Michael Blowhard recently interviewed Gregory Cochran. Here’s how he introduced him:
A professor at the University of Utah, Cochran is a physicist, an anthropologist, and a genetics researcher and theorist. He’s well known for his belief that many ailments that we now think of as genetic might well be of pathogenic origin instead. With Henry Harpending and Jason Hardy, he authored a paper suggesting that the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews — as well as their pattern of genetic diseases — might be an evolutionary consequence of their history of persecution and their emphasis on jobs involving lots of brainpower. The paper received extensive coverage in the Economist and the New York Times.
Evidently Cochran was “right” about Iraq long before things hit the fan:
Since I read the paper every single day, I knew roughly how much oil Saddam was smuggling out by truck and how big a kickback he was getting on the oil-for-food exports. A horseback guess said that the whole Iraqi state was running on a billion dollars a year. Took about fifteen minutes of Googling to determine that. Not much to pay for an army, secret police, palaces out the wazoo, and an invisible, undetectable Manhattan project. Which was right on the money, as later laid out in reports by Duelfer and Paul Volcker.I’m told that the CIA doesn’t do this kind of capacity analysis, why, I dunno.
An interesting bit of perspective on our military leaders:
I think that once upon a time the service academies were competitive, and picked up some very smart people. Today, when the Air Force Academy is the 78th-best engineering school in the country, they don’t get the same quality that West Point could before the Civil War, as the best free education in the country. Today, the average general spends his spare time reading BassMaster Journal, according to Tom Ricks, and that sounds believable to me.
Here’s an amusing irony:
More often than not imperial adventures are money-losers nowadays and don’t actually make the central country stronger. For example, the Soviets thought that the tide was with them after Vietnam and intervened in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, etc. All cost money and none did them a lick of good. You could make a pretty good case that our losing in Vietnam and electing Carter sucked them into a losing game in the Third World. Aren’t we subtle?
The interview spurred me to read Cochran’s piece on Overclocking the human brain — which he followed up with an entertaining list of science-fiction scenarios:
A. The drugs could be too expensive for universal use.A1. I doubt if they would be in the millionaire-only club — I don’t think any other drug is, really, not if there are a lot of customers to spread the fixed costs over.
A2. But it would be easy for them to be too expensive for general use in non-first-world countries. Them that has, gets. Even if too expensive for general use in a poor country, the kakistocrats could probably afford them, making revolution harder. Dictators would, as a perk, get smarts as well as power. The gap between us and , say, Guinea Bissau would become awesome.
A3. There might be a medium-sized but significant time lapse between elite use and general use. Would our government disintegrate in the interim?.
A4. A cabal keeps the drugs secret and strives for world domination. Sounds like fun. See E.
B. There might be side effects.
B1. You die after a while. Flowers for Algernon.
B2. You are physically messed up but don’t die, something like the kids with torsion dystonia. I doubt this though, because these mutations are very recent and have not been refined by natural selection. And most people with that torsion dystonia mutation never get sick. Since that is the case, it is probably easy to improve them, reduce side effects, etc. They are non-optimized and so can be optimized. If nothing else, take a break now and then from the drugs. Carriers can’t do that. Hmm.. if there is a risk of physical problems, would people use them anyhow? Most would-be Olympians would take a drug that killed them in five years if it gave them a gold medal: are wannabe Nobelists that tough? Would we use it in a desperate situation, a war? Should we force it on our researchers, for the greater good?
B3. The drugs change your personality in interesting and/or undesirable ways. This side effect too could probably be ameliorated, but it might be tricky.
C. They only work if taken in early life.. Then us geezers might be pushed aside by the rising generation in a new and spectacular way. In fact, the country might not even be run by middle-aged people at all.
C1. They work some, not as well, if you start late.
D. They increase intelligence a lot. Might be possible: if we’re talking the Ashkenazi mutations, hardly anyone has more than one, just about nobody more than two. One in two thousand Ashkenazi, at most, carry a Tay-Sachs mutation and a Gaucher mutation, the two most common. But using drugs, we could in principle give you the torsion dystonia effect and the Gaucher-carrier effect and the Tay-Sachs–carrier effect and the Canavan-carrier effect. and the familial dysautonomia carrier effect. As a rough guess, might give you considerably more than 20 pts — torsion dystonia gives about ten all by itself.
D1. Add even one standard deviation and society is transformed. Somehow I think that Poul Anderson”s Brainwave missed the point.
D2. Real smart people become so much smarter as to be un-understandable by usuns. This is a lot like Vinge’s Singularity, or his old short story Bookworm, Run !.
D2a. They stop having children altogether. if you extrapolate, that is certainly the trend, at least among women. The higher the IQ, the lower the fertility.
D2b. The incomprehensibly smart all convert to Catholicism. Or to something else. To them it is obvious.
D2c. The incomprehensibly smart figure out ways to get even smarter. This story can’t be told.
D3. We run similar genetic analysis on famously smart people, looking for strong IQ genes. Before we’re done we dig up Newton, Gauss, Clerk Maxwell, and steal Einstein’s brain
D4. We test it on chimps and overshoot. That could be bad.
E. The government bans it — the powers that be want to stay the powers that be. It’ll only work if the powers that be have their own trump — say, real machine intelligence, or maybe people souped-up with a computer connection, as in Starswarm. Or, hydrogen bombs, coupled with a world technological inquisiton, especially biotechnology. See Niven’s ARM stories, Poul Anderson’s Shield, [Jerry Pournelle's] CoDominium, Vinge’s The Peace War .
E1. Some countries ban it, while other countries, or other sub-national groups, try it. Beyond This Horizon, many others.
E2. Groups that currently have such genetic advantages wish to keep their edge and support the ban. Up to now, people could kill or oppress you but they couldn’t be you, couldn’t steal your essence. That was then.
E3. The government bans it for everyone other than themselves, for good national-security reasons. We wouldn’t want super-smart terrorists, would we? Shortly thereafter, hereditary rule is imposed. it now works because regression to the mean doesn’t make the nephew stupid; intelligence is a perk of office.
E4. The government only allows use on the slow: only for leveling. Never work of course.