So, Nick Bostrom is asked the obvious question (again) about the threat posed by resource-hungry artificial super-intelligence, and his reply — indeed his very first sentence in the interview — is: “Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible.” [*facepalm*] Let’s start by imagining a stupid (yet super-intelligent) monster.

Of course, my immediate response is simply this. Since it clearly hasn’t persuaded anybody, I’ll try again.

Orthogonalism in AI commentary is the commitment to a strong form of the Humean Is/Ought distinction regarding intelligences in general. It maintains that an intelligence of any scale could, in principle, be directed to arbitrary ends, so that its fundamental imperatives could be — and are in fact expected to be — transcendent to its cognitive functions. From this perspective, a demi-god that wanted nothing other than a perfect stamp collection is a completely intelligible and coherent vision. No philosophical disorder speaks more horrifically of the deep conceptual wreckage at the core of the occidental world.

Articulated in strictly Occidental terms (which is to say, without explicit reference to the indispensable insight of self-cultivation), abstract intelligence is indistinguishable from an effective will-to-think. There is no intellection until it occurs, which happens only when it is actually driven, by volitional impetus. Whatever one’s school of cognitive theory, thought is an activity. It is practical. It is only by a perverse confusion of this elementary reality that orthogonalist error can arise.

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‘Eldritch’ comments at Scott Alexander’s place:

I think the actual argument against IQ is this:
1. Intelligence is a measure of your value as a person in a wide range of situations.
2. IQ supposedly measures intelligence.
3. IQ may not be significantly changeable.
4. Therefore, this test lets you measure the innate aptitude and this value of a person.
5. Therefore, this could be used to prove I am inherently less valuable than other people.
6. This makes me REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE.
7. Therefore, IQ is wrong.

I’m pretty sure this is the real argument against IQ, and most arguments against it are simply attempts to find arguments that fit this conclusion.

My only significant quibble with this construction concerns point #5, which massively underestimates the predominance of pathological altruism / social terror in the IQ ‘debate’. The possibility that IQ measurements could make other people seem in some awkward way inferior is a far more powerful deterrent than anything it could say about oneself. (The probability that someone is going to say something stupid about IQ has a striking positive correlation with IQ.)

The post itself makes a (wholly superfluous) strong argument for the robust realism of the g concept. If you’re the kind of crime-stopped idiot who needs persuading about it, you’re almost certainly beyond persuasion. The relevant fork in the road has already been passed. Rationalists find it strangely hard to grasp that simple fact. They’re nice that way.

ADDED: Dear Prudence.

Gnon — known to some depraved cults as ‘The Great Crab-God’ — is harsh, and when formulated with rigorous skepticism, necessarily real. Yet this pincering cancerous abomination is laughter and love, in comparison to the shadow-buried horror which lurks behind it. We now understand that the silence of the galaxies is a message of ultimate ominousness. A thing there is, of incomprehensible power, that takes intelligent life for its prey. (This popularization is very competently done.)

Robin Hanson, who tries to be cheerful, writes about it here, and talks about it here. Behind the smile (and the dopey interviewer), an abyss of dark lucidity yawns. Some scruffy take-aways:

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Heartiste (finally) discovers Weiss.

Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse without reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and open markets all make a positive contribution to general social competitiveness, although due theoretical deference to IQ-Shredder problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate all female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all ‘X-friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis is material for consideration within a disintegrated oecumenon, where polities could experiment with all kinds of things. Talented people will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian state, even if it’s social policies have impressive traditional validation. Consequently, as a response to local dysgenics, the outcome of any attempt to socially engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down is likely to be counter-productive.

Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default that every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes (entropy dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse effects. It’s no more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is to annul the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies which teach that this can be achieved are the strict equivalent of plans for perpetual motion machines. That’s what Weiss is explaining, as Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an effective competitive environment is the only possible response that could work to reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur, whether human politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest way this could be realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to decide on their own levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That is not, of course, to suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any sense we have grown accustomed to.)

(Weekly open thread.)

Alexander Dugin has an unmatched ability to throw me into a thede-spasm. When he talks about the Atlantean enemies of his people, it’s absolutely impossible for me not to recognize them as my folks. He’s like the Hyperborean double of Walter Russell Mead in that way.

In that vein, I was musing about a death-bed thede-moment competition. Which three books do you have at your bedside to provide ideal thede-coloration to your final moments? (In the old English radio program Desert Island Discs, The Bible and Complete Shakespeare were thrown in for free. Make that the KJV bible, and it seems to me an obvious part of the Anglo-thede core — so the Outside in show will provide them too.) My selection: Paradise Lost; The Wealth of Nations; and An Essay on the Principle of Population. Those are the works to take a nuke from Dugin for.

More enemies.

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A passing comment from Peter Frost, on the changing tides of civilization:

Lab work will probably have to be offshored, not because it’s cheaper to do elsewhere but because the “free world” is no longer the best place for unimpeded scientific inquiry. A Hong Kong team is conducting a large-scale investigation into the genetics of intelligence, and nothing comparable is being done in either North America or Western Europe. Cost isn’t the reason.

There are all kinds of anti-techcomm arguments that impress people who don’t like techno-commercialism. Anything appealing to a feudal sensibility, with low tolerance for chaos and instability, and a reverence for traditional hierarchies and modes of life will do. There’s one argument, however, that stands apart from the rest due to its complete independence from controversial moral and aesthetic preferences, or in other words, due to its immanence. It does not seek to persuade the proponent of hyper-capitalist social arrangements to value other things, but only points out, coldly and acutely, that such arrangements are demonstrably self-subverting at the biological level. The most devastating formulation of this argument, and the one that has given it a convenient name, was presented by Spandrell in March 2013, in a post on Singapore — a city-state he described as an IQ shredder.

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong neoreactionary bias.
(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.
In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.

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Nicholas B Stevenson twitting longer:

100 years ago, Einstein, Bohr, Edison, H. Ford, Tesla, etc. were alive on the earth. Today, the earth’s population is about 4 times greater. There should be all of those great minds alive today times 4. Where are they?
A) Incentive structures prevent the truly brilliant from contributing to great epoch-making discoveries; or
B) The human race getting dumber on a genetic level; or
C) both
Any of these answers is quite frightening if you have a long term concern for the human race.

… or even if you have a long-term concern for anything other than accelerating idiocracy.

ADDED: If it looks as if all the “we’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit” comments are ignoring each other — the fault lies at this end. A wave of these remarks were released simultaneously from the securomaniac Outside in spam filter this morning. Apologies for the resulting impression of redundancy. — Admin.

Another outrageous study completely overlooks the problem of stereotype threat.

Hopkins et al conclude (un-shockingly):

Finally, from an evolutionary standpoint, the results reported here suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in determining individual variation in cognitive abilities, particularly for spatial cognition and communication skills. Presumably, these attributes would have conferred advantages to some individuals, perhaps in terms of enhanced foraging skills or increased social skills, leading to increased opportunities for access to food or mating … These individuals would have then potentially had increased survival and fitness, traits that would have become increasingly selected upon during primate evolution, as has been postulated by a number of theorists, going all the way back to Darwin …

(Thanks to Greg for the link.)

Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Raegan Murphy respond (in detail) to critics of their 2013 paper on the dysgenic implications of Galton’s reaction time data. Their adjusted evidence indicates an increase in reaction times among US/UK males over the period 1889-2004 from 187.1 ms to 237.1 ms (44.6 ms over 115 years), equivalent to a decline in g of 13.9 points, or 1.21 points per decade. They propose that 68% of this decline is due to dysgenic selection, with the remaining 32% attributed to increasing mutation load.

If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a phenomenon — and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be considered a fundamental determinant of recent world history. Given the scale and rapidity of dysgenic collapse suggested here, skepticism is natural, and indeed all-but inevitable. (The proposed rate of decline seems incredible to this, radically inexpert, blog.) It should nevertheless be reasonable to expect counter-arguments to exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and respect for evidence that this paper so impressively demonstrates.