Quote notes (#26)
Optimize for intelligence isn’t a rallying cry that Chip Smith is succumbing to:
… high intelligence may very well be an evolutionary dead-end. I’m certainly at a loss to come up with a good reason as to why a once-adaptive trait that you and I happen to value should enjoy special pleading before the blind algorithmic noise that is natural selection.
But even if the brawny-brained do figure out a way to defy gravity before the sun explodes, I think there are yet reasons to question whether the galloping ascent of mind is really worth cheering on. Futurist geeks will inform us that there are myriad tech revolutions afoot—all spearheaded by smarties, we may be certain. And I would suggest that such of these that converge on the gilded promise of quantum computing and nanotechnology might advise a second reflective pause—one that comes by way of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and settles at what grim solace remains in the darkest explanations that have always surrounded Fermi’s Enigma.
Maybe I’m being cryptic. What I mean to consider is simply that the evolutionary trajectory of intelligence can, has, and may yet lead to very bad things. It may one day be possible, for example, to create sentient experience—let’s not be so bold as to call it “life”—not out of gametes but in the deep quick of quibit [sic] states, and if this much should come to pass, it isn’t so far a stretch to imagine that such intelligent simulations—okay, they’re alive—will be capable of suffering, or that such will be made to suffer, perhaps for sadistic kicks, perhaps in recursive loops of immeasurable intensity that near enough approximate the eternal torture-state that’s threatened in every fevered vision of Hell to render the distinction moot.
Utilitarians have no sense for fun.
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Satoshi Kanazawa has a whole book on where high-IQ fails. To my mind the most damning is the low birth rates.
book: http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Paradox-Intelligent-Choice-ebook/dp/B00DNL37X0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378177379&sr=8-1&keywords=Satoshi+Kanazawa
High IQ women not makin’ da babies: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2384787/Too-clever-mother-The-maternal-urge-decreases-QUARTER-15-extra-IQ-points.html
It seems counter-intuitive on the face of it, but based on the evidence it does appear that high-IQ is bad in some environments. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out repeatedly it is professional intellectuals who have screwed over the West in many different ways, and it’s not like these people are “dumb” in an IQ sense.
Actually, I do find it had to not think of Sowellian-intellectuals as well as high IQ women as being “dumb”. Maybe not academically dumb, but socially or real-world dumb.
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admin Reply:
September 3rd, 2013 at 4:05 am
Slaving intelligence to the propagation of idiocy is a homeostatic circuit — preserving ‘intelligence equilibrium’ through negative feedback. Insofar as the cycle theorists of every variety are telling us something of importance, we probably shouldn’t be surprised to find that this kind of circuit design is so common. Smart-dummies are ecologically predictable.
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Puzzle Pirate (@PuzzlePirate) Reply:
September 3rd, 2013 at 5:28 am
They may be predictable but they blow me away sometimes.
“Clever sillies” isn’t the first time I’ve seen the idea of smart-stupid people come up and I’ve been meaning to point it out, but wasn’t able to find it until now. Stoddard in “The Revolt Against Civilization” makes this point by referring to them as “high grade defectives”: http://archive.org/details/revoltagainstciv00stoduoft
I know this is a long quote, but it plays on a lot of themes found in neoreaction.
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You do realize that Chip Smith is a Holocaust denier, don’t you?
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admin Reply:
September 3rd, 2013 at 6:57 am
He talks about it in the interview.
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It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that an antinatalist would fail to see the wisdom in optimizing for intelligence. Properly-functioning brains do not commit the sort of fundamental error(s) required to arrive at that position.
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Posted on September 3rd, 2013 at 7:22 am | QuoteNatural selection operates via differential reproduction. Anything heritable that increases the relative number of adults one produces becomes more common in the succeeding generation. It’s practically a truism. And it is evolution. During some era in our evolution, increased intelligence offset bigger brains that consumed more calories and that impaired parturition. It’s not clear that in an advanced civilization high intelligence is beneficial enough to offset big brain costs.
The failure of highly intelligent individuals to have children or to have very few children is clearly dysgenic, and they are ipso facto unfit in the Darwinian sense. You need at least three children to maintain the family line.
Our elite universities are (and perhaps always were) match-making services. They create and sustain the ruling elites. It is not clear that this is a high-IQ elite because the admissions criteria are heavily weighted towards PC social criteria. However, it is true that the average IQ of the elite students is above average. So the overall effect of the match-making is dysgenic for the population as a whole.
There is some speculation based on reaction times that mean IQs among Europeans have fallen by a full standard deviation over the last century or so. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but the current trend is to eliminate high-IQ individuals from the population, so the speculation is at least plausible. One wonders what the IQs of the early Indo-Europeans in and around Anatolia were. They invented agriculture and moved east and west supplanting the indigenous hunter-gathers.
A reduced IQ population might not be able to sustain a high technology civilization, so the future of the West might be in jeopardy, especially since all Western societies are experiencing large flows of low-IQ immigrants.
It should be noted that to the extent the immigrants displace the native Europeans, the immigrants are superior in Darwinian terms.
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Posted on September 3rd, 2013 at 12:16 pm | QuoteThanks for pointing out the typo.
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admin Reply:
September 4th, 2013 at 12:46 am
You’re very welcome.
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So if you know that he’s a Holocaust denier, why are you linking to him?
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admin Reply:
September 3rd, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Are you serious? Any other unforgivable thought crimes I should be attempting to obliterate from all possible contact with consciousness? A complete list of banned ideas would be helpful.
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Chip Smith Reply:
September 3rd, 2013 at 10:57 pm
Donald,
I deny that I am a Holocaust denier. But even if I accepted that silly label, it seems awfully wrongheaded to shame someone for “linking to” my comments on a completely unrelated topic.
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No, are you serious? You not only link to a known Holocaust denier, you also link to a piece in which he talks about his Holocaust denial? There are millions of articles and blogs out there with people making the trite, cliched argument that “high intelligence may very well be an evolutionary dead-end”. Is this really the only piece you could find making this argument? Are you dog-whistling to your readers or something?
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admin Reply:
September 4th, 2013 at 5:11 am
Grown ups should be able to read stuff like this without getting hysterical about it. The whole ‘dog-whistle’ nonsense is misapplied here. Despite your best efforts, there’s no ideological censorship in place. If I wanted to hammer the Jews, I’d hammer the Jews (and probably triple my blog traffic immediately).
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fotrkd Reply:
September 4th, 2013 at 10:43 am
I’ve been reading about Stuart Little (by way of Aesop’s Fables):
In April, 1938, Life ran a photo-essay called “The Birth of a Baby,” still shots from a film that depicted one woman’s pregnancy, labor, and delivery. The film had been banned in New York. Even the photographs proved too much for the American public, and the issue was pulled from newsstands in thirty-three cities. In The New Yorker, E. B. White offered a lampoon called “The Birth of an Adult,” stills of a film—drawings by Rea Irvin—portraying “the waning phenomenon of adulthood.” (Frame 1: “The Birth of an Adult is presented with no particular regard for good taste. The editors feel that adults are so rare, no question of taste is involved.”)
Of course, it’s not the same thing. It never is.
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Chip,
Cut the bullshit. People don’t wade into your swamp because they give a damn what you think about the “evolutionary trajectory of intelligence”. They wade in your filth because you’re a smut peddler and they want to deal and traffic in the smut you peddle.
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admin Reply:
September 4th, 2013 at 5:12 am
If you don’t calm down, you’re going to be banned. This blog isn’t a Sunday school.
You’re free to discuss the mistakes, evils, or what have you of holocaust denial in a civil and hopefully intelligent way, even though you’re the only person here who seems to think that’s the topic under consideration. Shouting and spluttering indignantly in an attempt to silence or ‘disappear’ other people, on the other hand, isn’t going to lead to the banishment of anybody but you. The fact that you have yet to make a single point of positive substance only makes this outcome more likely.
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How can you insinuate that Holocaust denial is simply just “hammer[ing] the Jews”?
You know it’s not the same thing.
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admin Reply:
September 4th, 2013 at 7:41 am
Since you’re clearly highly engaged with this topic, why not make a substantive statement about it, or point us to one through a link, so everyone (including me) can understand what exactly it is that you want to talk about here? If there’s anything to it — even a good reason why certain ideas should be placed beyond the pale of cultural intercourse — I’m prepared to set up a discussion thread devoted to it (if that’s what you want).
If there’s nothing to this beyond the indignation we’ve seen so far, it might be worth pointing out that I recently linked to a writer who advocates the random execution of white people — including babies — as an act of righteous racial retribution, and no one seems to have gone into emotional spasms about it.
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Some of us actually care about the elusive ‘truth’ believe it or not.
I no longer consider any kind of ‘denial’ beyond the pale. I only wish to hear
rational and non-hysterical argumentation. That’s it. Whether it’s about AIDS-HIV
‘denial,’ Global Warming ‘denial,’ Holocaust ‘denial,’ Vaccine ‘denial’ or whatever
other topic you find totally repulsive or beyond the pale, I fear people here simply don’t care.
This doesn’t imply of course that I or anyone else hear necessarily accepts skepticism
on any or all those topics, but that we are tired of consensus-based ideological
zealotry and thought crime punishments.
So in short, get the fuck out if you can’t handle it Donald.
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fotrkd Reply:
September 4th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Beyond the pale is the desired destination, isn’t it?
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You’re trivializing the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is categorically different. Historical events are not equivalent to the psychotic fantasies of some random loon.
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Posted on September 5th, 2013 at 5:18 pm | QuoteContemplationist,
Holocaust deniers don’t care about the truth. So if you’re a denier, don’t pretend to care about the truth.
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Posted on September 5th, 2013 at 6:05 pm | Quote