I think there are some useful things we can tease out of IQ tests, but there are a lot of illusions/delusions about much of the information we think we’ve elucidated from them and developed uses for, across society.

I’m also very dubious of the proposition that spelling and so forth are good proxies for actual wisdom-intelligence (call it “AWI”, as opposed to “IQ” from the tests). Dyslexia, anyone…? Plus, look at the typical pedantic ass that constantly corrects other people’s grammar and spelling–Does that have a place out of elementary school? Is such a “grammar Nazi” really smarter than the people they correct constantly, or are they just boorish assholes playing one-up games because they’re insecure or OCD?

The longer I live, the less actual faith I have in things like IQ tests, and the more interest I have in real-life performance evaluation. OK, great–You do well on tests. Wonderful. Now, let’s see how you actually manage to perform, and what the long-term results of your work are. Do you take into account second- and third-order effects? Do you look at the larger picture, and do you appreciate the impact of what you do on issues that are not related to your work on the surface level? How well do you work with others? Are you an effective team player, and what role do you normally play in a team setting?

This is all stuff that is far more important than some score you achieved on an abstract test. What you achieve has little or nothing to do with how well you do on those damn tests, but we’re using them to cut off people’s potential all the damn time. We’ve turned the IQ test into a self-licking ice cream cone, and we can see the deleterious effect of that all around us in today’s massively warped society.

Make me king for a day, and one of the first things I’d do is eliminate the entire “test regime” from top to bottom. While tests can be useful, the root issue is that they’re like Marshall McLuhan’s map–They’re a representation of a slice of information about a person’s potential, not the whole of it. Maps are symbolic representations of reality, not reality itself. There’s no little man on a map waving up at you from where you are standing, and the IQ test is similarly assumed to be such a thing, when it is not.

Until we can test for wisdom and judgment, the whole regime needs to be thrown out, and replaced with a results-oriented evaluation set. Just because you “test well” is no damn reason to think that you’re any more or less fit for some position in society.

What we’ve basically done is turn everything into a utopia for kids “who test well” and who “do well in school”, and without having taken care to ensure that the tests and the schools are actually reproducing the environment they will have to function in, we’ve utterly warped the hell out of society, because these “do well in school” types consistently try to make society look like school, instead of putting the horse out in front of the cart where it belongs.

E.g. if you rank your e-mail contacts by the quality of their spelling and vocabulary, you’ll have a pretty accurate IQ ranking, because smart people tend to read a lot. But you won’t find the nation’s smartest youth at the National Spelling Bee, because its trophies go to kids willing to grind the months away memorizing dictionaries.

I’m not sure if Borlaug is actually a hero, TBH. If he’d never done his work, all those African invaders on the borders of Europe would never have been born.

We started testing for IQ back around the turn of the last century. What we should have been seeking out, instead of “intelligence”, was a “wisdom quotient”.

Some “intelligent” people are dangerous far out of proportion to their places in society, not least because we keep ascribing things to them that they just aren’t capable of. “Expert” does not mean “Knows best”, just that the possessor of that title has been acclaimed as “brilliant” in their field of endeavor–As opposed to “wise in the way of” and “cognizant of the effects”.

It’s a framing issue; we test for IQ, whatever the hell that is, and frame it as virtue. It’s no such thing; the results of that misapprehension are all around us.

My earlier comment about “critical industries dominated by white men over 50 who got in before affirmative action” wasn’t so much about inventors and CEOs; I was referring to the sheer numerical dominance of guys like your plumber.

Think “Mike Rowe”, who’s discovered the reality: The high-functioning Asperger Syndrome types have a role, but it’s not the one they all think they have. Like anything, they’re just tools. When you get down to it, the world runs on about ten percent of the population actually doing anything effective to keep things running and make any sort of progress. The other eighty percent are just along for the ride, with another ten percent who are actively dragging things down.

Most of the people who think they’re really, really smart… Aren’t. They all want to make believe they’re Elon Musk, but Musk is a once-a-generation sort of phenomenon. The “schmot guys” can do as much harm as the stupid, and, indeed, sometimes can do damage far out of proportion to their actual position in society. Consider the case of Thomas Midgley, Jr..

Considered him, yet? Do you even know who the hell he was, and what he did?

Midgley was the “genius” chemist who invented and helped popularize tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock additive to gasoline. His brilliant invention (and, he well knew the hazards of lead poisoning, so it’s not like he didn’t know…) probably lead to the crime boom of the mid-20th Century, and decades of degradation to human mental performance around the world.

For an encore, he invented Freon.

Y’all keep right on thinking that these sorts of functional dolts are key and essential to the functioning of society. Me? I’m gonna vote for guys like my plumber as being more important to keeping civilization running, and less damaging than men like Mr. Midgley…

Intelligent non-spergs are highly attuned to social expectations. Their fierce competition for status sometimes escalates into a holiness spiral as everyone strives to be more “progressive” than everyone else. Society then becomes a stampede of lemmings racing each other into the sea, leaving the spergs behind to re-populate.

“I don’t understand! Why don’t you let [the morons] go to hell in their own way?”

“We tried it once for three months. We holed up at the South Pole and waited.

“In a week there was hunger. In two weeks there were famine and plague, in three weeks war and anarchy. We called off the experiment; it took us most of the next generation to get things squared away again.”

“But why didn’t you let them kill each other off?”

“Five billion corpses mean about five hundred million tons of rotting flesh.”

So what? Wait another two months and it’ll be one hundred million tons of dry bones that you can crush into fertilizer.

Takes fewer and fewer competent people to keep things running. The world has always relied on the “ten percent” of actual doers.

I have no idea where things are going, but I’m no longer going to allow myself to wallow in the despair of the late Cold War. Had you described the world of today to the “me” of the early 1980s, I’d have thought this some sort of utopian paradise. I’d have been incredulous that the world was no longer split up into a bipolar system between nuclear-armed idiots with their toys on a hair-trigger.

So, yeah… From my perspective, things aren’t so bad. We’ve muddled through this far, we’ll likely keep muddling along.

Oh, and by the way…? Consider this: The folks you’re bemoaning the passage of? They are, by and large, the authors of most of our problems, right along with those good things you mention. I’m not sure we should bewail their passing, especially in the elite classes. The amount of damage that the boomer generation and its immediate followers did to the body politic and the intellectual commons is past measurement, and we may do better once they shuffle off into the sunset.

Or, not.

Asteroids are irrelevant because we’re not running out of raw materials, we’re running out of good people. Half the kids in my rural white community have daddies in prison. With no resource constraints, natural selection has been replaced by female sexual selection, causing us to evolve into violent imbeciles obsessed with sex and bling.

At some point those fecund imbeciles will be breaking more things than competent people are able to fix.

But there is one thing: don’t self-denigrate; there are some really, really smart people at Harvard. Such as, for example, Dr. Cornel West, perhaps one of history’s most compelling speakers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iGeIElmCebQ

You’re a smart dude.