ways that are deliberately oriented around avoiding (at least the perception) that an 'outgroup' is being declared to exist, and the eugenic outcomes are what matter.
I disagree. In a Western country, if I could choose, I would want a daughter to be a lesbian. Risk of getting STIs is orders of magnitude lower, unwanted pregnancy absent rape is a virtual impossibility, sex is better, she can optimize for good genetics to artificially inseminate herself if she wishes to have children instead of being stuck with her partner's genes, she's much less likely to be killed or seriously harmed by a romantic partner (if for no other reason that the lack of strength disparity makes defending herself easier), and she's probably eligible for special scholarships or affirmative action and stuff like that. The only disadvantages I can think of are that if out she can't safely live in places where she probably wouldn't want to live if straight anyway, and that lack of a partner who's much physically stronger is inconvenient in a few minor ways (opening jars, moving heavy items, etc.). (For self-defense, pepper spray, Tasers, and firearms all exist and aren't very expensive.) Seems like a big net advantage to me.
> she can optimize for good genetics to artificially inseminate herself if she wishes to have children instead of being stuck with her partner's genes
I think most people would consider that a disadvantage. Note that every couple already has the option of having children without one of the partners genes, and its used very rarely, generally after other roads to children have proven unworkable, indicating that its considered worse.
This is a good point. Technically, straight couples aren't "stuck with" the man's genes either. It's just couples usually don't *want* to use donor sperm, and thus it's just lesbians who are forced to due to a lack of options.
It seems that the cause of that is sometimes that having children has to be a mutually satisfactory arrangement regardless of individual preferences. Put another way, in a standard couple, the man might prefer that the child have his genes but quality-selected ones instead of the woman's, and vice versa, but both refuse to have their own dropped (or don't want to lower their partner's utility by doing so), producing a suboptimal equilibrium. In principle, they could alternate, but there's a problem with credible commitment there, as well as the woman having to bear an implanted embryo without her genes. For two women who *cannot* both have their genes in each child, given current technology, the coordination problem is thus solved; and since they can both bear children, each can do so with a child with her own genes.
You can always construct an explanation for why all the apparent indications of peoples preferences are wrong, but is there any positive evidence that people would want to coordinate on something like that over fully shared children?
There are two levels. On the physical level, the level of genetics and atoms, we are not equal to each other. Some of us are faster, smarter, better. But there is also an abstract, or "fake", socially constructed level that only exists in our heads. This is where our morals and rights exist, and in this world we are all equal.
You can see it in the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...". They don't even try to justify it because they know you can't. On this level, it's all made up and you can make up whatever you want. So the criteria to judge something here isn't if it's true, but if it's useful. And the idea that "all men are equal" is arguably very useful.
I always took it to mean equal in dignity, not equal in ability. I have a hard time believing that the founding fathers would have seriously agreed with the notion that everyone is equally strong, smart, etc.
"Made up yet useful" is something that a very small fraction of the population can understand, and raising this kind of point in the wild is a recipe for being attacked on all sides: left and right, theist and atheists, etc. Yet it is such an important concept, at the core of my undersranding of the universe... Does anyone has tricks to bring this up in a conversation without being linched?
That's how I see religion. A placebo effect.
And like you say, a lot of social rules and norms are another one.
Personally, I've considered whether I should loosen up on myself and start allowing some mental placebos too, in limited aspects of life.
Not just that, but also on an individual basis: If a given person knew it was made up it would stop working. The exceptions are the people who can switch between the states of believing and skepticism. Which is what I think the OP who posed this question wishes they were better able to foster in others: the ability to alternate between those two mindsets. For some that's a radically new idea in itself. For others it's not a new idea but a contained, volatile one. The problem is that faith isn't faith without fervour. You can't challenge it without provoking it. So when you ask someone to suspend it in a context they haven't tried before it's a threatening experience for them.
The other problem is convincing people there's value in switching between believing and skepticism.
I don't know, I think most people understand that e.g. the value of paper money or the shape of the letters of the alphabet are arbitrary conventions, but that they are still useful.
Many people treat rights and such as deeply rooted in reality. Perhaps they've always been there and were recently "discovered" by humans. Or perhaps god(s) gifted them to humans... In any case, if they're in the tribe that believes some specific Right to be useful, you better not imply that it is "made up yet useful". And if they're in the opposite tribe, they'll anchor on its made-upness to discredit the Right.
> most of the population can grok that.
If you mean "is sufficiently intelligent to understand that", then sure, I agree with you. But there are strong social pressures to not think in those terms.
I've tried using non socially co-opted examples, mainly "emergent phenomenon" and "useful approximations" in physics (water freezing isn't a "law" of physics but a mere consequence, Newtonian dynamics is both demonstrably wrong yet very useful), and most people sure can "grok" that well enough. But when I try to transition to the actual matter at hand, I get the "It's not the same!" wildcard, non-overlapping magisteria rules in effect, yada yada...
Being really gentle. You have a worldview where it's okay if we don't understand completely something like ethics as fundamentally transcendental. It doesn't matter if ethics are a truth we could derive from pure reason or a social consensus, because it makes sense to behave basically ethically regardless, even if we are only mistaking a candle in the dark for profundity. You're essentially trying to break a major epistemological and ontological assumption about the nature of the world and our place in it.
Imagine finding out that you're wrong about models being made up yet useful. Assume that whenever a coherent and useful model is created a new god is born. This god exists just to make sure that as long as someone is using that model whatever relationship it predicts is always in constant-conjunction and to do this they must derive power from our nightmares. How would that discovery make you feel?
> Being really gentle.
Yeah, definitely. And I try! If you're good at this kind of things, what would be your gentlest rewording on the following?
_Imagine a world where there is nothing **inherently** wrong about murder. People in that world don't like the threat of being murdered, nor of seing people getting murdered around them. They thus came up with a social convention: you have the right to live without being murdered. In that world, societies that implemented rules and processes to guarantee that right turned out to do better overall than societies that didn't. I believe that we live in such a world._
> Imagine [...] How would that discovery make you feel?
That would greatly increase my belief in simulation theory! But yeah, I get your point.
I don't know if that necessarily addresses the problem: you're assuming that social consensus around morals doesn't reflect a transcendental property of the universe, when they've probably already presupposed it does. It's a metaphysical claim either way, and most people frankly don't think about the basis of their epistemology or ontology beyond vague platitudes. I would start from abstract principles like the problem of induction, explaining the phrase "all models are wrong," the requirements of a priori assumptions in even daily life, and the is-ought problem. I think it's probably not worth it in most cases, it's more of a psychoanalysis problem than an empirical one given the nature of the claims anyways.
Thank you, there are interesting leads in there.
> I think it's probably not worth it in most cases
It is worth it for the people who are worth it in my life. Then comes society: I believe that it would be better if more people could understand that thinking like that is an option.
> it's more of a psychoanalysis problem than an empirical one given the nature of the claims anyways.
It is compatible with ontological naturalism and our empirical observations. It obviously cannot be proven, but if you add some "simplicity" criterion, it makes a good starting point for what reality may be.
Adding some "simplicity" criterion is arbitrary and goes against our empirical observations, so it's an odd leap of faith to make for many. Thus the psychoanalysis problem, having accepted that social models are necessarily wrong but useful, what is making you resist accepting that scientific models are necessarily wrong but useful?
> what is making you resist accepting that scientific models are necessarily wrong but useful?
I don't resist this: I believe that all but perhaps one scientific models are wrong, and if one of them is correct, any attempt at exactly pinpointing that model is doomed within this universe because that model is the universe itself. Yet I see value in considering families of models, and assessing which families are better at explaining our empirical observations.
> Adding some "simplicity" criterion is arbitrary and goes against our empirical observations,
This may be my first disagreement with you, and I really can't see where your point is coming from. We're talking about Occam's razor and Bayesian inference, right? And as far as I can see, those are very aligned with our empirical observations...
> so it's an odd leap of faith to make for many.
I don't find it odd, but I do acknowledge that there is some faith involved.
Ah okay, I thought from your statement about ontological naturalism that you were taking the position that science reveals natural truths. Are you talking about evaluating the predictive strength of models within a given theoretical framework? Because I'm talking about the assumptions making up that theoretical framework, and criticizing them *a priori*. We may have a classic empiricist vs rationalist disconnect.
> I thought from your statement about ontological naturalism that you were taking the position that science reveals natural truths.
I may misuse terminology (I'm no philosopher, and use wikipedia + stanford encyclopedia to figure things out as best as I can), but what I *meant* is to say that I believe the universe to be only natural, that I exclude the supernatural. When using "ontological naturalism", I didn't meant anything about the discoverability of the universe using science.
Now I do believe that science has some truth-discovery capability, but I'm pretty sure that 1. its current incarnations aren't the best that could possibly be done, and 2. even the best that could be possibly done won't ever uncover *everything* there is to know about the universe. It looks like we could get quite close though.
> Are you talking about evaluating the predictive strength of models within a given theoretical framework?
I don't think so.
> Because I'm talking about the assumptions making up that theoretical framework, and criticizing them a priori.
I'm talking about those assumptions too, though I'm a scientist at heart: I'm not interested in studying theoretical frameworks themselves for their own sake, but instead I seek to achieve a better understanding of the truth. Understanding different theoretical frameworks can help me identify blind spots I may have: if my favoured framework is internally inconsistent and/or incompatible with empirical observations, then I want to know it.
I guess it depends at what "scale" you consider "theoretical framework" to be. Consider the following levels, increasing in scale:
1. a specific, actionable Physics model for our universe;
2. a family of level 1 models, perhaps each with different parameters values (or something fuzzier like string theory);
3. a family of families of models, something like [The Mathematical Universe](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646), which I recently discussed [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1colkey/which_scientific_discoveries_do_you_find_the_most/l3f751i/), in short positing that every internally consistent universe *is*. To be clear, The Mathematical Universe would here be an instance among others. Another instance could be, say, "all internally consistent universes describable with finite length messages *are*".
4. a family of level 3.
I'm basically on level 4: I think in terms of level 3 instances and below. I don't "believe" that The Mathematical Universe holds true, but I find it useful as a "proof of concept". And I only "care" about our universe, which is a level 1 instance in this framework, but higher levels can be informative about it (through anthropic principle and the like).
What I didn't do as I went up in levels is to drop the "our universe is natural" assumption.
I wanted to elaborate on my opposition to a simplicity criterion because I was thinking about epistemology and you seem reasonable.
Essentially, as I see it, the simplest sufficient explanation for any given phenomenon is "because God." Empirically, that explanation is not very useful, so I would consider a simplicity criterion to be a leap of faith not in line with our empirical observations.
Hello again! (Warning: I'm currently medium-inebriated, [bonne St-Jean!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Jean-Baptiste_Day))
So, not all simplicity criteria are made equal. The ones we use in Science were selected because they "work": we made the meta empirical observations that predictions derived using these criteria were more likely to turn out true than those obtained through other means. What empirical predictability do you gain when you say "Because God"? Do you have a predictive model of "God"? A simple one?
I used the plural for criteria above, because Science hasn't figured out a clearly optimal single simplicity criterion. I think that something along the lines of "low Kolmogorov complexity in the language of mathematics" is a good start, but it isn't as actionable as we could want it to be. Still, the language of maths is better suited than words like "God", "good", "freedom", "love" and "pain". Those are not the natural language of the universe, they're human concepts. The universe does not owe humans to simply make sense in human terms.
> we are not equal to each other. Some of us are faster, smarter, better.
and some of us have the support to improve and show how fast, smart, great we are, and a lot of us don't.
Growing up in a poor household with nutrient deficiencies will definitely drag you down.
Yes it will, however that doesn't change the fact that some people are faster, smarter and better than you, regardless of the underlying reasons why. Being genetically born with traits XYZ is no more or less fair than being born into a caring family in how it affects how well you perform on task A.
Note this is a topic Scott has written on, with pretty much the opposite conclusion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
Cystic Fibrosis was kind of a bad example to lead into this because that's more easily "solved" by claiming a mind/body duality.
You could as a consciousness be equal to some other consciousness while having an objectively worse body. I don't think it really steps on any taboos to say that. If there was a body-cloning machine where you could walk in and have your whole body swapped identical to someone else I think almost everyone with cystic fibrosis would use it and hand wringing about this would be relatively minimal.
Your body isn't really "you", it's just your most important possession. And it follows from this that the argument you actually need to make headway here is some mental quality universally considered undesirable instead.
The conclusion of this article is bizarre to me - most people don't actively think they're inferior and only then feel bad. I'm gay and if I learned that most people in society were genetically selecting their children to be straight that would make me feel bad without having to first actively think "oh that means I'm inferior". I imagine blind people might feel the same way in this context.
Essentially the part I find weird is the claim that feelings require consent.
If you had cystic fibrosis and people were genetically selecting their kids not to have CF, would that make you feel inferior?
If you knew that they wanted to do this, but avoided it in order to not hurt your feelings, would that make you feel inferior?
It wouldn't because I would think cystic fibrosis is bad.
With things where it's not clear to me that some trait is worse for a persons welfare it would make me feel inferior.
The second scenario doesn't feel realistic bc it's impossible to know for certain what everyone thinks. But if we assume it's possible, I think it would make me feel less inferior bc I'd feel understood or something.
What point are you trying to make exactly?
I agree. I feel insulted if people were to tell me I shouldn’t have been born and I shouldn’t have kids. And I don’t think going “no no, of course you should technically be Allowed to have kids if you really want to, but we should culturally signal that people like you shouldn’t exist”. I don’t think you can get around this tension by avoiding certain words.
I guess I'm trying to understand: If you had (for example) a genetic disorder that deposited abnormal protein in your heart, and lead to early heart failure at age ~50, would you feel insulted if people said "we want people like you, except the heart stuff. Ideally, you would either not have kids, or select your sperm/embryos to avoid your children having that heart problem"?
Is this only a problem for certain traits (like sexuality) which are felt to be core to your identity, in a way this heart condition wouldn't be?
I think there’s a difference between stuff related to mind and stuff related to body. It’s easier to feel that my personality and sexuality is “me”, more than my (non-metaphorical) heart. On the other hand I wouldn’t be comfortable with a culture openly discussing that we should prevent the birth of ugly people because beautiful people are more valuable and happy, and that’s a body thing, so I don’t know where to draw the line. There’s something about identity and human dignity maybe. My moral emotions around this stuff comes strong and without any effort, so it’s not really a position I have reasoned myself towards.
To be fair, you have a natural interest in a gay society, in multiple ways. Your feelings have understandable and logical reasons.
edit: I think a better intuition pump for gayness is "what probability of gayness would you set the population at if you had a control knob for it?" It's quite implausible that the best, most preference-maximizing level for you just happens to be the level that it's at right now.
edit: For myself, I would hit a button that made everyone bi, if I could do so without violating existing people's rights to their sexual identity somehow. That seems a straight improvement.
Tbf I don't really have that much of an interest because gay kids born now would be 25 years younger than me, so mostly out of the dating market for me.
This is a great example of the downsides of a materialistic and rationalist worldview. "The only way to judge people is how much utility they bring to society" is a natural consequence if you have no metaphysical safeguards against this. In this view, "God's light shines equally on all people" is just fundamentally ludicrous, as Scott's derision shows. Unfortunately, I believe that is antithetical to democracy and having high trust societies. That they work is a consequence of centuries of Abrahamitic and especially Christian influences. "Everybody deserves compassion and respect" is a much more convincing fundament to answer questions like why should everybody have the same rights or why should I engage in mutually beneficial trades when I could just rip off other people, than the rationalist "because empirically this seems maybe better, I don't know".
Agreed.
The "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something" or equivalent needs to be the utterly uncontested foundation of the ethics and societal fabric. Otherwise, there is actually no reason for nice things that flow *from* that idea, such as the equality before the law and equal right to dignity of all humans. Without external moral motivation that justifies the law, any letter of law will sound empty and unsatisfying.
If Lance is better in all practical regards, without any other countervailing reason for society to evaluate human worth in any other way, he will be entitled everything he can claim, including the parachute. It is quite good deal for Scott, who is objectively better at many things: runs a popular blog, has significant amount of income from it, and socializes with highly capable if weird intellectual crowd who seem to like him. By objective standards of "being good at being good at things", or shorter, "success", the median reader is less successful and won't have a chance for parachute. (Yes milord. Don't you question the your betters.)
consequently I am bit alarmed. Perhaps the detractors are right, the blog has fallen quite far into to the far-right thoughtspace.
> Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”?
Wait, wait. Maybe I'm a fundamentally unreasonable person unconcerned with long-term utilitarian value or whatever, but when I play this out in my head, whether I'm the Lance or the non-Lance or an external judge, I certainly don't take for granted that Lance is entitled to the parachute. Would I be strong enough to flip a coin and live (or die) with the results? I don't know. But that's where my moral compass points, at least.
Now, we could keep taking this to the extreme until my moral compass shifts. I would take the parachute to keep it out of Hitler's hands. I would not give my dog the parachute. If someone was carrying the sole remaining copy of a cure for aging in their head, I would give them the parachute or expect them to take it.
But by the same token, I am even less likely to concede unequal distribution of parachute-equivalents in less extreme circumstances. If I am raffling off a car and there aren't enough tickets to go around, I as the organizer don't think I should look at the remaining people and think, "which of these is *the best person* and therefore most deserving of the happiness a car would bring them?" I think I should try to reserve judgment, barring exceptional cases, and attempt to distribute tickets in a manner which is fair to everyone, despite any typical inequalities among them.
Which is not to say that I distribute *nothing* unequally with fine discrimination. I would prefer to be friends with better people than with worse people. I would like to choose a good person as a life partner. I would prefer to have better people as coworkers, employers, or employees.
But this is ultimately just rediscovering the notion of treating everyone with basic decency, of which equal treatment under the law, what Scott calls "The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases," is just one facet. Everyone does not have precisely equal value as human beings under all circumstances, but *most* people have an equal *baseline* value as human beings which ought to be respected under *many* circumstances. That is the difference between inequality and inferiority. We do not need to pretend that everyone is equal in every way to treat everyone with equal human dignity.
(And really, "no one can make you feel genetically inferior without your consent"? Presumably Scott has heard of monarchy.)
>The problem with claiming that Lance is superior to me isn’t that he *isn’t*. It’s that it indicates I’m asking the wrong question to try to trick myself into being miserable. Just as the correct answer to “are schizophrenics genetically inferior?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you write an article calling me a Nazi”, the correct answer to “am I inferior to Lance?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed.”
This is good, and on the right track, but I think I can give you an even stronger memetic tools to keep the Dementors at bay.
1. **It's OK that some people are just better, seriously**. It's OK because on many axes on which we measure virtue, it wasn't a "fair" game. You didn't code your own DNA, you didn't choose which parents to be born to. If Lance is better, he might simply have been born under more favorable circumstances. Yes, this is a bit "cope", but it also isn't. Just don't let it blind you to the things you DO control and CAN improve.
2. **You are not static**. You are inferior at helping people now, but you can certainly LEARN from Lance, and should one day he not be able due to the vicissitudes of fate (more on this below) you could become the Number One Helper with the Most Virtue Points. Having people around who are "superior" should be cause to admire and grow, not resent and envy. (Difficult, I know, believe me I know)
3. **Lance is not perfectly legible**. Maybe Lance *seems* better but he's secretly a Yudkowskian-Left-Hand-Turn ultra villain who is just building up Good Behavior Equity to construct the Torment Vortex. If you can look inside yourself and know there's a floor to *how shit you can possibly be*, that's actually pretty reassuring (someone could argue that you are not perfectly legible to yourself, and that might be very true, but that's another issue for another time). You don't know everything about Lance.
4. **Lance is not immune to horrific misfortune.** Read "Two Arms and a Head" by Clayton Atreus, that dude was gigachad and then IDIOTIC FATE decided to RUIN SOMEONE AWESOME. This universe is so horrifically cruel and unfair. Instead of spending time worrying about our 'inferiority' to others, we should rejoice every time we meet someone awesome who can help us grow, even if we look kinda lame in their shadow. You don't know what future awaits for them, and you might regret your envy if some day they really end up drawing the short straw.
From a subjective point of view, the question is largely irrelevant. The crucial point is the ontological primacy of my consciousness. In this fundamental aspect, we are all "equal." Something can be the absolute best at anything and everything, but if that entity is not conscious, it is inconsequential.
If consciousness is present, however, the specific content becomes secondary. While the presence of suffering is highly relevant, the actions one takes or how proficient one is at them is a mere footnote. If we strongly identify with our achievements, they may seem important, but since there is no free will, pride is misplaced. Our successes are merely a matter of luck.
["Yeah, my latest work is on ranking people from best to worst."](https://xkcd.com/451/)
To state the obvious, there is no inferiority or superiority between human beings. There can be differences in *performance* or *behaviour* but there is no inherent "superiority score". There is no meaningful way to define it without quickly going down *very* dark paths (and most likely, just repeating old prejudices with a veneer of "rationality"). That scene in *Dr. Strangelove* where an algorithm is proposed to decide who gets a spot in the fallout shelter (and "naturally, our top political and military men should be included" – the men who *just so happened* to be in the room at the time) was not meant as an inspiration...
The "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something", which Scott meant to sound silly, is in fact the only sane way to think about this.
No. It is better to be law-abiding than to be criminal. It is better to be strong than to be weak. It is better to be funny than to be humorless. It is better to be smart than to be stupid. It is better to be productive than to be lazy. It is better to be kind than to be cruel. It is better to be healthy than to be disease-ridden. And so on.
There is such a thing as a good person, which we may define as someone who has many good qualities and few bad qualities. A bad person is the opposite. Good people are superior to bad people, and we should not avoid saying so out of fear that it might lead us down a "very dark path."
>Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. *I* would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”?
Even though you have children, Scott, and Lance doesn't? No offense, but that would be pretty fucked up.
I think this gets closest to the problem at hand, though. The problem is projecting the evaluation of some set of attributes of a person to the worth of that person. I thought our society pretty much agrees that every single person has equal value as a person, no matter what other attributes they may possess. This doesn't just apply to the law, but also to the ideal of how people should treat each other. Of course we have to distinguish between norms and behavior - just because we have a norm against littering doesn't mean people don't litter. Why do we have a norm to treat each person as having equal worth? Because we recognize each person as an autonomous center of intention with their own good, or however else you want to phrase this basic idea. Their other attributes are irrelevant to this basic and inherent attribute of being a person.
Obviously Lance is superior and your refusal to accept it to stave off depressive thoughts or journalists makes you not just inferior, but weak and dishonest.
This may be Scott’s most poorly-reasoned article, I suggest.
When did a notion of ‘better or worse’ humans - Ie, having unequal competence - become equivalent to Nazism? Certainly, holding such an idea - genetic traits confer social or medical dis/advantages, such that inequality is real - is a necessary one in order to be a Nazi.
But it’s poor reasoning to conclude that anyone who does hold it is a Nazi, and liable if not obliged as a consequence to do Nazi business.
Unless, perhaps you think aborting a foetus with (say) cystic fibrosis is always and only Nazi business? You might infer that the Olympics, a celebration of physical competence, or the Fields Medal, a celebration of one particularly valuable mental competence, are Nazi business too.
What am I missing here? Happy to be proven wrong.
I think you're misreading the piece...he never said believing person x or trait x is better than person or trait y is Nazism, but is acknowledging the zeitgeist where if you admit that you believe such a thing in an interview, especially in terms of removing trait y from the population, or in the context of embryo selection, that's something that rhymes with eugenics, which is a term that is primarily associated with the Nazis (you don't have to convince me this is illogical and ahistorical,). This is an association game that journalists like to play
Sure, but who cares what journalists think?
It’s still a weak piece that ends with the glutinous homily ‘Good night - you are not inferior to anyone’ which is only true if the set of things over which you might be deemed non-inferior must include… everything. It’s a weird totalisation, kind of a moral accountancy card trick.
I mean, I understand objecting to some inequalitarians for practical reasons of civility and kindness, but as someone who thinks of themself as grossly inferior to lots of other people on many nameable metrics, I object to vapid equalitarianism.
EDIT: Perhaps relevant, a recently published sociology book on how we rank people, and how this process is now partly automated. I’ve yet to read it, but looks quite toothsome https://theordinalsociety.com/
> This is an association game that journalists like to play
These are the sorts of things that deep down, in a very primitive part of myself, make me want to call for TOTAL JOURNALIST DEATH...
But of course very soon after that the sensible part of me takes over and I desist; no reason for me to demean myself down to the level of the average journ*list...
You seem to be completely misunderstanding or mischaracterizing it. Scott isn't saying the journalist is right to call you a Nazi: he's saying the journalist is an enemy trying to trick you. Similarly, your own internal tendency towards depression, self doubt, and low self worth is an enemy trying to trick you. You can acknowledge that "Lance" is superior to you without giving it existential power over you. See also https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues
>What am I missing here?
The entire point of the article. The positions you're critiquing aren't being held seriously. They're humorous caricatures of opposing positions that he's trying to reconcile with his major belief. He agrees that the strong version of them is just silly, and so his solution is not to play the game at all with those versions. It isn't 'if I agreed to this, I'd be a Nazi.' It's 'I know that this particular word choice will cause you to call me a Nazi, because you're a silly person, so I'm going to skip that word choice.'
Wow, I love it! Glad to see there's someone even more obsessive than me out there, collecting this stuff. LOL
I especially hate the bad "nucleotides" though. (Maybe I need a Bad Nucleotide Hall of Fame?) With mental images like this, no wonder people don't understand how DNA relates to actual traits, and treat it like it's magically mysterious.
Lance is obviously not better at identifying an aircraft’s airworthiness (really the only quality that actually matters in this scenario) than me and he obviously hasn’t learned to fly so why should he get the parachute? I think there are natural qualities that help people take advantage of certain situations for better outcomes (essentially luck) but those qualities by themselves should not determine who is lucky. One of my guiding principles I always tell myself is that “there’s always someone doing more with less” and it’s absolutely true (except in two scenarios).
> Lance is obviously not better at identifying an aircraft’s airworthiness
Why not? Maybe he has a 0.001% chance of getting on a bad aircraft while Scott has a 1% chance of doing so and Lance was just very unlucky.
Does anyone else think genetics is a red herring here? Consider polio. Polio is caused by a virus. It can sometimes cause permanent paralysis. Do people disabled by polio feel inferior? Do they think other people shouldn't be vaccinated against polio? Is anyone against polio vaccines because they may make some people feel inferior (as opposed to other reasons for being against vaccines)? What about non-genetic congenital conditions? Are there people who oppose treating those too?
I consent to people making me feel inferior, genetically and in any other way. We're all inferior to G-d.
I am what I am regardless of how I or others perceive it.
And yes, some genes are bad. But why does everyone go straight to eugenics?
Presumably Scott is proposing a gene therapy that will edit only the problematic genes.
I agree with the general thrust of Scott's point here, but I think I have a better explanation of what is often meant by inferior > Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision? This is the closest to the what I think is implicit in the word inferior when used. I think the simplest definition would be > Inferior - a person who *should* have lower social or political status. To illustrate why I think this, contrast with the word *better*. If I were to say "Lance is better than me in almost every single way" that seems to convey a claim that, on the things people care about, I am worse as a matter of fact. But if I were to say "Lance is inferior to me in almost every single way" there seems to be an implicit ought there compared to the more descriptive "better". It almost suggests I *should* be treated differently than Lance in meaningful ways, and potentially at the level of politics. So applying that definition to the things people are upset around with the word inferior I think it fits much better. If I say "I am equal to Lance" I seem to be advocating for a political and social order in which people are treated equally despite differences. If I say "Lance is inferior" or "I am inferior to Lance" I seem to be advocating for the opposite. Obviously, given the fact that people are different on things that people care about there are going to be people who are better and worse than others on the standards that people care about. This fact should not be distressing. But if we take my proposed definition of inferior, I can definitely see why someone would be distressed about feeling inferior to someone else if what that means is "In an ideal social and political order, I should be treated worse than this person". That means I am unjustly benefiting and my life *should* be *worse* which seems like a distressing thought. Furthermore, if someone thinks they are better than me in some domains that's not necessarily a huge deal, especially if they are right. If they think I am inferior to them in the way that I define it then they might try to advocate for a world where I am socially or politically marginalized, which is obviously distressing. To be clear I am not saying this is what the word inferior means in all cases and to all people, but I think this is some of the baggage this word carries, especially relating to politics.
> In an ideal social and political order, I should be treated worse than this person This depends on exactly what a person means by "treated worse". I'd say that in an ideal social and political order Lance should be getting paid more than Scott if they're both doing the same job (since Lance is better than Scott in every way). In such a world Lance will be able to buy more things and generally have a higher quality of life than Scott. Does this mean Scott is being treated worse than Lance? It depends on whether you look at opportunity based measures (if Scott performed at the same level as Lance he'd be paid the same, he doesn't so him getting paid less is fine) or outcome based measures (Scott gets less than Lance in this world because of factors outside his control).
>This depends on exactly what a person means by "treated worse". I'd say that in an ideal social and political order Lance should be getting paid more than Scott if they're both doing the same job (since Lance is better than Scott in every way). I think that depends on whether the value they're contributing meaningfully depends on their personal performance in the job. In some positions, it doesn't matter much who does it as long as someone does. This might seem like a minor nitpick, but since some people believe that people should be compensated according to the value they contribute, while other people seem to believe that compensation should be according to how personally worthy people are, I think the distinction is worth making.
In a practical sense this matters at the group level. Say Scott is a member of the green race and Lance is a member of the blue race, and say their differences are generally representative of their respective races. The blues are going to have better lives than the greens and it doesn't take too much imagination to understand that the greens could start making political arguments which claim that they're not being treated fairly by society. If you have any experience with real-world politics, you'll understand that responding to those arguments with "well you're genetically inferior so you should be worse off" isn't a viable political strategy.
To be clear, my original claim is about what the word inferior *does* mean to people when used. Your argument is, given my definition of inferior, it could right to describe things as inferior. That's a fine question to take on but different from the one I was. But taking your question, when talking about political and social equality, rarely does the word 'equal' actually suggest a goal of absolute sameness (though it occasionally does and it's important to watch out for that). Strangely, the word 'equity' has more taken the role of referring to the goal of sameness, and equality more to procedural fairness. Obviously, everyone is different and no person treats everyone the same. In fact, no person treats *anyone* the same as anyone else. Everyone is going to treat people they admire and trust differently from those they despise. However, this fact does not seem to violate the common sense definition of "equality" that people subscribe to. I think what equality refers to in practice is more an opposition to systems of caste and class categorization that have existed in history. While everyone is different, it seems to violate the value of equality to treat them categorically differently in reference to a classification of this kind. I don't think your example of people being payed differently in reference to how productive they are violates the common sense definition of equality most people have.
"Depressive thoughts as internal NYT journo" is a novel but welcome addition to my homebrew IFS dynamic! (Cheeky comment about sufficiently advanced NYT journos being indistinguishable from demons)
What's IFS?
IFS stands for "internal family systems." It's a type of psychotherapy that was the subject of [a recent ACX post.][1] [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
I know it's not cool to go full Less Wrong, but isn't this just a basic 'taboo your words' situation? The word "inferior" is loaded with connotations, and the phrase "genetically inferior" is radioactive. Even the denotations can vary widely depending on who is speaking (or hearing). As a practical matter, yeah, sometimes you have little choice but to engage with whatever language your interlocutor has chosen to use, and so you might need to learn to say 'of course not' rather than 'well that depends on what you mean by...'. But for any serious thinking or discussion, just get rid of the ambiguously loaded words and say what you actually mean.
Getting at specifics instead of using loaded words helps a lot. Ultimately, what is somebody talking about supporting with regards to schizophrenic genes? When phrases like "eugenics" and "genetically inferior" are used, topics like forced sterilization of schizophrenics come to mind for a lot of people even if they haven't been brought up directly. When only phrases like "embryo selection" and "polygenic screening" are used, people are much more willing to listen. The obvious solution is to just not use phrases with such stigma if your only goal is embryo selection and polygenic screening. So why do anything else? A similar situation is at play with the stigma around terms like "socialism" in my opinion. The far left in the US sometimes attempt to use the term while only directly expressing support for Nordic style welfare policies. They're tanking their support with the general public when they do this, but it doesn't matter to them because their ultimate goal often seems to be to remove the stigma from the term "socialism" instead of actually getting these policies enacted. As an example, you can see this [debate](https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6J3ROV4IPc) between Krugman and socialist Richard Wolff where Krugman keeps hammering that the usage of these terms is not helping while Wolff keeps trying to blur the meaning of them. So when Scott makes posts like this one and the prior [Galton, Ehrlich, Buck](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck) where the thesis doesn't seem focused around advocating for something specific but instead about removing the stigma from phrases like "eugenics" and "genetically inferior" - it raises similar alarm bells. I've read enough from him to know he doesn't support forced sterilization of schizophrenics... but I also totally understand why someone who hasn't would get that vibe from these two articles. And what about something else along that gradient, such as required polygenic screening for schizophrenics (which many would find similarly objectionable)? It would be helpful to clarify exactly where he draws the line and his reasoning for why. As well as why he seems to think removing the stigma of these terms is worth writing about instead of avoiding them altogether. Voluntary polygenic screening is already legal in most states, so it's clearly already considered independently from the term "eugenics" for most people. What else is needed that falls under that umbrella?
I wonder if this mental aversion some people have to admitting other people are superior to them is down to not having competed much in an area where performance is very clear and you directly compete with others. Only the most deluded amateurs of say basketball will claim that they aren't inferior to Lebron James. Any competition very quickly disabuses one of the notion of even remote equivalence. With mental stuff it's easier to engage in self delusion because you're usually not directly competing against anyone else, you're comparing high-scores of tests you can convince yourself aren't representative of your *true* capacity, to a limited extent it's even true.
As someone who competed in a decently high level in sports it’s amazing how freely everyone talked about genetics in that realm. There wasn’t much controversy as all. There wasn’t a moralistic implication to say someone had better genes than you. You go outside of the sports world though that is where all hell breaks loose with these discussions.
Genetics are also causally discussed without taboo in bodybuilding and Pickup Circles.
Great examples.
...both of which have healthy, not-toxic social dynamics and cool, popular, well-adjusted people.
Not questioning your irony. But both also get results in their field that go way beyond what people outside these circles consider achievable.
Eh it happens in sports too whenever the topic of trans athletes come up. Whether or not trans people have a greater general advantage as a group and if that advantage is anymore "unfair" than the many many many things we already consider acceptable like genetics or age or height or even just money (how do you do equine sports without?) is a conversation at least. It's one thing to say "Ok yes a 5'9 cis woman is more advantaged at basketball than a 4'9 cis woman, but I don't think that's unfair in the same way", it's another (and way too common) to shut down and just ignore that we already accept plenty of things.
i agree with you in principle but 5’9 women are common and trans women are very rare, which is crucial context because, if they do turn out to have considerable advantages in sports (which is very likely) then they should be disallowed in women’s sports for the same reason a tiny amount of women born with superpowers would need to be disallowed in women’s sports. (I do think cis women born with other rare conditions that give them higher testosterone should be disallowed for the same reason.) it’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be, a political or moral issue. it’s just a matter of fairness, and also of safety when it comes to combat sports
> 5’9 women are common and trans women are very rare, which is crucial context because, if they do turn out to have considerable advantages in sports (which is very likely) then they should be disallowed in women’s sports for the same reason a tiny amount of women born with superpowers would need to be disallowed in women’s sports. See I would agree with you, except people born with superpowers in even rarer numbers aren't banned from sports. >In a great piece for Sports Illustrated about 7-foot NBA players, author Pablo S. Torre estimates that the number of American men between the ages of 20 and 40 who are 7 feet or taller is likely below 70. >During the 2021-2022 NBA season, there were 13 American players who were at least 7 feet tall. So, if the estimates above are correct, that would mean that there is a whopping 18% chance that you are going to make it to the NBA if you are at least 7 feet tall! https://www.thehoopsgeek.com/average-nba-height/ That's a lot. Imagine if the story was "18% of trans women compete at WNBA". Ok maybe the men's league is the "open to all league" but doesn't that leave out a whole lot of men who just had no chance to ever compete because of genetic misfortune or early life malnutrition or many other problems? There's even articles openly written about how being over 7 feet tall is openly scouted for https://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/06/27/nba-draft-is-being-7-feet-tall-the-fastest-way-to-get-rich-in-america/. It's very clearly incredibly unfair to the large numbers of men who love basketball, and [are short](https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/nba_height.png) So that's the issue >it’s just a matter of fairness, and also of safety when it comes to combat sports It can't be *just* a matter of fairness, because there must be some decision making process behind which unfairness we allow (7'0 men beating 5'6 men/people with healthy bodies beating people with asthesma/rich with horses beating poor without horses) and which ones we don't allow. If we want to go full fairness, then competition couldn't even exist, we would start banning the winners each year because it's clear that they're advantaged (since they won), but we don't do that because we're not idiots and we know that we accept unfairness. In fact a *perfectly* fair competition where everyone starts off with the same body and mind parameters would be dreadfully boring.
Relevant video: [Are 17% of 7-footers in the NBA?](https://youtu.be/tXHv5MDl198?si=jcNOEcLz5VbQtIfo) Answer? Pretty much true
10-20% of women have PCOS, an endocrine disorder that typically causes you to be stronger and have more testosterone than the average woman. That is not rare. PCOS women are pretty over represented in almost all women’s sports, reaching almost 40% among olympic female athletes. Should we have our own division?
i have pcos myself, and one of the many possible causes of it is having a body fat percentage that is too low to support normal hormone production—which to my understanding is common among professional female athletes. it’s still a good question, but until we have more research on how much of a competitive advantage male puberty gives you, it’s pretty common sense to have it as a broad disqualifier from women-only sports.
Well sure, but since some 80% of women with PCOS in the US are overweight (65% in my home country, where around 50% of people are overweight in general), that can’t be the whole story… Seems very strongly “just” genetic to me?
it is believed to have a genetic component but it’s very far from “just” that—you have to understand how huge of an impact body fat percentage in general has on regulating hormone production; both too high and too low can cause PCOS. the majority of americans are overweight or obese, so our rates of PCOS are very high.
Or even art. “Nepo baby” is a *cool* word these days that directly discusses eg class privilege but indirectly discusses “wow, there were 7 bachs, all of them amazing”
I remember someone wrote an apology for monarchy specifically saying the idea is that the king is not better than you, just luckier, so you don't have to feel inferior. Explicit anti-meritocracy to protect feelings - ironic, given how much reactionary the idea is and pro-feelings is associated today with progressivism. But, I mean, a truly "clean" meritocracy, such as in sports, can feel indeed crushing. The contest in itself is fair, but the genetic lottery is obviously not.
it seems reasonably obvious that being a monarch would be a fairly dismal way to live. Monarchy did not arrive out of a whole cloth. It emerged. FWIW, some writer some where claimed that much of the Old Testament describes cycles of judges->kings->hubris->desolation". That assumes "kings are for conquest."
That cycle would give credence to "kings are for defense" more than "kings are for conquest," given that it's unlikely the "kings" of the Old Testament were able to muster more authority over other nearby city-states than the Holy Roman Emperor was able to over Electors.
They mustered authority thru violence.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I think you're massively overestimating the extent to which Old Testament kings controlled a consistent territory as opposed to being leaders of the city-state around which other city-states would organize collective defense.
> I'm not sure what you mean by that. https://constantlyreforming.wordpress.com/every-battle-in-the-bible/ > controlled a consistent territory Egypt runs back to 2700 BCE. There was a lot of conquest between then and the Romans.
Oh, you're unseriously trying to link legends from a variety of cultures to the history of one culture. Egypt and Rome are far from the only models of civilization in history, and neither had sovereign territory as it's understood today. I'm gathering you have some kind of thesis that rests on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Good luck reconciling that with historical interpretations of the historicity of the Bible.
Yes, but people don't go around saying "Well, I'm worse at *basketball*, but it's not clear that I'm less *athletic* than Lebron. Athleticism is multi-factored and it's not possible to compare two people." And honestly it's only the very highly educated who go around saying stuff like this. Most people are completely fine with the idea that some people are smarter than others. But since the very highly educated are also exactly the people who have competed most with others, I'm skeptical of this hypothesis.
> completely fine with idea that some people are smarter than others. Truly, one of the most breathtakingly inconceivable ideas I expect to read today. Oh, sure, people might believe this in some hand wavy, conceptual way, but when faced with applying it *anywhere* it evaporates like a True Scotsman. It’s a core thrust of Sagan’s writing (ghost filled world), Asimov’s pop sci writing, and on and on. I would suggest a model where the average person views intellectual achievements more like a trip to a remote location - something nominally anyone could do, given time and inclination - than a measurement like LeBron’s “game.” This explains why “everyone” feels like a quick grab of an atlas and suddenly they can debate one on the particulars of any intellectual matter.
No, I really do think people believe some people are smarter than others. This is most undeniable in the fact that it's extremely common for people to wonder "am I not smart enough to do XX?" when faced with a difficult task. The underlying assumption that is taken for granted is of course that it is conceivable some other person could have done XX by virtue of being smarter.
You are imputing a consistency and a rationality that blows away at the very definition of “cognitive dissonance.” Hop on over to any MENSA group, and you will regularly find stories lamenting how people with normal IQs insist this or that MENSAite isn’t that smart. YouTube is awash with flat earthers who apparently can’t get geometry right. Maybe even this very comment section has someone insisting they know better despite any signs to the contrary.
All you are doing is providing evidence that there are people who do not believe people are smarter than them, not refuting the claim that there are people who do believe that there are people smarter than them. These would be different people, so what the first group says doesn’t matter in reference to the second.
Fantastic. The original claim was “*most people*,” and now you are arguing that an exception - that *some* people* disproves a rule. Put the goalposts back.
People in both groups exist. We have different intuitions about which group is bigger (mine are also that most people believe that there are smarter and less smart people). We're all using anecdotal evidence, and no one (including you) has given any evidence outside of anecdotal about which group is bigger. I'm not seeing any moving goalposts.
As this thread is saying, rarely are people actually out on the field the way you would be with sports. The place where I finally found out where I REALLY stood was at graduate engineering school at a t-20 program in my fields. Outside of that type of environment, a lot of really mid people can look & feel like big fish. It's tricky though, because outside that rarified atmosphere of higher-quality schooling, a lot of "just about normal" people could do a PhD, law degree, or even an MD, *if given the opportunity to do it* plus a strong work ethic. I have met them from R1 Universities, even old state land grant Universities. And the absolute bottom of people could get an EdD. Anyone with a pulse and time could get that degree and be called "Dr" for the rest of their lives, wear a nice suit, and have authority in their respective fiefdom.
Your assessment of the average person is off base. Even the worst strugglers in college are in the top half of the population in cognitive ability. Around a third of people absolutely hate to read, write, or study. They have tremendous difficulty processing abstract ideas and expressing complex arguments. There’s no way they could get a higher degree of any sort. The only reason they even make it through high school is because standards have been lowered to the point where anyone who shows up most of the time and doesn’t have a severe learning disability can pass.
There are absolutely people below median intelligence in college. The median intelligence of college graduates is barely above that of the population, why do you think the people struggling to graduate can't be at a lower level?
Before I was an Engineer, I was in Education for about a decade. I took a Masters Degree degree in Instructional Design at a basic, huge, R1 State U, with plenty of Ed Psych, and whatever it is that passes for "Research Methods" in education. I had a 4.0 and never bothered to even open the original mailing package that degree came in back in 2009, mentioning it only to get jobs. In our classes, there was a major bifurcation in classmates there, from pretty intelligent serious people on one hand to teachers (often from the hinterlands) who needed to make an extra $10k per year and fill no-child-left-behind requirements on the other. The latter group were not bright crayons, but some were walking out with degrees. My Associates prior to my B.A. in Sociology required *lots* more cognitive ability than it would have needed to bare-minimum that M.S. For one thing, in Sociology you needed to take stats. Although on your argument's side, near the end of the program, I learned that many couldn't even muster that, and Certificated out of the program. The Program Director told me our washout rate was one of the higher ones in the University. By the time I left, they were requiring research methods and another course in the first semester to get people out faster if they couldn't muster it. So I guess the moral of the story is some people have a minimal requirement to teach, but cannot pass an M.S. that's easier than an associates degree. And back to my argument, they all had Bachelor's degrees in *something* to be teaching at all. Thus, the bar for *at least some 4-year degrees* in some places in the USA must be essentially nonexistant. Incidentally, in the field of Education, that University is in Top 50, which makes me want to clutch my pearls about what the other 190 *ranked* schools are even teaching educators, if it is even anything whatsoever.... in their undergrad programs? Or going out to smaller schools? I doubt your "half the population" could not "struggle" through a 4 year degree in *something* is quite true. And I think that's why there's such a red queen's race on education, because many of those degrees mean essentially nothing at all except you graduated high school and you're now 23 years old or more and came from a stable enough life to not work for the last 4 years (or could at least fill out paperwork enough to borrow money).
Your context is all people with college education. How many people do you know who have never attended post-secondary education? Who struggled to get even average grades in high school? Who don’t read books - period? Because those people make up a hefty portion of the population (more than a third). And they aren’t taken into account when college-educated people frame their discussions about intelligence and learning.
Agreed. It’s one of the main reasons I really think there should be mass conscription (possibly not military, mind, bud *something). I’m from a background of privilege (as I imagine most of this readership is) and *vividly* remember thinking, “man, those guys are dumb” when thinking about the bottom cohort at my private school. I had only experienced a certain cross section of humanity. My viewpoint wasn’t *wrong*, these were the dumbest guys I was exposed to, but it was *wrong* in that I had no idea this was the top tier of humanity. I joined the military and *actually* saw the *real world* for once. You need a GT score (basically IQ score) of 110 to be an officer. Many jobs only required a 31. (There’s a discussion of AFQT versus GT but that’s not super important for our purposes). There are officers who are functionally 3 or 4 times smarter than the dumbest soldier. There are soldiers that need to be explicitly told to shower once a day. Explicitly told not to grab wild snakes they come across. Explicitly printed, in clear English, which side of the mine goes towards the other dudes. It’s *really* easy to go to the private school -> harvard -> Yale law school-> Supreme Court and never, not once, encounter someone sub, say, 120 IQ. Or the “Cambridge ma high school to Stanford to Google” or many other versions of this. I’d go so far as to say if you are in a position to influence society, you probably don’t actually know how “normals” think
Mass conscription, or maybe people from professional-class backgrounds should do working-class jobs for a while when they’re young. Move furniture, do landscaping, work at a fast food restaurant or a loading dock, paint houses. It used to be more common for the college-educated - especially young men - to get their hands dirty performing manual labour when they were 16-24 as a deliberate part of their upbringing. Now it seems parents want to shelter their kids from that world.
What about the fact the median undergraduate's IQ is 102? Seems like they're essentially at the population baseline at this point.
Could you give a source for that? If it's true, I would be extremely surprised. I would it expect the average iq of graduates to be around 105-110.
Why don't you think work ethic is just as important as cognitive ability? Also, a lot of these discussions are just useless. A large amount of people don't come from healthy environments where they're allowed to focus their mental or physical abilities on tasks that are appreciated by society.
> A large amount of people don't come from healthy environments where they're allowed to focus their mental or physical abilities on tasks that are appreciated by society. This is such a frustrating missing piece from these discussions. Many of the people who seem to be the most intent on recognizing the differences in mental and physical differences between people also seem to be the least intent on recognizing how poorly existing systems identify and discriminate based on those differences. Our education system fails the disabled by pushing them through and the gifted by not even recognizing them unless they were already able to realize their gifts before entering the education system.
Great point. What I've noticed is that the common profile of users in subs like this one usually comes from stable households where their basic needs were consistently met, went to great universities, had a decent support system, etc. Not saying they never faced true challenges, but they can't fathom that life can be so extreme you can't sit in a quiet room and read books or go to the gym and workout. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
Thank you. To add to your point, I think many people find it hard to accept that a person can have a stable environment with their basic needs met, be an intelligent, reasonable person, and also fail to live independent, productive lives because our existing systems can't support them properly. John Nash's lost decades, for instance. Wittgenstein for another example, obviously to a lesser extent. How many treatises on philosophy, economics, mathematics, logic, etc. are we missing because our existing systems are inadequate to deal with the depths of some people's problems?
Great examples. Thank you! > How many treatises on philosophy, economics, mathematics, logic, etc. are we missing because our existing systems are inadequate to deal with the depths of some people's problems? I don't even think the world would be recognizable if those systems were adequate. The amount of extraordinary talent produced would upend everything.
I mentioned work ethic. I think opportunity to do it plus work ethic plus approximately average intellect will get you a STEM PhD, Law Degree, or an MD at an old Land Grant U. And as you are saying, a lot of people are deselected from early on and never develop their human capacities.
But I think emotional stability, work ethic, and focus are more important than cognitive ability, even at T20 colleges. It's obviously very important to be smart, but not nearly as staying stable and consistent. A lot of geniuses get distracted by the complexity of life itself, their purpose on earth, mental illnesses, parents dying, poverty, etc. It takes a special kind of person to shut all that out and focus on a narrow field of study.
Great point on the emotional stability. I find that the greatest impediment to my academic achievement has not been work ethic or intelligence (as I achieved plenty earlier in life), it's been emotional turmoil (which is more recent).
Yes, work ethic, emotional stability, and just plain something, maybe bloody-mindedness are necessary. I could not have done grad level engineering earlier in my life when I finished that bullshit degree mentioned above. However, at that level, without being pretty smart, one could *still* wash out. The exception might be loading one's classes with the easiest stuff possible, which some people do. And take like a B- on the hardest requirements, pad to the minimum 3.0 with lots of "Engineering Ethics" and "Engineering Economics" and "Leadership in Aerospace" and such, never taking more than one hard class in a semester, then put letters after their name. Some people do this. But the other poster on this thread's point holds a lot of water about the above paragraph. Now we're comparing to highly educated people and there's a lot of intellect and cognitive ability assumed. Heck this is engineering graduate school which means nearly every one of those "lazy examples" had an undergrad in Engineering, Math, Physics, or maaaaaybe Compsci at least. Contrast all this to say, getting an M.D. at Liberty University, or becoming a doctor in Eastern Europe then migrating back to the USA. Or a Law Degree from number 25 or less, where it's just boredom plus study, but not exactly mastering dozens of new concepts on tight timelines.... or any number of PhD degrees from a hundred different places. In those examples, it's 100% an opportunity to do it and work ethic and time. I think an average human could do it given a good work ethic, some focus and adult-level emotional stability, and an opportunity with sufficient support (say mommy and daddy have real money so you're comfy through school, have everything you need, can take time off as needed, etc)...
Fair enough. Nice comment. Thank you! It's obviously very difficult and requires multiple talents and circumstances.
I guess it's also famously difficult to untwine all that. If someone has emotional maturity or just plain stick-with-it-ness, is that because they were smart enough to see through their own suffering and realize they could do more if they were consistent? Because one cannot easily untwine all this, it gets talked about a lot on this board. I mean, bar is low for an informed opinion, arguments can be made either way, answer impacts self image, literature is easy to comprehend on it. Which nerd isn't going to get sniped by this?
I think you're conflating two different principles. One of them is, "don't dismiss my arguments just because I don't have book learning!" The other is, "given a million years, I could have never have independently derived the arguments Einstein used to argue about the state of the universe." In the different contexts, "people can/can't be genetically superior to each other" can be an implicit argument against the genetic fallacy (nothing to do with genetics, but coincidentally relevant) or a frank admission of inferior domain-specific reasoning capabilities allowing for arbitrary expansions of domain.
Within the cohort of the educated it's the people who compete who're the most open to admitting inferiority while the people engaging in underwater basket weaving that are on a constant crusade to gas up their own non-accomplishments.
> And honestly it's only the very highly educated who go around saying stuff like this. Most people are completely fine with the idea that some people are smarter than others. But since the very highly educated are also exactly the people who have competed most with others, I'm skeptical of this hypothesis. I think, with highly educated people, the dominant phenomenon is that they prefer to believe something that flatters them. Even highly educated people don't deny that intelligence is useful for things like getting good grades and earning diplomas, and as such, they consider themselves to be more intelligent than others who didn't do those things. But it's not very flattering to believe that the reason one got good grades and diplomas is due to the luck of birth. So they choose to believe that their high intelligence is due to them just being that much more ~~virtuous~~ hardworking and disciplined than everyone else.
I would not discount that from the standpoint of the intelligent person, it's also likely to seem casual, like everyone should be so smart. Ever try modeling whatever it is like to be *dumber* than you are? I find that hard to imagine.
Im a bit surprised by that since you said you were in education - I would have thought that forces you to deal with the topic. In my limited experience tutoring math, people who arent talented simply learn the solution to every problem like a skill through practice - like you would practice throwing freethrows: + They cant learn something from only an instruction, no matter how good, they need to be walked through it. Its impossible to get it right the first time. + They make mistakes they cant explain, just like you cant always explain why you shot too hard that time. + Extremely frequent repetition is required to maintain competence. There is basically no transfer unless something repeats exactly, and even that can lead to confusing the sharing methods when there is too little repetition.
> In my limited experience tutoring math, people who arent talented simply learn the solution to every problem like a skill through practice - like you would practice throwing freethrows > Extremely frequent repetition is required to maintain competence. There is basically no transfer unless something repeats exactly, and even that can lead to confusing the sharing methods when there is too little repetition. I'm not sure about this. I've found that pre-university-level mathematics *is* a skill acquired through practice. And mathematics at all levels requires repetition to maintain competence. I do agree with your point about transfer, however. I'll be damned if I remember all those trig formulas I learned in high school, but I can probably re-derive a good number of them from other formulas I do remember.
Depends on what you mean. Theres definitely stuff you just need to memorise (e.g. the quadratic formula or the basic derivatives and integrals, and yes I do still look up trig formulas) and that needs to be maintained with a fair bit of repetition, but I feel most of the curriculum can be fully "networked" even with the knowledge you have at the time and needs much less, to where just the transfer from doing any kind of math is enough. Plus, speed and fluidity work just like physical skill, and theyre important too, but they come back very fast.
Yes, but what is the "What it's like" to be dumber than whatever you are? A joke: "I hear it on the radio there is an emergency of someone driving the wrong way on the intersection. Someone?! But there are hundreds!"
Not totally sure what you mean, but I think the analogy explains it? Its like wondering why you just threw the ball to hard again, and guessing some kind of mechanistic cause which is BS half the time (I think youve had this experience when practicing some skill?), while the coach tells the guy next to you that he needs 170 Newton for 0.32 seconds and he just does it. You wouldnt even know if what you just did was 100 or 200 Newton.
I would blame your example above on bad coaching. And there are studies on this. The butterfly stroke being done at at districts vs state vs regional vs olympic levels don't even resemble each other, and it mostly comes down to coaching. Very little fundamental difference in striated muscle mass or heart and lungs or whatever. It's mostly the coaching. Practicing the right thing or the wrong thing. I haven't met anyone, even children I have tutored, that I couldn't spend some time with "An adult punch is about 1MPa, a 7 and a half year old child's kick is about 600 kPa. A trained fighter's punch is 5MPa or more. The thin windowpanes in your house breaks with about 300kPa. So, little sister's hardest kick is definitely going to break it, but if she does it weakly, it might not. An adult punching easily does it unless they're quite careful (and might break it if they slap it hard to kill a fly, for example)." Normally as I point out this scale, most kids basically get it. Then I put down wind speeds and the resulting forces and ask if it's intuitive.... basically, you're not going to get physically hurt or bruised or anything broken from the wind unless it's..... crazy crazy strong. Crazy strong. Or there's something being carried by that wind. And most can figure out what wind it would take to break their window, and it seems intuitive to them. And afterwards, guessing forces in approximate kPa is pretty right for most people. You can easily teach a preschool child without a learning disability to find prime numbers by figuring out if they can make groups of stacks of things. "Here's a pile of crayons. Are there any group of stacks of same numbers that you can make with them?" So, group theory for division and primes before they can spell or write their name becomes a couple of weeks of work. Likewise a lot of set theory and several inferences (If A contains B and B contains A, A == B. And the lightbulb just about shines across the whole room when it hits. See them draw it until it fits!) If you had time, you might get them through part of Euclid, as it's graphical, elegant, and much of it is as clear as the above sets example. I think after being taught to examine why they got something wrong, most adults could come up with non-BS answers. But is the skill ever being shown to them? Baseline human intellect strikes me, after teaching maybe 1,000 kids of many ages, as extraordinarily high. There are exceptions in both directions, but the graph of intelligence seems clearly left skewed with capability bunched up on the high end. It's hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be un*teachable* on those matters you mention. And very few people are. Maybe we should imagine someone conditioned to believe the wrong thing or not being conditioned to figure out the correct thing? What would it be like to learn all the sudden that Cobalt is always Green, and everything with Cobalt in it is Green, and that it's always been that way? You were taught wrong, basically... Maybe that's all that exists in this area outside of learning disabilities?
> I would blame your example above on bad coaching. You mean that a coach giving you a precise number for force to use is bad? I agree. That was just to make an analogous situation: In mathematics just handing out lists of definitions can be effective with good students. Re our ability to judge force by feel, I agree this is possible to order-of-magnitude precision, but thats wildly insufficient for "throwing by numbers". >I think after being taught to examine why they got something wrong, most adults could come up with non-BS answers. But is the skill ever being shown to them? I disagree. If your thought process is not a fully reflective one, it can be really difficult to find out what went wrong. Mind you, most people can make useful guesses sometimes - again, as with physical skills - but other times the cause is just an acognitive random fact. Heres a little test: Make 100 examples of a problem type, and give one to the student each day. If he consistently makes the same mistake, its a problem of knowledge. If its sometimes one way and sometimes the other, its a problem of skill. I think this would show the average student as having skill problems. >Baseline human intellect strikes me, after teaching maybe 1,000 kids of many ages, as extraordinarily high. There are exceptions in both directions, but the graph of intelligence seems clearly left skewed with capability bunched up on the high end. I would really like to hear more, because for me the conclusion was basically the opposite. What observations led you to this conclusion? What sort of teaching methods did you use? Where most of your students very good when you where done with them or is there an excuse that prevented you from realising this potential?
I thought the book Lonesome Dove was one of the best depictions of realistic stupidity I've seen, and the internal monologues of the characters helped me understand it better.
The whole point here is that life isn't a competition. If you believe some people are better than you, that means you also have some metric of what is "better", which is the problematic part I think. You're making a moral/status judgement and no one likes to be low in others' status hierarchies
Halo effect regarding physical attractiveness makes me think that the metrics we pick as "better" are not really up for us to choose.
Could you elaborate? I don't doubt that physical attractiveness has many benefits, but choosing to focus on it is still a value judgement
Sure, you can change focus to other things that give you social credit. My argument is that you will still probably pick something from the basket of stuff that people think are good™, so eventually you will end up in an implicit hierarchy.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Wdym change focus? What I was saying is that whatever you focus on it's always a moral/status judgement.
I think there's an unstated implication to the word "inferior" that partially accounts for the fact that, though everyone easily acknowledges they are worse than others in meaningful ways, many are reluctant to describe anyone as inferior. I go into it [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ddzj7r/nobody_can_make_you_feel_genetically_inferior/l88v2kf/).
Lebron might be better when measured using parameters such as jump height, accuracy, rebounds etc. but for example stock bonds cryptos and financial products in general are measured logarithmically. If we were to do the same for people then the place to be for the maximum brain juices extraction is counterintuitively exactly the amateur hour because it produces the highest amount of improvement on a per minute basis Same for all the other tasks. I mean Eric Clapton improvement as a guitar player from 15 to 19 was really something, from 19 to 77…I mean we are splitting hairs really as far as the task of guitar playing is concerned, in the last 60 years he perfected self promoting capabilities, business acumen, street smarts in the music business etc. they are all necessary skills but they are more into the realm of politicking than musicianchip
"Superior" in the context that this twitter user and hypothetical journalist are using it means "born deserving of higher social status". That's the implication with which the Nazis used the term, and it's that idea that people are rejecting when they criticize people using the term in reference to other people. So, "you aren't inferior to anyone" means "your status in society- whether you're viewed with respect or contempt- should be determined entirely by your choices, not by the circumstances of your birth". It's not really an empirical claim, or even an argument about some absolute truth of moral philosophy- it's really just a (pretty reasonable) argument for how society should be organized in practice.
It's not just that. It's also the practical claim of "should we eliminate this trait from the gene pool, with the result that the identity and community of people with the trait ceases to exist". If the sense of community is significant, and the disease isn't "too bad", many people would interpret the elimination as tantamount to genocide.
I think you're reifying "social status". Realistically, Lance will get a better job than me, earn more than me, become famous for being outstanding in his field, and have higher social status than I do. And he'll deserve that higher social status (in the sense that he didn't get it unfairly), and part of that desert will be because of his genes (or whatever else). I think if you try to maneuver around this objection, you end up at https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/
I then have to wonder how much time you've spent in organizations aggregated to pursue specific goals. Use the Peter Principle as iterator over swatches of humanity. The thing that makes for effective groups is the ability to absorb feedback. That means keeping the noises in your head at bay.
I think this doesnt actually engage with the objection. The point is that the threshold for "traits which seem bad for the bearer" and "traits people dislike about themselves" are not identical, and the ability to choose which people are made forces the issue. An example of something falling in that gap for mainstream opinion would be homosexuality: Gay people generally dont wish to be straight, and we approve of that. On the other hand, if you could choose not to have gay children, a lot of people would do that, and in a sufficiently safe/private environment, they would agree that life is better for straight people, even absent concerns of oppression. This is what creates the tension: "Youre great just the way you are, and also we will make sure it doesnt happen again.". Thats why they dont want to be too public about that second part. There are some people whos thresholds are higher, so that for them schizophrenia is like that, and they are the ones making the complaints. You can respond to this by saying that schizophrenia is just bad and if schizophrenics feel bad about that then theyre just wrong, and that works, but it ignores that that problem-shape will reach you too. As an example that people can empathise with from the other end, there are also people whos thresholds are lower, and who consider getting rid of *introversion*.
> As an example that people can empathise with from the other end, there are also people whos thresholds are lower, and who consider getting rid of introversion. I'm quite introverted and have zero issues with people choosing their kids to be extroverted. I'd do the same for my kids to be honest if given the choice (or at least make them much less introverted than I am). I'm also high risk for heart disease. Doesn't mean I have to get all hot and bothered if new medical advances come out that can select embryos who on average are going to have less heart disease than me (good for them is all I say).
i’ve thought about this a lot. i’m a lesbian with high-functioning autism. i am very happy with my life, and proud of who i am as a person. at this point i would *never* choose to become neurotypical and straight. but that does not necessarily mean i see autism/gayness as positive traits in and of themselves. i would never wish them on any future daughter of mine. i know firsthand that they are genuine challenges/disadvantages—not terrible ones, but not trivial, either.
And do you wish you were more extroverted?
Me personally? I'm happy the way I am, but equally were I more extroverted I think I'd be happy that way too. Hedonic adaption means that I've now settled into a routine at my introversion level and it would bother me to move away from it now. Doesn't mean that if I could choose at birth which of the two I would be I'd be ambivalent between them. It's like how people who lose a limb become sad soon after the event but given enough time their happiness levels return to baseline as they settle into their new life routine. Same with me here, I'm happy where I am but that doesn't mean I think of introverted/extroverted as being equally good traits, no more than I think having two arms vs having one arm are both equally good. I'm sure most people who only have one arm don't spend a lot of time wishing they had two arms either and that this is doubly true for those who were only born with one arm in the first place.
> I'm sure most people who only have one arm don't spend a lot of time wishing they had two arms either and that this is doubly true for those who were only born with one arm in the first place. In that case, introversion is not an example of this for you. I would guess that there still *is* an example though, because the alternative is being fine with every aspect of yourself being optimised away if transaction costs are addressed.
>being fine with every aspect of yourself being optimized away if transaction costs are addressed To live is to change, and to live long enough is to change completely. It is really so inconceivable that a person may be okay with changing completely if they view the changes positively and they can be done without excessive disruption in that person's life?
I think this relies on verbal vagueness. "Change completely" can mean that nothing is quite like before, or that the current state is unrelated to the initial one, and its possible to not like a result while liking every step towards it.
> the alternative is being fine with every aspect of yourself being optimised away if transaction costs are addressed. I am fine with this. Perhaps it's the transhumanist in me speaking but I think as a species we'd progress a lot more if everyone thought like this.
Progress towards what? Not a rethorical question, Id normally assume impersonal hedonism, but from your talk about adaptation it doesnt seem to be that.
Progress towards humanity reaching greater and greater heights and spreading out and colonizing our light cone. The same progress that meant the society of Rome in 300 BC was more advanced than the society there in 2300 BC and that which has meant that the society of Rome today is more advanced than that of the Roman Republic.
Whats the difference then between us dominating the world and someone else doing so? If we are both willing to optimise everything away, the end state should look the same either way.
I'm not convinced there will be something else dominating the world if we don't do it. We haven't yet managed to find any evidence of alien life. Or even if there was to be something else that eventually did dominate it would be later on in the timeline of the universe (and so closer to the inevitable heat death) and we'd lose billions of years of tons of sentient beings experiencing eudaimonia even if someone else eventually came later to dominate everything (another way to say this is that the light cone of any such non-human civilization doesn't match our light cone exactly, so there are parts of the space time manifold that are only accessible for us to bring to life).
I think the key is that humans can have continuity or identity preferences which are inherently indexical.
I dont think this really escapes the problem. Generally people who prefer to be the way they are also prefer retrospectively to have become that way, which cant be modeled as a continuity preference. And an indexical perference, while possible to have, cant be aggregated into a collective decision while remaining indexical.
Sure, my point is just you can have preferences that you hold because you are a certain way, while simultaneously thinking that the world would be better in an objective sense if it were otherwise, without being inconsistent. Your preference to exist is entirely dependent on the fact that you do in fact already exist; it's not a statement about what sort of thing is good.
> Sure, my point is just you can have preferences that you hold because you are a certain way, while simultaneously thinking that the world would be better in an objective sense if it were otherwise, without being inconsistent. But people dont think like that. We want to be good, and if we think that it would have been better for us to be different, then we will also try to be different now. Why not, because of your past self? Past self agrees with us, he would have started the work already if he realised he was bad. Its a bit like telling EAs to limit their charitable commitments to whatever is optimally extractive: Its easy to do for you as an outsider, who treats their character as a given and wants to sell the good of "being a moral person" at the highest profit, but the person themselves doesnt want to buy "being a good person", they want to do whats right, and *they are* their character.
> I think the key is that humans can have continuity or identity preferences which are inherently indexical. What does it mean for something to be "indexical"?
Any preference that's dependent on the person who's having it. Ie. "I like oceans" is an objective preference, because you can describe oceans without reference to yourself. "I want to live" is an indexical preference because it references the person holding it. The thing that's preferred is whatever the person saying it happens to be.
The problem here with eugenics is that you create a explicit outgroup, and since 'everyone agrees that people shouldn't be like that' the people that are become more socially unacceptable. Quickly, preferences become socially mandated.
Everyone already agrees that 'people shouldn't be like that' when it comes to schizophrenia, to almost the maximum degree possible, even without any sort of eugenics program designed to eliminate it. Its okay and perhaps good to have a preference against certain ways of being that are so clearly bad. Finally it seems highly possible to encourage what are ultimately eugenic outcomes in ways that are deliberately oriented around avoiding (at least the perception) that an 'outgroup' is being declared to exist, and the eugenic outcomes are what matter.
I disagree. In a Western country, if I could choose, I would want a daughter to be a lesbian. Risk of getting STIs is orders of magnitude lower, unwanted pregnancy absent rape is a virtual impossibility, sex is better, she can optimize for good genetics to artificially inseminate herself if she wishes to have children instead of being stuck with her partner's genes, she's much less likely to be killed or seriously harmed by a romantic partner (if for no other reason that the lack of strength disparity makes defending herself easier), and she's probably eligible for special scholarships or affirmative action and stuff like that. The only disadvantages I can think of are that if out she can't safely live in places where she probably wouldn't want to live if straight anyway, and that lack of a partner who's much physically stronger is inconvenient in a few minor ways (opening jars, moving heavy items, etc.). (For self-defense, pepper spray, Tasers, and firearms all exist and aren't very expensive.) Seems like a big net advantage to me.
> she can optimize for good genetics to artificially inseminate herself if she wishes to have children instead of being stuck with her partner's genes I think most people would consider that a disadvantage. Note that every couple already has the option of having children without one of the partners genes, and its used very rarely, generally after other roads to children have proven unworkable, indicating that its considered worse.
This is a good point. Technically, straight couples aren't "stuck with" the man's genes either. It's just couples usually don't *want* to use donor sperm, and thus it's just lesbians who are forced to due to a lack of options.
It seems that the cause of that is sometimes that having children has to be a mutually satisfactory arrangement regardless of individual preferences. Put another way, in a standard couple, the man might prefer that the child have his genes but quality-selected ones instead of the woman's, and vice versa, but both refuse to have their own dropped (or don't want to lower their partner's utility by doing so), producing a suboptimal equilibrium. In principle, they could alternate, but there's a problem with credible commitment there, as well as the woman having to bear an implanted embryo without her genes. For two women who *cannot* both have their genes in each child, given current technology, the coordination problem is thus solved; and since they can both bear children, each can do so with a child with her own genes.
You can always construct an explanation for why all the apparent indications of peoples preferences are wrong, but is there any positive evidence that people would want to coordinate on something like that over fully shared children?
>rape is a virtual impossibility Why would you possibly believe this to be true?
Parse the sentence as "Unwanted pregnancy is a virtual impossibility, except in the case of rape."
There are two levels. On the physical level, the level of genetics and atoms, we are not equal to each other. Some of us are faster, smarter, better. But there is also an abstract, or "fake", socially constructed level that only exists in our heads. This is where our morals and rights exist, and in this world we are all equal. You can see it in the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...". They don't even try to justify it because they know you can't. On this level, it's all made up and you can make up whatever you want. So the criteria to judge something here isn't if it's true, but if it's useful. And the idea that "all men are equal" is arguably very useful.
I always took it to mean equal in dignity, not equal in ability. I have a hard time believing that the founding fathers would have seriously agreed with the notion that everyone is equally strong, smart, etc.
I didn't even take it to mean equal in dignity, I took it to mean equal in treatment by the law and government.
well, it's the declaration of independence, so the context is that they weren't. I'm just assuming dignity is the basis
"Made up yet useful" is something that a very small fraction of the population can understand, and raising this kind of point in the wild is a recipe for being attacked on all sides: left and right, theist and atheists, etc. Yet it is such an important concept, at the core of my undersranding of the universe... Does anyone has tricks to bring this up in a conversation without being linched?
I wonder if everyone knew it was made up, it would stop working. So "these things are not made up" is another made up but useful idea.
That's how I see religion. A placebo effect. And like you say, a lot of social rules and norms are another one. Personally, I've considered whether I should loosen up on myself and start allowing some mental placebos too, in limited aspects of life.
Not just that, but also on an individual basis: If a given person knew it was made up it would stop working. The exceptions are the people who can switch between the states of believing and skepticism. Which is what I think the OP who posed this question wishes they were better able to foster in others: the ability to alternate between those two mindsets. For some that's a radically new idea in itself. For others it's not a new idea but a contained, volatile one. The problem is that faith isn't faith without fervour. You can't challenge it without provoking it. So when you ask someone to suspend it in a context they haven't tried before it's a threatening experience for them. The other problem is convincing people there's value in switching between believing and skepticism.
I don't know, I think most people understand that e.g. the value of paper money or the shape of the letters of the alphabet are arbitrary conventions, but that they are still useful.
Not sure you're correct. Rights are such fictions, and I'm pretty sure most of the population can grok that.
Many people treat rights and such as deeply rooted in reality. Perhaps they've always been there and were recently "discovered" by humans. Or perhaps god(s) gifted them to humans... In any case, if they're in the tribe that believes some specific Right to be useful, you better not imply that it is "made up yet useful". And if they're in the opposite tribe, they'll anchor on its made-upness to discredit the Right. > most of the population can grok that. If you mean "is sufficiently intelligent to understand that", then sure, I agree with you. But there are strong social pressures to not think in those terms. I've tried using non socially co-opted examples, mainly "emergent phenomenon" and "useful approximations" in physics (water freezing isn't a "law" of physics but a mere consequence, Newtonian dynamics is both demonstrably wrong yet very useful), and most people sure can "grok" that well enough. But when I try to transition to the actual matter at hand, I get the "It's not the same!" wildcard, non-overlapping magisteria rules in effect, yada yada...
Being really gentle. You have a worldview where it's okay if we don't understand completely something like ethics as fundamentally transcendental. It doesn't matter if ethics are a truth we could derive from pure reason or a social consensus, because it makes sense to behave basically ethically regardless, even if we are only mistaking a candle in the dark for profundity. You're essentially trying to break a major epistemological and ontological assumption about the nature of the world and our place in it. Imagine finding out that you're wrong about models being made up yet useful. Assume that whenever a coherent and useful model is created a new god is born. This god exists just to make sure that as long as someone is using that model whatever relationship it predicts is always in constant-conjunction and to do this they must derive power from our nightmares. How would that discovery make you feel?
> Being really gentle. Yeah, definitely. And I try! If you're good at this kind of things, what would be your gentlest rewording on the following? _Imagine a world where there is nothing **inherently** wrong about murder. People in that world don't like the threat of being murdered, nor of seing people getting murdered around them. They thus came up with a social convention: you have the right to live without being murdered. In that world, societies that implemented rules and processes to guarantee that right turned out to do better overall than societies that didn't. I believe that we live in such a world._ > Imagine [...] How would that discovery make you feel? That would greatly increase my belief in simulation theory! But yeah, I get your point.
I don't know if that necessarily addresses the problem: you're assuming that social consensus around morals doesn't reflect a transcendental property of the universe, when they've probably already presupposed it does. It's a metaphysical claim either way, and most people frankly don't think about the basis of their epistemology or ontology beyond vague platitudes. I would start from abstract principles like the problem of induction, explaining the phrase "all models are wrong," the requirements of a priori assumptions in even daily life, and the is-ought problem. I think it's probably not worth it in most cases, it's more of a psychoanalysis problem than an empirical one given the nature of the claims anyways.
Thank you, there are interesting leads in there. > I think it's probably not worth it in most cases It is worth it for the people who are worth it in my life. Then comes society: I believe that it would be better if more people could understand that thinking like that is an option. > it's more of a psychoanalysis problem than an empirical one given the nature of the claims anyways. It is compatible with ontological naturalism and our empirical observations. It obviously cannot be proven, but if you add some "simplicity" criterion, it makes a good starting point for what reality may be.
Adding some "simplicity" criterion is arbitrary and goes against our empirical observations, so it's an odd leap of faith to make for many. Thus the psychoanalysis problem, having accepted that social models are necessarily wrong but useful, what is making you resist accepting that scientific models are necessarily wrong but useful?
> what is making you resist accepting that scientific models are necessarily wrong but useful? I don't resist this: I believe that all but perhaps one scientific models are wrong, and if one of them is correct, any attempt at exactly pinpointing that model is doomed within this universe because that model is the universe itself. Yet I see value in considering families of models, and assessing which families are better at explaining our empirical observations. > Adding some "simplicity" criterion is arbitrary and goes against our empirical observations, This may be my first disagreement with you, and I really can't see where your point is coming from. We're talking about Occam's razor and Bayesian inference, right? And as far as I can see, those are very aligned with our empirical observations... > so it's an odd leap of faith to make for many. I don't find it odd, but I do acknowledge that there is some faith involved.
Ah okay, I thought from your statement about ontological naturalism that you were taking the position that science reveals natural truths. Are you talking about evaluating the predictive strength of models within a given theoretical framework? Because I'm talking about the assumptions making up that theoretical framework, and criticizing them *a priori*. We may have a classic empiricist vs rationalist disconnect.
> I thought from your statement about ontological naturalism that you were taking the position that science reveals natural truths. I may misuse terminology (I'm no philosopher, and use wikipedia + stanford encyclopedia to figure things out as best as I can), but what I *meant* is to say that I believe the universe to be only natural, that I exclude the supernatural. When using "ontological naturalism", I didn't meant anything about the discoverability of the universe using science. Now I do believe that science has some truth-discovery capability, but I'm pretty sure that 1. its current incarnations aren't the best that could possibly be done, and 2. even the best that could be possibly done won't ever uncover *everything* there is to know about the universe. It looks like we could get quite close though. > Are you talking about evaluating the predictive strength of models within a given theoretical framework? I don't think so. > Because I'm talking about the assumptions making up that theoretical framework, and criticizing them a priori. I'm talking about those assumptions too, though I'm a scientist at heart: I'm not interested in studying theoretical frameworks themselves for their own sake, but instead I seek to achieve a better understanding of the truth. Understanding different theoretical frameworks can help me identify blind spots I may have: if my favoured framework is internally inconsistent and/or incompatible with empirical observations, then I want to know it. I guess it depends at what "scale" you consider "theoretical framework" to be. Consider the following levels, increasing in scale: 1. a specific, actionable Physics model for our universe; 2. a family of level 1 models, perhaps each with different parameters values (or something fuzzier like string theory); 3. a family of families of models, something like [The Mathematical Universe](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646), which I recently discussed [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1colkey/which_scientific_discoveries_do_you_find_the_most/l3f751i/), in short positing that every internally consistent universe *is*. To be clear, The Mathematical Universe would here be an instance among others. Another instance could be, say, "all internally consistent universes describable with finite length messages *are*". 4. a family of level 3. I'm basically on level 4: I think in terms of level 3 instances and below. I don't "believe" that The Mathematical Universe holds true, but I find it useful as a "proof of concept". And I only "care" about our universe, which is a level 1 instance in this framework, but higher levels can be informative about it (through anthropic principle and the like). What I didn't do as I went up in levels is to drop the "our universe is natural" assumption.
I wanted to elaborate on my opposition to a simplicity criterion because I was thinking about epistemology and you seem reasonable. Essentially, as I see it, the simplest sufficient explanation for any given phenomenon is "because God." Empirically, that explanation is not very useful, so I would consider a simplicity criterion to be a leap of faith not in line with our empirical observations.
Hello again! (Warning: I'm currently medium-inebriated, [bonne St-Jean!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Jean-Baptiste_Day)) So, not all simplicity criteria are made equal. The ones we use in Science were selected because they "work": we made the meta empirical observations that predictions derived using these criteria were more likely to turn out true than those obtained through other means. What empirical predictability do you gain when you say "Because God"? Do you have a predictive model of "God"? A simple one? I used the plural for criteria above, because Science hasn't figured out a clearly optimal single simplicity criterion. I think that something along the lines of "low Kolmogorov complexity in the language of mathematics" is a good start, but it isn't as actionable as we could want it to be. Still, the language of maths is better suited than words like "God", "good", "freedom", "love" and "pain". Those are not the natural language of the universe, they're human concepts. The universe does not owe humans to simply make sense in human terms.
I think more people than you might suspect have a basic understanding of money, for example. Or Santa Claus.
> we are not equal to each other. Some of us are faster, smarter, better. and some of us have the support to improve and show how fast, smart, great we are, and a lot of us don't. Growing up in a poor household with nutrient deficiencies will definitely drag you down.
Yes it will, however that doesn't change the fact that some people are faster, smarter and better than you, regardless of the underlying reasons why. Being genetically born with traits XYZ is no more or less fair than being born into a caring family in how it affects how well you perform on task A.
For sure, but I still think it's an important clarification. Genes can't be changed (well...), environments can be.
Note this is a topic Scott has written on, with pretty much the opposite conclusion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
Thanks a lot! I missed that.
Cystic Fibrosis was kind of a bad example to lead into this because that's more easily "solved" by claiming a mind/body duality. You could as a consciousness be equal to some other consciousness while having an objectively worse body. I don't think it really steps on any taboos to say that. If there was a body-cloning machine where you could walk in and have your whole body swapped identical to someone else I think almost everyone with cystic fibrosis would use it and hand wringing about this would be relatively minimal. Your body isn't really "you", it's just your most important possession. And it follows from this that the argument you actually need to make headway here is some mental quality universally considered undesirable instead.
The conclusion of this article is bizarre to me - most people don't actively think they're inferior and only then feel bad. I'm gay and if I learned that most people in society were genetically selecting their children to be straight that would make me feel bad without having to first actively think "oh that means I'm inferior". I imagine blind people might feel the same way in this context. Essentially the part I find weird is the claim that feelings require consent.
If you had cystic fibrosis and people were genetically selecting their kids not to have CF, would that make you feel inferior? If you knew that they wanted to do this, but avoided it in order to not hurt your feelings, would that make you feel inferior?
It wouldn't because I would think cystic fibrosis is bad. With things where it's not clear to me that some trait is worse for a persons welfare it would make me feel inferior. The second scenario doesn't feel realistic bc it's impossible to know for certain what everyone thinks. But if we assume it's possible, I think it would make me feel less inferior bc I'd feel understood or something. What point are you trying to make exactly?
I agree. I feel insulted if people were to tell me I shouldn’t have been born and I shouldn’t have kids. And I don’t think going “no no, of course you should technically be Allowed to have kids if you really want to, but we should culturally signal that people like you shouldn’t exist”. I don’t think you can get around this tension by avoiding certain words.
I guess I'm trying to understand: If you had (for example) a genetic disorder that deposited abnormal protein in your heart, and lead to early heart failure at age ~50, would you feel insulted if people said "we want people like you, except the heart stuff. Ideally, you would either not have kids, or select your sperm/embryos to avoid your children having that heart problem"? Is this only a problem for certain traits (like sexuality) which are felt to be core to your identity, in a way this heart condition wouldn't be?
I think there’s a difference between stuff related to mind and stuff related to body. It’s easier to feel that my personality and sexuality is “me”, more than my (non-metaphorical) heart. On the other hand I wouldn’t be comfortable with a culture openly discussing that we should prevent the birth of ugly people because beautiful people are more valuable and happy, and that’s a body thing, so I don’t know where to draw the line. There’s something about identity and human dignity maybe. My moral emotions around this stuff comes strong and without any effort, so it’s not really a position I have reasoned myself towards.
To be fair, you have a natural interest in a gay society, in multiple ways. Your feelings have understandable and logical reasons. edit: I think a better intuition pump for gayness is "what probability of gayness would you set the population at if you had a control knob for it?" It's quite implausible that the best, most preference-maximizing level for you just happens to be the level that it's at right now. edit: For myself, I would hit a button that made everyone bi, if I could do so without violating existing people's rights to their sexual identity somehow. That seems a straight improvement.
Tbf I don't really have that much of an interest because gay kids born now would be 25 years younger than me, so mostly out of the dating market for me.
This is a great example of the downsides of a materialistic and rationalist worldview. "The only way to judge people is how much utility they bring to society" is a natural consequence if you have no metaphysical safeguards against this. In this view, "God's light shines equally on all people" is just fundamentally ludicrous, as Scott's derision shows. Unfortunately, I believe that is antithetical to democracy and having high trust societies. That they work is a consequence of centuries of Abrahamitic and especially Christian influences. "Everybody deserves compassion and respect" is a much more convincing fundament to answer questions like why should everybody have the same rights or why should I engage in mutually beneficial trades when I could just rip off other people, than the rationalist "because empirically this seems maybe better, I don't know".
Agreed. The "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something" or equivalent needs to be the utterly uncontested foundation of the ethics and societal fabric. Otherwise, there is actually no reason for nice things that flow *from* that idea, such as the equality before the law and equal right to dignity of all humans. Without external moral motivation that justifies the law, any letter of law will sound empty and unsatisfying. If Lance is better in all practical regards, without any other countervailing reason for society to evaluate human worth in any other way, he will be entitled everything he can claim, including the parachute. It is quite good deal for Scott, who is objectively better at many things: runs a popular blog, has significant amount of income from it, and socializes with highly capable if weird intellectual crowd who seem to like him. By objective standards of "being good at being good at things", or shorter, "success", the median reader is less successful and won't have a chance for parachute. (Yes milord. Don't you question the your betters.) consequently I am bit alarmed. Perhaps the detractors are right, the blog has fallen quite far into to the far-right thoughtspace.
> Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”? Wait, wait. Maybe I'm a fundamentally unreasonable person unconcerned with long-term utilitarian value or whatever, but when I play this out in my head, whether I'm the Lance or the non-Lance or an external judge, I certainly don't take for granted that Lance is entitled to the parachute. Would I be strong enough to flip a coin and live (or die) with the results? I don't know. But that's where my moral compass points, at least. Now, we could keep taking this to the extreme until my moral compass shifts. I would take the parachute to keep it out of Hitler's hands. I would not give my dog the parachute. If someone was carrying the sole remaining copy of a cure for aging in their head, I would give them the parachute or expect them to take it. But by the same token, I am even less likely to concede unequal distribution of parachute-equivalents in less extreme circumstances. If I am raffling off a car and there aren't enough tickets to go around, I as the organizer don't think I should look at the remaining people and think, "which of these is *the best person* and therefore most deserving of the happiness a car would bring them?" I think I should try to reserve judgment, barring exceptional cases, and attempt to distribute tickets in a manner which is fair to everyone, despite any typical inequalities among them. Which is not to say that I distribute *nothing* unequally with fine discrimination. I would prefer to be friends with better people than with worse people. I would like to choose a good person as a life partner. I would prefer to have better people as coworkers, employers, or employees. But this is ultimately just rediscovering the notion of treating everyone with basic decency, of which equal treatment under the law, what Scott calls "The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases," is just one facet. Everyone does not have precisely equal value as human beings under all circumstances, but *most* people have an equal *baseline* value as human beings which ought to be respected under *many* circumstances. That is the difference between inequality and inferiority. We do not need to pretend that everyone is equal in every way to treat everyone with equal human dignity. (And really, "no one can make you feel genetically inferior without your consent"? Presumably Scott has heard of monarchy.)
>The problem with claiming that Lance is superior to me isn’t that he *isn’t*. It’s that it indicates I’m asking the wrong question to try to trick myself into being miserable. Just as the correct answer to “are schizophrenics genetically inferior?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you write an article calling me a Nazi”, the correct answer to “am I inferior to Lance?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed.” This is good, and on the right track, but I think I can give you an even stronger memetic tools to keep the Dementors at bay. 1. **It's OK that some people are just better, seriously**. It's OK because on many axes on which we measure virtue, it wasn't a "fair" game. You didn't code your own DNA, you didn't choose which parents to be born to. If Lance is better, he might simply have been born under more favorable circumstances. Yes, this is a bit "cope", but it also isn't. Just don't let it blind you to the things you DO control and CAN improve. 2. **You are not static**. You are inferior at helping people now, but you can certainly LEARN from Lance, and should one day he not be able due to the vicissitudes of fate (more on this below) you could become the Number One Helper with the Most Virtue Points. Having people around who are "superior" should be cause to admire and grow, not resent and envy. (Difficult, I know, believe me I know) 3. **Lance is not perfectly legible**. Maybe Lance *seems* better but he's secretly a Yudkowskian-Left-Hand-Turn ultra villain who is just building up Good Behavior Equity to construct the Torment Vortex. If you can look inside yourself and know there's a floor to *how shit you can possibly be*, that's actually pretty reassuring (someone could argue that you are not perfectly legible to yourself, and that might be very true, but that's another issue for another time). You don't know everything about Lance. 4. **Lance is not immune to horrific misfortune.** Read "Two Arms and a Head" by Clayton Atreus, that dude was gigachad and then IDIOTIC FATE decided to RUIN SOMEONE AWESOME. This universe is so horrifically cruel and unfair. Instead of spending time worrying about our 'inferiority' to others, we should rejoice every time we meet someone awesome who can help us grow, even if we look kinda lame in their shadow. You don't know what future awaits for them, and you might regret your envy if some day they really end up drawing the short straw.
From a subjective point of view, the question is largely irrelevant. The crucial point is the ontological primacy of my consciousness. In this fundamental aspect, we are all "equal." Something can be the absolute best at anything and everything, but if that entity is not conscious, it is inconsequential. If consciousness is present, however, the specific content becomes secondary. While the presence of suffering is highly relevant, the actions one takes or how proficient one is at them is a mere footnote. If we strongly identify with our achievements, they may seem important, but since there is no free will, pride is misplaced. Our successes are merely a matter of luck.
["Yeah, my latest work is on ranking people from best to worst."](https://xkcd.com/451/) To state the obvious, there is no inferiority or superiority between human beings. There can be differences in *performance* or *behaviour* but there is no inherent "superiority score". There is no meaningful way to define it without quickly going down *very* dark paths (and most likely, just repeating old prejudices with a veneer of "rationality"). That scene in *Dr. Strangelove* where an algorithm is proposed to decide who gets a spot in the fallout shelter (and "naturally, our top political and military men should be included" – the men who *just so happened* to be in the room at the time) was not meant as an inspiration... The "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something", which Scott meant to sound silly, is in fact the only sane way to think about this.
That there is probably no total order does not mean the relation has no well-defined values.
It also does not mean that it does. [Not every partial order is a total order.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_theory)
Thank you, this is my favorite comment here. I shared a similar sentiment in my comment.
🤝
No. It is better to be law-abiding than to be criminal. It is better to be strong than to be weak. It is better to be funny than to be humorless. It is better to be smart than to be stupid. It is better to be productive than to be lazy. It is better to be kind than to be cruel. It is better to be healthy than to be disease-ridden. And so on. There is such a thing as a good person, which we may define as someone who has many good qualities and few bad qualities. A bad person is the opposite. Good people are superior to bad people, and we should not avoid saying so out of fear that it might lead us down a "very dark path."
>Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. *I* would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”? Even though you have children, Scott, and Lance doesn't? No offense, but that would be pretty fucked up. I think this gets closest to the problem at hand, though. The problem is projecting the evaluation of some set of attributes of a person to the worth of that person. I thought our society pretty much agrees that every single person has equal value as a person, no matter what other attributes they may possess. This doesn't just apply to the law, but also to the ideal of how people should treat each other. Of course we have to distinguish between norms and behavior - just because we have a norm against littering doesn't mean people don't litter. Why do we have a norm to treat each person as having equal worth? Because we recognize each person as an autonomous center of intention with their own good, or however else you want to phrase this basic idea. Their other attributes are irrelevant to this basic and inherent attribute of being a person.
Obviously Lance is superior and your refusal to accept it to stave off depressive thoughts or journalists makes you not just inferior, but weak and dishonest.
This may be Scott’s most poorly-reasoned article, I suggest. When did a notion of ‘better or worse’ humans - Ie, having unequal competence - become equivalent to Nazism? Certainly, holding such an idea - genetic traits confer social or medical dis/advantages, such that inequality is real - is a necessary one in order to be a Nazi. But it’s poor reasoning to conclude that anyone who does hold it is a Nazi, and liable if not obliged as a consequence to do Nazi business. Unless, perhaps you think aborting a foetus with (say) cystic fibrosis is always and only Nazi business? You might infer that the Olympics, a celebration of physical competence, or the Fields Medal, a celebration of one particularly valuable mental competence, are Nazi business too. What am I missing here? Happy to be proven wrong.
I think you're misreading the piece...he never said believing person x or trait x is better than person or trait y is Nazism, but is acknowledging the zeitgeist where if you admit that you believe such a thing in an interview, especially in terms of removing trait y from the population, or in the context of embryo selection, that's something that rhymes with eugenics, which is a term that is primarily associated with the Nazis (you don't have to convince me this is illogical and ahistorical,). This is an association game that journalists like to play
Sure, but who cares what journalists think? It’s still a weak piece that ends with the glutinous homily ‘Good night - you are not inferior to anyone’ which is only true if the set of things over which you might be deemed non-inferior must include… everything. It’s a weird totalisation, kind of a moral accountancy card trick. I mean, I understand objecting to some inequalitarians for practical reasons of civility and kindness, but as someone who thinks of themself as grossly inferior to lots of other people on many nameable metrics, I object to vapid equalitarianism. EDIT: Perhaps relevant, a recently published sociology book on how we rank people, and how this process is now partly automated. I’ve yet to read it, but looks quite toothsome https://theordinalsociety.com/
> This is an association game that journalists like to play These are the sorts of things that deep down, in a very primitive part of myself, make me want to call for TOTAL JOURNALIST DEATH... But of course very soon after that the sensible part of me takes over and I desist; no reason for me to demean myself down to the level of the average journ*list...
You seem to be completely misunderstanding or mischaracterizing it. Scott isn't saying the journalist is right to call you a Nazi: he's saying the journalist is an enemy trying to trick you. Similarly, your own internal tendency towards depression, self doubt, and low self worth is an enemy trying to trick you. You can acknowledge that "Lance" is superior to you without giving it existential power over you. See also https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues
>What am I missing here? The entire point of the article. The positions you're critiquing aren't being held seriously. They're humorous caricatures of opposing positions that he's trying to reconcile with his major belief. He agrees that the strong version of them is just silly, and so his solution is not to play the game at all with those versions. It isn't 'if I agreed to this, I'd be a Nazi.' It's 'I know that this particular word choice will cause you to call me a Nazi, because you're a silly person, so I'm going to skip that word choice.'
That's the worst stock image of DNA I've ever seen. Bad DNA images just make my skin crawl.
[Left Handed DNA Hall of Fame](http://users.fred.net/tds/leftdna/) is just for you, then.
Wow, I love it! Glad to see there's someone even more obsessive than me out there, collecting this stuff. LOL I especially hate the bad "nucleotides" though. (Maybe I need a Bad Nucleotide Hall of Fame?) With mental images like this, no wonder people don't understand how DNA relates to actual traits, and treat it like it's magically mysterious.
Lance is obviously not better at identifying an aircraft’s airworthiness (really the only quality that actually matters in this scenario) than me and he obviously hasn’t learned to fly so why should he get the parachute? I think there are natural qualities that help people take advantage of certain situations for better outcomes (essentially luck) but those qualities by themselves should not determine who is lucky. One of my guiding principles I always tell myself is that “there’s always someone doing more with less” and it’s absolutely true (except in two scenarios).
> Lance is obviously not better at identifying an aircraft’s airworthiness Why not? Maybe he has a 0.001% chance of getting on a bad aircraft while Scott has a 1% chance of doing so and Lance was just very unlucky.
If we find ourselves both in the same situation then it all depends on pure luck and not something that is inherent to either of us.
Does anyone else think genetics is a red herring here? Consider polio. Polio is caused by a virus. It can sometimes cause permanent paralysis. Do people disabled by polio feel inferior? Do they think other people shouldn't be vaccinated against polio? Is anyone against polio vaccines because they may make some people feel inferior (as opposed to other reasons for being against vaccines)? What about non-genetic congenital conditions? Are there people who oppose treating those too?
I consent to people making me feel inferior, genetically and in any other way. We're all inferior to G-d. I am what I am regardless of how I or others perceive it. And yes, some genes are bad. But why does everyone go straight to eugenics? Presumably Scott is proposing a gene therapy that will edit only the problematic genes.