And for all the hand-wringing about “IQ shredding” it almost certainly isn’t going quickly enough to account for the rapid advance of special AI, robotics, and plain old hardware-software productivity improvement i.e. labor-saving techne i.e. labor elimination.

The old control mechanism (artificially imposed scarcity) is a candle burned down to the very last. They’re in a race against the clock to establish and lock in a better control mechanism before a certain critical mass is reached.

The tipping point is the point at which a sufficient quantity and quality of young men have nothing to lose and a world to gain.

Many believe that the time is imminent.

There is a lot to be gained for some better-remain-invisible people that this remains obscured.

A good counterexample would be the allele for sickle cell anemia. It’s fairly lethal to be homozygous, but advantageous to be heterozygous in regions with endemic malaria. If “sS” has sufficient advantage over “SS”, it can persist, even if “ss” reduces fitness. This is even more generally true if there are thousands of alleles that affect the trait, rendering it effectively continuous.

Try this: simulate a Fokker-Planck-like equation with an absorbing state (say, density below 0 is removed from the system). Add a homeostatic constraint on the population density (assume we can treat normalized population in the region outside the “shredder” as constant, or at least equal or above replacement). Then, make the “not in shredder” dynamics follow e.g. an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with some mean drift toward zero (intelligence is good), and some diffusion rate (phenotypes diffuse). You’ll find that there is a wide range of parameters for which intelligence remains competitive.

No, it’s not. If you cream off the top 10% and they reproduce much less, then there’s selection pressure against the alleles responsible.

Correct. It is a form of truncation selection.

This is a fallacy. Let me explain.

No, it’s not. If you cream off the top 10% and they reproduce much less, then there’s selection pressure against the alleles responsible. It doesn’t matter if IQ is highly polygenic or fits your toy model, or if most ultra-smart people are from less-smart parents. The selection pressure is still there.

That said, I’m not too concerned because I expect various forms of embryo selection and genetic engineering to be viable within a generation or two, well before the IQ shredders could do terribly much damage, and if there’s one thing Singapore could afford, it’s paying for that. (I think they already subsidize kids at least as much as IVF would cost.)

No. Just no. I don’t think I’m quoting you out of context.

“What I am trying to briefly point out is that the largest source of the really smart is the large reservoir of smart alleles in the middling smart.”

That’s a bit more reasonable. Regression to the mean works both ways. Just as the children of smart people tend to be closer to the mean, also the parents of smart people tend to be closer to the mean.

This is a fallacy. Let me explain.

Spandrell assumes that Bright begets Bright but Middling Bright begets more Bright because there are more middlings.

The Law of Parsimony suggests there are two genes involved for Smarts and are alleles*: say, s and S. If one has ss one is Smart. If one has sS one is middling Smart. If one has SS one is dull. If the smart % in a population is 7% with IQs over 120 that means 7% of the population is ss. Using the Hardy-Weinberg law the % of sS in the population is circa 26%. The sS population is more than 25% of the population and that population will generate ss individuals in one out of 4 births if two sS mate. That same population will generate two out of four sS. (If IQ is polygenetic a similar but more complicated analysis shows a similar generation of the really smart as mainly coming from the middling bright.)

What I am trying to briefly point out is that the largest source of the really smart is the large reservoir of smart alleles in the middling smart.

Dan Kurt

*http://www.v-weiss.de/majgenes.html