31 Comments

> But it's generally perceived that lazy is a choice whereas intelligence is a god-given quality.

Indeed, to the point where people seem to be quite surprised when I tell them that Conscientiousness turns up as being about as heritable as IQ in the twin studies, stable over a lifetime (only increasing somewhat with age), and there are no established interventions increasing it I have been able to find. These points have not been widely advertised, to say the least, and active researchers in the area like Duckworth are definitely towards the environmental end of the spectrum.

Of course, part of the problem here is simply that some of these traits simply don't have as much available research. For example, OCEAN/Big Five was only really nailed down in the '80s, while IQ dates back more than half a century before that, and it's difficult to infer any Big Five factors reliably from existing large-scale datasets (either cross-sectional or longitudinal) - because a lot of psychology tasks and academic-style tests are g-loaded you can piggyback on all sorts of datasets like military enlistments going back many decades, but you can't do anything comparable for Big Five. (How has a population's Conscientiousness changed over the 20th century? No idea. Do hispanics have different Big Five profiles on average? No idea. etc)

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Satoshi Kanazawa would disagree that there is little hostility regarding research into physical attractiveness.

As your first commenter noted, it's all about race. If you say that conscientiousness is relatively fixed in people before they reach adulthood, and that higher  conscientiousness has positive social results, without mentioning race, very few people will attack you. If you explicitly state that conscientiousness varies by racial group, and therefore (even if this you only imply, rather than conclude) racial economic equality is not likely to be achievable, you'll attract a firestorm of opprobrium. 

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The people being called stupid are associated with a specific interest group that is political powerful?

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Wikipedia cites The structure & measurement of intelligence, Hans Jürgen Eysenck and David W. Fulker, Transaction Publishers, 1979, page 16.

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TGGP, do you have any sources for the Nazi IQ ban?

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Thought: median intelligence is probably significantly above mean intelligence, because people with poorly functioning brains (because of things like Down's Syndrome, brain injuries, or being three years old) can be much stupider than smart people can be smart.

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As it turns out, it isn't.

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... You know, I don't actually think a lot of the aversion towards intelligence research is due to people's view of intelligence itself.

We know one can't really change whether or not they're attractive, whether or not they're male or female (to an extent), and other such things. Intelligence seems like the most malleable factor in a person. It seems like the thing that makes life "fair" (life's not fair). 

I think that the general dislike towards intelligence research is due to a kind of prediction... one answering the questions "What would happen if we figure out the greatest thing which affects intelligence is a person's genes? What would happen if we figure out who has the best intelligence genes and who doesn't?"

I'm going to be 100% honest—but I would genuinely be afraid of my society if the "intelligence" gene-set was found, and one race has it over another. Better put, if one easily definable group has it over another. Perhaps I'm a cynic, I know I'm a huge pessimist, but I don't trust people enough to have that information and not use it worsen people's lives, whether it be directly or indirectly.

It's not the information I have an uneasy feeling towards. If I got the information that my genes didn't maximize for a trait I put value in, sure, I'd be pretty bummed out. I'd probably wish I was in a position where they did; but not-desirable things that I have to accept happen all the time, and I enjoy altering my beliefs towards that which reflects reality.

My trepidation comes more from thinking of the question "How is this society going to use that information?"

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The Nazis actually banned IQ tests. Jews scoring higher than any other ethnic group and all. Anti-semites sometimes claim the reason some Jewish intellectuals like Gould argue against the merits of IQ tests (rather than being a nonsensical reaction against non-existent Nazi policy) is that they don't want to publicize their ethnic group's unusually high scores.

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Nobody takes physical attractiveness research as an authority for what it means to be attractive.

If I find Alice more attractive than Cindy I make that assumption based on my own standards. If some academic model tells me that Cindy is more attractive than Alice than I ignore the model.

If I however want to judge their intelligence it's different. If I think that Alice is more attractive than Cindy and then get told that Alice has an IQ of 90 while Cindy has an IQ of 120 I might change my assessment. 

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Intelligence, I suspect, is more closely held in personal identity than either physical appearance or social interaction. Its modification, especially in new ways beyond basic nootropics, may be costing too much. We know AGIs won't want to change their utility function... why either wouldn't humans? This is why, as a transhumanist, I have always been more excited about human network augmentation. Bandwidth and processing power aren't the same, and both have great potential, but I suspect interface development is more popular than old school IA.

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Also: Hitler. The intellectual classes had been very fond on (often bad) intelligence research before the Second World War and after the Nazis had shown where it might lead one they reacted violently against it. Had a regime premised brutal policies on physical attractiveness it would be far more taboo than it is today.

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It has considerable implications for different peoples' ideologies. Should intelligence turn out to be particularly variable philosophies of egalitarianism would be hard to sustain. Philosophies premised on meritocratic notions would be on shakier grounds, as well, because it would be even harder to support the view that success is associated with individual virtue.

If this were true it would also have significant negative consequences on peoples' actual lives. Yet I tend to suspect that intellectual people are swayed more by the fear of being wrong than of actual harms - that might be too cynical.

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An idea starts to be interesting when you getscared of taking it to its logical conclusion – TalebIt is the logical conclusion that people are most afraid of here. What they are afraid of is that intelligence matters the most for success in today's world and it depends mostly on your genes. But this is exactly like the idea of the Sun going around the Earth which was considered a heretical statement to make 500 years ago. Today we wonder how stupid could those people be then.

500 years from now It is quite possible people then will wonder how could these people never realize that intelligence matters most and it is all dependent on genes?

Hinduism took this knowledge for granted a long time ago and reached 25% of World GDP till a few hundred years when the caste system started breaking down.

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"Bryan Caplan says intelligence research is very unpopular because it looks so bad to call half of people stupider than average, let alone stupid outright."

Consider that the opposite might be closer to the truth. I don't anyone who has difficulty calling half of humanity stupid (and enjoying it), including people i personally would place in that half.

There there are the extremely bright. These are the ones whose creative output is dismally low relative to their IQs. Very high Intelligence does not predict for creativity. What is wrong with these people? Are they just with us to defend and replicate the status quo, without improving on it or advancing it very much? Are they evolutions own specialists (as opposed to societies)? Why does very high IQ seem to impede the ability to produce novell ideas and methods, rather than simply being a tool to aid this?

Perhaps the real stigma of intelligence research comes from people being labelled very high IQ, in that it leaves the rest of wondering why these people cannot contribute original ideas as well as people with (often much) more modest cognitive means.

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I actually think that such research would be taboo, if people cared enough about it for it to become taboo.  Imagine how taboo the scientific equivalent of Roissy would be!

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