Beroe is just being honest; Galton was the guy who coined the term (at least according to himself) and the rosy visions he had of healthy young university men getting Certificates Of Fitness awarded over their lifetimes by their teachers, etc. and going on to marry suitable young ladies at an early age and having a minimum of three sons who would pull up the average of the "V and above" classes (the very cream of the human crop), with his little talks and lectures to local societies interested in Eugenics...
.... well, in practice, it all ended up in the heaps of skulls. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
This board seriously needs a mute-user function. It gets tiresome having to scroll past the same hobbyhorses from the same few usernames under every post.
Antisemitism in Europe had been intense for millennia, and the salient difference in the early 20th century was that they finally had the industrial capacity to conduct much larger pogroms than before.
Delays in genetic enhancement technology are extraordinarily harmful. I think the stigma prevents open discussions and serious evaluations of the possible returns.
There are two big holdups. One is that we barely understand how anything works. It's rarely as simple as fixing a single gene, and doing so is too likely to reveal other genetic dependencies. The other is that we have extremely limited capabilities to modify genes. CRISPR is a big advance, but it may make undesired modifications and miss others. There has been a lot of progress, so we should keep up and even expand the funding even if it seems to be off on a tangent. CRISPR, for example, came from studying insect immune systems. You never know what is going to turn up where.
"you give a license to the left to blame white people for everyone else's problems"
Isn't that ... exactly what's been happening? I can't tell if your conditional phrasing is just a rhetorical posture or if you've actually been living in a cave.
As I understand it, what happened was that Scott went looking for jobs, all the prospective employers kept reading squid314 (which came up in Google searches for "Scott Siskind", unlike SSC) and telling him that having a blog was incompatible with being a psychiatrist (as he told it, it wasn't even the content of the blog, just the blog's existence), and so he burned squid314 and went pseudonymous.
However, Cade Metz burned Scott's pseudonymity (and Scott made peace with that in the first post of ACX, "Still Alive"), so that's now a sunk cost and this probably isn't such a big deal anymore.
I'd agree that, if your objective is to understand Godel's incompleteness theorems, there are substantially better ways to do so today than working your way through GEB.
However, as a piece of art, I judge GEB to still be on the efficient frontier. (Granted, that may just be because I haven't been exposed to works that surpass it; happy to look at nominations!)
This article is excellent! It's pretty impressive that your attempt to steelman the cooky anti liberal eugenicists sounds infinitely more persuasive than any actually existing anti liberal eugenicist.
Errr, I read the post as perfectly mastering two ITTs here - Intellectual Turing Test: similar to but not exactly steelmaning. Scott showing he can present both positions as eloquently as their best resp. adherents would. - Knowing Scott's writings over the years, his own position is actually very close to the "cooky eugenicist". As is mine. (Not sure what "anti liberal" means in this context. Anti-Lefty? Anti-D? Me from Europe. Oh, no need to explain.)
Case and point, this line got a chuckle out of me from the irony:
>I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”.
since a younger version of Scott professed support for a very similar proposal (I believe it was UBI-contingent-on-sterilization). I can only assume this was a self-aware jab at his earlier beliefs.
:D Yes, though I am not sure that Scott is really convinced this is such an evil thing. I assume a) he is no longer that worried about the left side of the curve: We shall be able to provide for them. b) he is wondering more how to get the right side to reproduce. Lately, The Zvi wrote repeatedly about how to incentivize those to have kids (and Scott met his wife discussing Singapore's attempts to lure academics into breeding ). - After "the singularity", none of this may matter no more.
But *why* was it tabooed? I mean it's obviously a good idea. The clear reason is that you can't trust any human authority to implement it without bias. And the historical evidence is that you can't.
Fortunately, there's now a better option. (Well, it's almost ready.) CRISPR geneline editing. This should first be tested against things like Huntington's disease, thalassaemia, and perhaps sickle-cell anemia, and then gradually expanded into other generally accepted conditions, and it should REQUIRE totally voluntary acceptance. Perhaps it should even be charged for, though I'd prefer that it be considered a public health measure. The real question is should "cosmetic changes" be allowed? Genes to increase height, e.g. I'm inclined to think that should be discouraged, perhaps by a high tax.
I mean I just think that's an empty criticism. You can't trust humans to administer any policy without bias. That's just the nature of humans and power. Eugenics is no special exception and I think that having strictly-enforced rules against violence (which we already have) is more than sufficient to protect against abuses. Having completely voluntary incentives for low IQ people to not reproduce would be perfectly fine.
The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Actually, eugenics is a special kind of thing here, but it's not unique. Nationalism is the same kind of thing, and so is racism. There are a few others. Their defining characteristic is the claim "My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes.". Anything of that nature is too dangerous to allow humans to control it, so should currently be tabooed. And the part that makes it too dangerous is " so we should rule and you should submit". Even if the first part is objectively true, that part is too dangerous.
Note that by this argument there are forms of eugenics that should not be tabooed. And forms of racism. But the general term is used to include the should-be-prohibited subcategories, and thus should not be acceptable.
"My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes."
And that distinguishes them from ... what other political organization, exactly? Again, I feel this is an empty criticism.
Every political group wants the power to force their outgroup to submit. You don't prevent that by tabooing group identification, you prevent it by having a carefully constructed constitution. The greatest historical strife has arguably arisen over religious differences, but that wasn't fixed by outlawing religion - it was solved by making sure that religious ideology was explicitly barred from government policy. Saying that ethnicity-based identity groups pose a unique threat is, I believe, an isolated demand for rigor.
I would submit that nationalism at least *doesn't* necessarily demand that the outgroup submit. It *can*, of course, but it can also say "my group is good and should rule *here*, we're fine with you lot ruling yourselves over there as long as you don't try to tell us what to do here". There is such a thing as e.g. a Swedish nationalist, and they aren't secretly plotting to recreate the Kalmar Union.
It's the supposedly more enlightened -isms of the 20th and 21st century that demand they should rule everywhere, as soon as they can get around to it.
Yes, they all want it. It's quite common. This doesn't make it good. And there are degrees of "submit", with some being worse than others. I don't think there *is* a general answer that doesn't involve evil. Negotiated settlements aren't always possible (and even those are often due to threats rather than to "this is the best we can do".
Part of the problem is that everybody engages in motivated reasoning. And this is only "empty criticism" if you insist on seeing everything as binary rather than as a graduated scale.
It's a matter of path dependency. We've seen eugenics used to justify some pretty horrible stuff. Sure, humans are smart, so we can do horrible stuff with just about anything, but history matters. Maybe some brilliant monster will use cute kitten photos to kill millions of people somehow, but even PETA hasn't managed this yet. So, we'll consider cute kitten photos safe and acceptable until proven otherwise. There are stupider policy approaches.
>The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Ding ding ding. People don't want to have to struggle with the reality of how much actual difference there is in the clay.
There's work using CRISPR on sickle cell anemia. There have been some apparent cures. Interestingly, they don't do it by fixing the defective gene but, rather, enabling a the fetal red blood cell gene which is usually turned off early in life. I think read a complicated explanation of why in Science, but in one eye, out the other.
> Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
That's simple: intelligence has no correlation to morality. The "evil genius" is a well-known media trope for a reason! There are plenty of very good smart people, and plenty of very bad smart people.
One of the biggest intellectual failings of the past few decades has been the loss of this understanding, via the gradual conflation of concepts of good and evil with concepts of smart and stupid. We've tended to think that all hard-thinking people will be right-thinking people who agree with us, and anyone who disagrees with our perspective on morality can only do so because they're too dumb to grasp the simple truth. But nothing could be further from the truth; bad people have been using their intellect in pursuit of evil since time immemorial. There's no good reason to expect them to stop now.
The example that the ‘intelligence uber alles’ people point to is often that criminality is associated with low IQ and correspondingly decreases with high IQ, etc.
But of course this is a ridiculous argument; it is only natural that society does not criminalize evil that can be rationalized, and the sort of evil that high-IQ people do is almost always legal at the time, or impossible to punish. The common man complains that one can buy justice with riches—not wrong, but you can buy the government with smarts, too, and you can get away with a lot between the cracks of the law.
I think below a certain threshold most people or societies understand you can’t work and care for you. It’s when you’re in the gray zone above that where it seems like you could work if you tried that things get hard.
The interesting part is Galton's views of what is "obviously" desirable, moral, indicative of excellence, improving society, etc. He wants to adjust religion to get rid of it, or at least model it to something 'sensible' that sensible people of the modern era can use as a kind of prop to the idea of eugenics and so on.
But things we take for granted arising out of the whole liberal mindset would appall Galton. So what are we assuming are the "obvious" traits a society must have, that properly applied eugenics will cultivate, that future generations will think belong in the Stone Age?
This is a standard argument against eugenics that doesn't make it into the fictional dialogue, at least not directly: People are just very bad judges of what good traits look like and trying to select for them is likely to incorporate their culturally-bound biases in a way that misses important goods. Scott does allude to some of the effects of this problem in the atrocities of historical eugenics resulted in where societies made some retrospectively absurd judgments about who were to be seen as defective, but the problem of biased judgment here has a larger scope than that..
More generally, eugenics acts as an elite reproduction scheme where the advocates of eugenics tend to see themselves, at least in some ways, as part of the elite. You see a similar pattern with the overlapping world of IQ and modern race science where the people into it usually, though not always, think of themselves as part of the cognitively blessed and this implied sense of superiority permeates a lot of what they say.
You've got part of the answer. If the perceived payoff is high, and the perceived risk is low, people are likely to do the thing. Legal status is just one way of adjusting what people see the payoff and risks to be, but there are others. And, of course, "perceived" is significantly affected by your time horizon.
E.g., most people try not to fart in a loud an obnoxious manner in the presence of those they consider powerful in their social group. Legal status has no bearing here, but social standing has a lot. OTOH, for awhile I was with a group where flatulence was considered acceptable. (We were eating a lot of beans and cooked cabbage.) Among that group, covering up a fart was considered undesirable. So many people tried to emphasize the noise of their farts.
> Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
I accidentally scrolled here, and without seeing the context I assumed you were talking about *age*. Wanted to say that 85 years is actually the perfect age to commit crimes, because if caught, your punishment won't be worse than what nature has already prepared for you anyway.
Perhaps that's because you can't actually measure criminality - you can only measure *detected* criminality - and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to get away with whatever nefarious deeds you choose to perform.
And I wonder about the monetary impact of crime as correlated to IQ? It seems like it would take multiple thousands of IQ 85 bank robbers to match the amount of money that an IQ 120* white-collar criminal like Bernie Madoff stole.
*Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
This will depend a lot on how you price violent crime. sure, it takes a *lot* of petty theft to equal Madoff, but how many *murders* would you say it's equivalent to in badness?
For the most violent of violent crimes, homicide, IQ probably has little correlation with homicide rates. According to UN study roughly 80% of homicides worldwide are between family members, of which the highest percentage of that being intimate partners. Maybe lower IQ families are killing themselves at higher rates, but I don't think anyone has tried to tease out that data.
As for other violent crimes—car jacking, muggings, etc.—I wonder how much IQ is a correlative. Starting in 1960s we had huge rise in the violent crime in the US, but it started to fall in the 1990s, and now it's down to 1960s levels. Seems like something other than IQ is involved, because the rates have varied over time, while IQ distribution has remained static (except for the steadily upward incline of the Flynn Effect).
The highest correlators for violent crime seem to be sex (with males perpetrating the vast majority of violent crimes), and age with males 18-30 being the most like to perpetrate violent crimes.
> Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
Not if it's just IQ. Two standard deviations in IQ, and two standard deviations in Gumption, and one standard deviation in physical Charisma, is about as rare as three standard deviations in IQ alone but probably a better package for the CEO track. And the strictly superior "+3 standard deviations in everything" is so rare that there aren't enough of those to fill more than a tiny fraction of the CEO slots.
The really smart criminal masterminds get offers to take the fall and work the refs to get away scotfree. SBF could have pulled it off with a bit more patience. He got too greedy too soon.
But this is an arms race with another side[1]. People have an incentive to detect and deter "criminality" that meaningfully harms them; yes, that includes the challenging concentrated-benefits diffuse-harms pattern that is characteristic of a lot of high-IQ nefarious behavior.
It is easy to see instances of that pattern which are still insufficiently checked today. But we've actually patched a remarkable number of the more obvious holes of this type (this is a reason law is so complicated), and created an economy that provides good rewards to most high-IQ people who play it straight; in combination, this results in relatively few people being motivated to engage in serious white-collar crime.
1: Note that AGI has far more potential to overwhelm the defense in this arms race.
I wouldn't be surprised if this finding stemmed from back before our society did so many quasi-eugenic abortions of Down's Syndrome fetuses. There used to be a lot more Down's people and they made up a lot of the very low IQ population. They tend to be sweet-natured and not criminal knuckleheads.
Criminality peaks at 85 in the United States because the mean IQ of blacks is 85 and they are concentrated around the center of their bell curve just like other groups. No need for elaborate just-so stories about the optimum level of IQ for crime.
Embezzling enormous amounts of money is difficult to do with a below-average IQ, but it's still illegal. Rich people aren't fine with being defrauded just because the defrauder is smart. Bombers have relatively high IQs (the Unabomber being an obvious example), but we punish bombing as severely as cruder homicides.
Yeh. Of course smart people become criminals bit by and large we don’t legalise or nullify that criminality (with the exception perhaps of war criminality)
isn't this just the fact that there's a correlation, but the correlation is not one? People with relatively low IQs, have slightly higher probability of committing some kinds of street crime, but it's not all that huge difference in probability, and there's absolutely nothing that says the very smart people can't commit serious crimes, or that dumb people can't be scrupulously law-abiding.
Smart people often have better things they can do, i.e. something that pays well enough and doesn't have the downsides. The lower time preference also means you can see the downsides better.
Yeah I suspect a lot of the IQ crime correlation just comes down to being able to foresee the consequences. But I wonder if there's anything else going on there. For example, would we see the same pattern in crimes that were very unlikely to be detected?
Do you even know all the laws you are supposed to be abiding by? How do you know that you're not a criminal?
Too much attention is being focused on criminality at the expense of attending to "harming other people". The legal status of an act is significant to the extent that it adjusts the risks and the payoff of performing that action. But whether the act is desirable or not (from a social point of view) depends on whether it harms the society in which it occurs (or possibly in which the performer lives). And, of course, that judgement depends strongly on what you consider harm. And there are other valid points of view, e.g. I consider whether and action is wrong or not based on my judgement of whether it will harm me. The social context then becomes important because I live in the society, but it less important (to me) than more direct effects.
Also, the crime-IQ correlation has a major data censoring problem, since we can only identify someone as a criminal if they're caught committing a crime. Maybe the high-IQ criminals are disproportionately unlikely to be caught.
A Professor of Business Law at the University of Oslo once gave this definition of a thief: “A thief is a person that is in such a hurry to help himself to other people’s money that he does not have time to establish a limited liability company first.”
Not really, because there's an independent way to judge this: which countries would a typical person with no criminal intent prefer to live in? An excessive high-IQ crime load can be expected to result in a country that's actually worse to live in than a typical low-population-IQ country.
I do think there are countries that fit this description: North Korea is the first that comes to mind, and there are a bunch of related examples. But at least for now, it is clearly the exception rather than the rule.
You are being quite unfair to the populace of North Korea. They can be expected to have the same variations and means as South Korea. They're just operating under a very different management. (And possibly with different resources, but I don't think that's significant.)
Re: North Korea, it should be obvious that the crime load is concentrated at the top, and that's enough to make the country not worth living in. I don't know why you'd expect most readers of my comment to interpret me as criticizing the *general population* of North Korea here.
Modern Russia is a more debatable and interesting case.
There are a lot of high IQ murderers in movies and TV shows. One cliche of screenwriting is that the murderer should turn out to be richer than the initial suspect.
But, that happens a lot more in "Law & Order" than in real life. You can look up statistics for murders in Manhattan. There aren't many and they mostly involve the usual suspects rather than some interesting Patrick Bateman-type Wall Streeter.
Similarly, there's a big demand for true crime stories involving middle class white people killing each other, such as on "20/20." But most of the true crime murderers on TV tend to be small-time dopes who think their spouse's $125,000 life insurance policy would be a bonanza.
Every violent crime is negatively correlated to IQ. That's a pretty big deal.
Hijacking government policy to legally extract subsidies from fellow citizens at gunpoint is a thing, but if one compares the size of the welfare state to the size of the corporate welfare state it doesn't support your argument that high IQ people do more of the legal sorts of plundering.
Depends on what you agree is legal plundering, definitionally. Unless you can demonstrate that you’ve found a method to capture everything that could possibly count in that category (including undetected crimes and corruption, and other easy parasitism that is not illegal), then I’m going to say no, I don’t agree that observation doesn’t support me. Rather the reverse.
More than this, I think we're failing to distinguish between all the different types of evil. A partial taxonomy:
1. You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence, through poverty, since the more desperate you get the more selfish you become.
2. Emotionally-led evil, you're just angry. This is the evil of (say) a violent domestic abuser.
3. Utilitarian evil, where you try to do good things and it winds up evil because you're a mortal human and humans are really bad at moral tradeoffs. Probably positively correlated with intelligence, because you gotta be pretty smart to talk yourself into doing something that looks obviously wrong.
I suspect most of the really big evildoers of history who might initially seem to be in Category 3 are actually in Category 2 as well. Lenin, Hitler, Bin Laden etc all claimed to kill for some higher moral principle, but inevitably wound up killing people they emotionally hated anyway.
Galton and Ehrlich, to the extent they were evil, seem to at least be pure category 3.
Hitler, and perhaps to a lesser extent Bin Laden, is an example of something else: elevating what most of us would consider to be deeply evil to the level of a principle, to the extent of going against personal self-interest or the self-interest of the collective cared about.
Lenin would be 3, with some elements of 2 (a mixture of genuine hatred of injustice with being pretty reasonably embittered by his older brother's hanging) but, more interestingly, 3b: digging yourself into a deeper and deeper utilitarian hole by convincing yourself that deontology is something to be ditched entirely.
Nah, this perception is the result of successful demonizing propaganda. Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters. They were strongly influenced by some of the widespread ideas of their respective societies and took them to their logical conclusions. Sure, now with the benefit of hindsight we might say that those ideas were uniquely bad, but they weren't seen as such in Hitler's time, and Wahhabism is plenty popular and respectable in Saudi Arabia even today.
You haven't read what I am saying. They were, in their way, "idealists"; it is just that their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals* (particularly in Hitler's case, actually).
No, I just disagree. I think that Hitler sincerely loved Germany and expected his policies to be beneficial to it. Your argument proves too much, you can blame anyone who ever starts a war that "their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals*", which some pacifists may believe, but certainly isn't the mainstream view.
> Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters.
Glorifying death wasn't considered depraved in Hitler's era. For a young man, dying was the poetic thing to do.
Consider "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers", a popular German book describing a depressed young man who later kills himself. After publishing, the book inspired many suicides. Such was the culture where Hitler grew up; he only fanned the flames of the existing romantic notions in popular culture for his political goals.
There is no contradiction between "wasn't a monster" and "glorified death". It may seem so to us, because from the historical perspective, we are living in an unprecedented bubble of wealth and empathy.
>You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence,
Or not, because this describes plenty of lawyers, salespeople, financial people, and CEOs, who are just as happy doing selfish or unethical things which leave the other party worse off, just in legally-sanctioned (or even illegal-but-white-collar) ways. They're just smart enough to find ways to be selfish in which they are either unlikely to be punished or the punishment will be negligible (cf wage theft being an order of magnitude higher than "common criminal" theft).
But as a motive for criminal behavior it may well be negatively correlated. All the higher-IQ types you mentioned can operate perfectly legally, which being just as evil.
I'll push back on "perfectly legally" (using wage theft as an example again: very much a crime, it just goes unpunished), but I agree on the premise that it's not the sort of crime that tends to show up in crime stats.
But yeah. From a first order approximation, "crime" is just selfishness from people too poor (low-iq-as-a-class?) to get the state to take their side.
This is something probably already discussed in existing criminology literature, but I'm not quite sure where the line between 1 and 2 is drawn or if it should be drawn at all. A domestic abuser might have poor impulse control, or they might simply not give a shit about the well-being of their partner as long as their own well-being is taken care of. Or probably both.
I have a strong suspicion you can't make that assumption. To me it seems that for many people their sexual morality is walled off from their more normal morality. That seems to be what I observe among people I know, and it's certainly what's indicated by various popular and folk songs.
The thing is, you've misidentified the evil component of choice 3. The evil component there is the authoritarianism. This includes all aspects of "I know better than you, so I don't need to take your goals/intents/purposes/suffering/etc. into account.
Just being mistaken isn't evil. Forcing people to do things, even for actually good reasons, is already morally questionable. This leads to a whole bag of worms when you're trying to establish the rules for a society. (Yes, I think the making requirements were valid. But to call them questionable is definitely reasonable. They were a trade-off with evils on both sides.)
Real quick, what's the precise definition (or set of related definitions) of "Authoritarianism" that you're using here? Because I think I agree, contingent on how you're defining it, but it's a pretty broad term.
Authoritarianism is basically the belief that someone (the authority) has the right to tell everyone else how to act (Note the lack of restrictions in what they can say) and that the speaker (or someone he designates) has the right to speak in that name of that authority.
Okay, in that case I disagree, since that essentially amounts to a roundabout definition of a state. i.e. It applies equally well to authoritarian dictatorships and functional democracies.
The authority derived from a state is not inherently evil - in fact, it's arguably to best solution to many types of coordination problems - see Scott's own writings on the matter[1].
People don't usually use "authoritarian" so broadly, though - they usually reserve it for states where overuse of authority leads to harm. (And you seem to agree on that implicit definition based on what you said above, which makes me confused as to why you provided the definition you did.) The authority itself is not evil, it just lowers the barrier for committing utilitarian evil - so the evil in authority is when you put too much confidence in the moral authority it gives you.
...I feel like I've started rambling at this point
It's not inherently evil, but it inherently has tendencies in that direction. Being a democracy doesn't protect you against that. And good kings have existed. India even has legends of a good Emperor.
It's not the authority that is evil, it's the use the authority is put to. But authority has inherent in it the ability to commit evil without noticing it, and certainly without caring. You could ask various Indian tribes if being a democracy prevented the US from evilly exercising its authority.
Is authority the best solution? It's probably the only solution to living in groups. This doesn't mean it doesn't have inherent problems.
This. We have a basically mammalian brain, grounded in affect and emotion, but with a large, powerful and evolutively recent symbolic processing module tacked on. It's so poorly debugged, that it can destabilize the whole system, by overwhelming channels originally made to carry sense data with symbolic imaginations, and getting itself into insane loops - losing all sense of perspective at the drop of a hat, all the way into depression and mental illness.
And people want to help the human race by boosting up this system even more? It's a wonder that symbolic thinking hasn't gotten us to extinction yet, and people still think the solution is *more of it*?
You've got this exactly backward. Symbolic thinking has raised the human race out of the worst abuses of living in nature. It has lifted billions into living like kings and queens did only mere hundreds of years ago.
So yeah, people still think more of that would be a good thing.
Thanks for the obvious objection, it had to be said. I'm not actually proposing that we go "back to the trees", except maybe for the week-end.
My point is to propose that with intellect we may have reached a point where secondary effects are becoming important. Kind of like how cars and plastics have been a huge boon to mankind, but now we're breathing bad air and filling the seas with detritus.
If I had a magic wand to wish for an improvement to the human form, rather than straight up higher IQ, I'd rather ask for better inner integration, more groundedness and less tendency to feel threatened.
Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
If what you mean is that desperate people will undertake desperate acts, well, that's true. But symbolic thinking won't change the axioms and postulates that you're working from.
If you mean people think smarter people are better...I think you need to read popular media. They may like some of the results, but they don't make what you think is the obvious attribution.
> Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
That's not true. Quite the opposite in fact, because only intellect can question the premises underlying beliefs. For instance, why is the King supposed to be above the peasant? Divine right? Who is this "God" fellow anyway?
Those questions lead directly to giving up the premise that any particular person has more rights than any other.
Only poorly applied intellect can justify any morality, a sort of intellectual process that does not question its own premises.
Clearly false. Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time. And intellect is always used to justify the resulting conclusion. A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
What one CAN do is try to evoke challenged instincts within the disputant one is arguing with. Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind. (Of course, most argument is really directed at those listeners who haven't yet decided. Or is a form of social display.)
* For instinct the meaning I'm using is "non-verbal mental process". I don't like the term, but I can't think of a better one.
> Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time.
Yes, and only intellect can question the assumptions underlying each instinct to discover which is more justified, if any.
> A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
Which then raises questions about the axioms, thus contradicting your own claim.
> Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind.
This is not an argument that intellect cannot change people's minds, it's merely an indication that a particular approach is not suited to the problem at hand. We can achieve great heights by applying intellect to build towers, but no amount of intellect will build a tower to the moon.
You have to use intellect to solve the problem at hand in the most appropriate way (which only intellect can elucidate). For some people that might require pointing out deductive mistakes, for others that might be specific examples with emotional connections, for yet others it might require patiently listening to their concerns which led to them to a particular conclusion and then explaining how those concerns can be address in your approach.
Regardless, it remains simply false that intellect can justify any morality. Kant demonstrated quite clearly that pure reason can justify many moral prescriptions.
I've seen criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis which goes (put somewhat uncharitably), "If you say that a Greater Intelligence would not necessarily be more moral, you go against the entire concept of moral progress altogether! And if we grant that education does not necessarily increase the morality of a population, by what right should the more educated populace be an authority at all on moral decisions?" (This style of thinking bothered me much less when it wasn't at risk of preventing avoiding an apocalypse.)
Anyone who's in favour of the taboo and legal ban on incest because children of incest are disproportionately likely to have birth defects is already a eugenecist whether they like it or not. Spoken as a person who fully supports the taboo on incest.
I think few of these people are suddenly okay with incest provided that everyone involved is using contraceptives, which suggests that the birth defect argument is not their true reason but a rationalization.
I do agree that anyone using this rationalization is already in some sense a eugenicist, although I think the argument would benefit from tabooing the word "eugenics" completely.
I'm not sure about "few" here. German law criminalizes sex between adult siblings only when vaginal sex is involved - consensual incestuous sex acts that cannot possibly be reproductive are not criminalized.
(Interestingly, consensual incest between adults is legal in France, Spain and... Russia? That is odd. I knew about France because of two middle-aged siblings who moved from the UK to France for that reason.)
Interesting, I didn't know that. The German law is certainly evidence against my claim. Although even in that case I notice that the prohibition is against all heterosexual incest, with no contraception exception. Is that really where we would expect the equilibrium to land in a universe where most people did not have a reflexive disgust for incest?
German law was likely written by a bunch of rationalizing lawyer/politician types that followed the logical reasoning of reducing harm from birth defects. But I'd bet the broad majority of the population would socially ostracize anyone engaging in incest regardless of the legality.
Also, the law involved is a bit of a mess. The official reasoning behind it, as per the constitutional court, is mostly "well, it has been here for a long time" and the good to be protected is the family... For a law bound to relationships by blood, not by family, in a case in which the people involved didn't even know they're related by blood (both were adopted by different families, they later married and what they sued against was annulling their marriage because them having sex would be criminal).
There are better, non-eugenic reasons for tabooing incest. Mine is that incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common. As long as the liberal state gives broad deference to parental authority within the domestic sphere, a hyperstrict cultural shame campaign against any form of sexual contact with your (step) children or siblings is the most effective tool we have for protecting children from the people they have to get naked with on a regular basis.
No, but at least parent-child incest potentially is under a law against abusing the position of someone being in your charge for sexual purposes. Of course, siblings can have a lot of informal authority without a formal authority to bind that to and all that authority can be used without having to physically assault or explicitly extort the victim
The rest of this comment was a result of me misreading the thread and writing something unrelated, so I removed it
> incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common
> ... is the most effective tool we have
seems like there's some tension here. do you think that there simply are no possible more effective tools? do we have evidence on how effective the cultural shame campaign is? it's not clear to me that we are in a position to know the answer to either of these questions.
I've heard a theory that expanding and strengthening the (pre-existing) taboo on incest was actually a sneaky way to consolidate state power, by hampering the ability of extended families to maintain local political factions through strategic marriages.
Excellent questions. I agree it's hard to measure prevalence and therefore the success of any interventions (Stoltenbergh 2011 have a meta-analysis which suggests CSA is more prevalent in North America, Africa and Australia but that it matters a lot how you ask). It's possible the stigma contributes to underreporting, but since harm reduction will inevitably require separating kids from their abusers it's hard to imagine a non-stigmatizing approach.
I think there are plenty of plausibly more effective programs, from age-appropriate sex ed starting in kindergarten to routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers. The problem with all of them is that they'd meet intense resistance from cultures that prize the "private sphere" and its right to be exempt from public scrutiny—here I'm heavily informed by theoretical arguments from feminists like Susan Okin and Carole Pateman about the historical emergence and function of the public/private dichotomy.
"routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers"
Well if you want to make sure actual abuse is skimmed over and non-abusive situations result in kids being hauled away, go right ahead with that brilliant idea. I think "trained" social workers are trained only in the particular ideological shibboleths of the day where they are trained, so you can shoot up heroin in front of your toddler* and still be considered a 'good mother' but if you don't agree that the same toddler is fully capable of deciding to socially transition their gender you are a horrible abuser bent on driving your kid to suicide.
*Based on story I heard at work about a social worker claiming a client was a good mother because she always turned her back when shooting up while her kid was in the room. How about maybe NOT SHOOTING UP HEROIN IN FRONT OF A TODDLER AT ALL, HUH? Naturally there were no moves afoot to take the kid away from such a 'good' mother.
I was shocked, and that's here in small-town Ireland. As I've said before, I thought I was cynical about human nature when I worked in education grants, then when I worked in social housing I discovered I wasn't nearly cynical enough.
"The marriage of a brother and sister would excite a feeling of loathing among us that seems implanted by nature, but which further inquiry will show, has mainly arisen from tradition and custom.
…(4) The harm due to continued interbreeding has been considered, as I think, without sufficient warrant, to cause a presumed strong natural and instinctive repugnance to the marriage of near kin. The facts are that close and continued interbreeding invariably does harm after a few generations, but that a single cross with near kinsfolk is practically innocuous. Of course a sense of repugnance might become correlated with any harmful practice, but there is no evidence that it is repugnance with which interbreeding is correlated, but only indifference; this is equally effective in preventing it, but is quite another thing.
(5) The strongest reason of all in civilised countries appears to be the earnest desire not to infringe the sanctity and freedom of the social relations of a family group, but this has nothing to do with instinctive sexual repugnance. Yet it is through the latter motive alone, so far as I can judge, that we have acquired our apparently instinctive horror of marrying within near degrees.
…A great deal more evidence could easily be adduced, but the foregoing suffices to prove that there is no instinctive repugnance felt universally by man, to marriage within the prohibited degrees, but that its present strength is mainly due to what I call immaterial considerations. It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister would do now. "
I think Galton is wrong and it will trend in the opposite direction; incestuous marriage or partnerships will be regarded as "well if they're not having kids and it's all consensual, why not?" rather than making "non-eugenic marriages" socially repugnant.
Galton's cousin Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood.
It was American eugenicists who did most of the research that led to our modern laws against incest in Protestant countries. (Catholics had long been against cousin marriage.) British eugenicists were too loyal to the Darwin family to deal much with the topic.
Isn’t the current research mostly that Galton was right? That while systemic inbreeding is bad, the random first cousin marriage is barely even worth tracking.
There's a problem like that with first cousin marriage. Saudi Arabia is full of people with birth defects because they didn't have much of a dating scene. There's a theory that the Council of Agde, which sounds like a supermarket chain, with its prohibition on first cousin marriage had a major impact on Western European civilization.
With regards to Ehrlich: I concede that Coria's characterization of him *in the beginning* can be argued. But it is now clear that his most famous argument was, and is, fundamentally incorrect (and has done real harm). Ehrlich declines to concede that his entire professional career made the world worse, which is his privilege. It is also a moral failing.
WAS it fundamentally incorrect? You say that based on what?
The way the future of the world is likely to play out is that China just barely managed to scramble onto the helicopter in time. Everyone later than China (Most of Africa and South Asia -- and probably most of the Arab world once the oil runs out) is probably doomed. The path of light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing to services is probably shutting down, visibly for political reasons but more importantly because machines will do the jobs. We won't need to argue about whether we should "export jobs" to Bangladesh or import Mexicans, we'll do neither and have robots doing the work.
Previously this was not a problem because excess farmworkers could move to the factory, excess factory workers could move to retail. That's probably over and, even if within the wealthy countries society is willing to help out via moves like UBI, that won't extend to those poor countries.
Now, if those countries had frozen their populations at the 1970 level, everything would have been so much easier. There would have been money to improve things starting at that point, money to build few but good schools and hospitals rather than many but bad. Entry onto the path to modernity a whole lot sooner.
It was not not fore-ordained that China would be the last one out; it could have been that South Asia and Africa escaped hopeless poverty first. But people chose to mock Ehrlich on minor points rather than on the big picture, and we are where we are today, simultaneously crying about whatever is the disaster du jour (not enough water! species dying!) while insisting that doubling the number of people is quite manageable and won't cause any problems, no sirree.
I don't think you really can call Ehrlich's mistakes "minor". Pretty much everything he predicted was directionally incorrect: death rates went down, not up. Countries like India and Egypt, which he advocated should stop receiving food aid because they were lost causes both massively increased production and are now able to afford imports of food from the global market for what they don't produce themselves. Percentage of the global population "undernourished" went down, not up, over time.
It's sort of why one should never warn the driver of an obstacle. They might swerve and avoid it. and you'd wind up being wrong to have warned them. Prophesy stories have a lot in common with time travel stories.
Except we didn't "swerve". Ehrlich's policies (such as taxing families increasingly by # of children, financial incentives for sterilization, research into mass-sterilizing agents for the US, and eliminating food aid to India and Egypt because they were lost causes) were, by and large, not adopted. Instead food production was massively increased.
Besides, Ehrlich explicitly claimed that the obstacle was unavoidable:
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
There was a level of triumphalism in the 1960s followed, starting in the late 1970s, by a more global rethinking in which the problems of the rapidly growing "third world" appeared increasingly intractable. I took a look at the What Can You Do? chapter of the Population Bomb. He has sections on letter writing, proselytizing, organizing action groups and so on. Perhaps the most controversial statement was that long term population growth should be zero, but the means of achieving it had to include changing attitudes, increased awareness of ecological limits, improving agriculture - especially tropical agriculture, improved contraception and a host of other things, most of which were implemented in various forms.
He addresses eugenics and argues against it. He points out that intelligence has genetic and environmental components, and, if someone is concerned about increasing overall intelligence, they should focus on improving education. The goal was to slow population growth to zero, increasing available resources and minimizing environmental degradation. He points out that belief in eugenics is usually directed against out groups, not something to be encouraged. I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause. Improving health care for children, vaccination, food support and propaganda in popular culture were the primary means of attitude change, though China did have its coercive one child policy. That wasn't Ehrlich. He wasn't running China.
His next chapter, What If I'm Wrong, is basically Pascal's wager. It's applicable today. Suppose we, even with existing technology, could support 20 billion people, what mistake would we be making by world stabilizing population under 10 billion. It's an easily correctable mistake. It would be easy to adjust attitudes and, in maybe 60 years, raise the population to 20 billion. His goal was to match population and resources by means other than famine, war or pestilence.
> I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause.
I will provide citations (using https://archive.org/details/populationbomb00ehrl/ as a reference since I don't have a physical copy), but all of these seem to be in Chaper 4, "What needs to be done", which discusses policy (as opposed to Chapter 5, "What can you do?" which is aimed at the individual level):
Taxing people for having children: p136 (his example involves increasing taxable income by $600 for the first 2 children, $1200 for subsequent).
Luxury taxes on goods used to raise children beyond the "essentials" (specifically mentioned as taxable: cribs and diapers): p137.
Establishing a Department of Population and Environment, which would research the development of mass-sterilizing agents (for use at home and to help underdeveloped countries): p138.
"Triage" of under-developed countries is necessary, as some will not be able to feed their population even with aid (he quotes "Famine 1975!" for his examples, and says it will be remembered as one of the most important books of our age): p160.
Making development aid to specific "areas" of under-developed countries, contingent on population control, including internal migration controls, because only some parts of countries will receive help: p164
Redrawing the political boundaries of under-developed countries to make the above easier: p165
"we should have applied pressure" on the government of India to sterilize all males with 3 or more children: p165
That’s all completely wrong. China is in trouble - albeit not as much as some western countries - because of its falling demographics. It is this that is causing some people to think that it’s boom is over, and certainly ageing populations are a major headwind to economic growth.
China is also in trouble for its not-falling-early-enough demographics. As much as they like to pride themselves on their unappologetic imperialist desires, the reason why they risk a world war by sending fishing vessels in territorial waters of others countries is because they have a big and hungry population that needs proteins to thrive and they don't have enough ressources at home.
Pointing to a large aging population and saying that the only solution is to add more children is litterally like pointing at a late-stage ponzi scheme and saying that the only solution is to add another layer. Sometimes you've got to blow the bubble and suffer the consequences.
This is totally false. China is not struggling to feed its population, and in any case buying food is much cheaper than war. Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
That's not a dilemna that people ever have. In practice you buy food until you can't afford to buy it anymore, and then you make war whether you can afford it or not.
> Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
You're proving too much. As long as there is food being wasted in the parts of the world that are not overpopulated you could say the the world *as a whole* is not overpopulated and it's just a distribution issue ; denying that some regions of the world definitely are.
Obfuscation. Your central assertion (that China is preparing war because it is unable to feed its people) is completely false. They might be preparing war but its not because they can't feed their people. According to Google, Chinese food imports amount to 100b/yr, at a time when the Chinese current account surplus is 100b/month. This is not a country struggling to pay for enough food to feed itself. Nor is `inability to feed its population' the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine, or the US invaded Iraq.
Russia's supposed imperialism also has been with respect to neighbors, usually in response to western countries destabilizing those neighbors. I sup[pose one could count Syria and such in Africa, except that (unlike the United States), Russian troops are in those countries at the request of the recognized government there.
"outside china" does a lot of work when approximately all the flashpoints are regions China claims have always been theirs (and never mind the views of the locals).
I would argue that the CCPs' actions wrt Tibet, the Uighurs, the disputes in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and the persistent threat of something going down with Taiwan are all Imperialist.
I note also that Chinese troops do regularly skirmish on the border with India, though it's defensible to not regard that as "combat"
They've been in combat with India more recently than that. I guess you could call it a police action or some such euphemism, but India and China are in earnest.
Can you point to evidence that South Asia and Africa have missed the helicopter? The largest countries in each (India and Nigeria respectively) just clocked GDP growth rates of 8.7% and 3.6% respectively. Also, if machines can do lots of production...that should make us richer, not poorer. Wealth is determined by how much stuff you can produce, not by how many people it takes you to make stuff. Insert story about `if you don't want to use earth movers because digging with spades employs more people, then why use spades, hire even more people to scratch at the dirt with bare hands'
Are we sure having robots do the farming is a great idea? Do people farming now really want to re-invent themselves as robot management experts? Do they want to sell their farms and go do something else? If they don’t want to, are people sure they’ll be happier afterwards even though they think they won’t?
I understand the concern, but there is a difference between robots doing literally all the farming, and robots doing most of the farming while a long tail of hobbyists of various sorts continue doing some farming as well. I look at the Amish, I don't see them seriously threatened, and as long as that remains true I'm not that worried.
I do always love the tension between the two widely held beliefs that “overpopulation isn’t a problem”, and “omg we are burning through the earths resources and biosphere too quickly. Seems like even before it was clear that the curve was working in our favor on item 1 it had become politically verboten. And on top of that even if we stabilize at 10 billion or whatever, it is literally twice as hard a problem as stabilizing at 5.
I agree Ehrlich's position seemed much more defensible in 1970 than today, although Coria's point was trying to draw a line between "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil", and while I think the amount of stupidity it takes to believe Ehrlich's position now has gone way up, I don't think that affects the dichotomy.
I kinda do think being wrong can make you morally culpable. Specifically, if you’re in a position of authority and you could be right by exercising a reasonable amount of intellectual discipline and spending a reasonable amount of effort, then you’re culpable for being wrong. Don’t know if this applies to 1970 Erlich or not. He seems to have been in a position of authority, and I expect he expended a reasonable amount of effort, but I would not be surprised to discover he was lacking in discipline.
Is that a good stance for us to take, individually or especially as a society? There's got to be some room for blaming people for the results of their actions as well as their intentions, otherwise every true-believer mass murderer could get a pass. We should reserve the right to call out evil methods or evil suggestions, even if they seem right at the time. It's better to miss out on an opportunity for improvement if the alternative is a definite atrocity.
And what would due diligence look like in 1970, regarding population? Even by the 80s and 90s population was being taught in schools as a major issue (and maybe after that, I wouldn't know). The consensus opinion at the time was that he was correct, and that would have been the consensus even if he personally had never said a thing.
If a doctor kills a patient, but they believed their actions were going to save the patient, and there TRULY was no way they could have known better, then I do not think they are ethically culpable.
If you think a "true-believer serial killer" is different from "a doctor that accidentally kills several of their patients", I suspect that's probably because you think the "serial killer" actually DID have a way to know better and failed to exercise it. (If you think there's an ethical difference for some other reason, please share!)
Of course, society may sometimes need to defend itself from well-intentioned-but-wrong people by stopping them with force. I think defending yourself is conceptually distinct from punishing the other guy, though occasionally both may result in the same action being taken.
Society might even need to penalize that person as a deterrent, if there isn't a reliable way to distinguish between "well-intentioned but wrong" and "pretending to be well-intentioned to avoid punishment". I still think that's distinct from assigning ethical culpability to wrong people who genuinely couldn't have known better.
I think it's also worth noting that there can be situations where X is the best strategy conditional on Y being true, and it seems very likely that Y is true, but X is still not actually the best strategy when taking uncertainty into account. Sometimes the harm if you're wrong is so big that a small probability of that harm outweighs the larger probability of some benefit. Sometimes there's an alternative strategy that hedges your bets, which is slightly less helpful if Y is true but much less harmful if Y turns out to be false. If you do your best possible analysis of all available evidence and conclude, correctly, that there is a 95% chance that Y is true, that is still not the same as a 100% chance and does not license you to act as if it was a 100% chance.
I guess the short answer is that I'm a deontologist, and some approaches to solving problems are just simply off the table from the start. Mass-sterilization is one of those items. Experimental treatments (going back to your doctor example) is not.
I'm reminded a bit of the Olympic gymnast doctor who was giving the female gymnasts repeated and unnecessary genital examinations (there's apparently some reason to do a similar examination) and abusing these girls for years. He was able to claim, with some support, that he was not abusing them. What should have happened is probably some process to review the necessity of such procedures or to have a female doctor involved instead. We take the "well-meaning but wrong" possibility off the table by simply removing the possibility. Similarly, we don't know if the doctor is trying out the best treatments he knows and it happens to kill the patient, or he's intentionally killing the patient. We therefore have medical review panels and investigate the situation instead of taking his word for it.
Yes, and I'd argue that the threshold for what counts as "reasonable" amount of effort and discipline must rise dramatically with the severity of your proposed action. It could be argued that some actions are so drastic that no human agency could reasonably supply sufficient effort and discipline to justify them.
This sort of clause seems dangerous unless you have a way of determining this type of culpability a priori. This discipline you point at being essentially an internal psychological phenomenon, I doubt this would work.
I believe Bryan Caplan argues that "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil" are more continuous, rather than discrete (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery).
If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
Similarly, if you make policy decisions, with anything but the most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis, and those decisions have the potential to hurt millions of people, (let alone cases like Ehrlich's where you know you will be hurting people and the question is only the payoff), that would seem to also be on the evil spectrum, rather than a member of a totally different category.
By extension, then, anyone who makes policy decisions is evil (because we should all understand our flaws and that none of us is capable of consistently doing most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis.)
But policy decisions still need to be made. What do we do?
Simple rules like "no extermination camps" and "fair trial" go a really long way to preventing the worst kinds of mistakes. Deontology gets a bad rap around here sometimes, but it's a great system for preventing repeat bad outcomes.
> If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
What if you shoot the bullets directly upward vs at an angle? Then you're back to just fine again? I'm being serious, by the way. Turns out, if you shoot a bullet directly up, it will come tumbling back down and be fairly harmless whoever/whatever it might hit. If you shoot it at an angle, whatever it hits will be very unhappy.
I dunno, man. I just find it hard to believe that the guy doesn't grasp, somewhere in the back of his head, just how bad he is at extrapolating from current data. Which may just be me, sure.
I often think about this in the context of HIV denialists, or vaccine-autism-ers, or other similar views. There was a point where their view was a little contrarian, but perfectly reasonable. By now they are completely utterly verifiably wrong and harmful. There’s probably a point in between where some lines were crossed. But the people who stick with it do so because of their instinct of resisting criticism in the early days, which was good for science, but now is bad for science.
Population Control a half century ago was a common cause among Republican Protestants, like the Rockefellers and Bushes, to back. Their specific concern was, I would guess, Irish Catholic Democrats: e.g., Bobby Kennedy had ten kids (and one is currently running for President). But white Catholic birthrates fell sharply and Protestants lost interest in the subject over time.
Ehrlich was had good intentions, and he was smart. World population was rising rapidly and would lead to resource related collapse. He presented three scenarios of collapse. For rhetorical reasons, he focused on the impact of rising world population on the US since his audience was largely in the US, but he ignored the fact that being rich, the US would be able to mitigate more of the effects than in a poorer nation. He sorted of assumed the US would be impacted much like some hypothetical average nation.
I remember the book, and I've recently reread it. It challenged a lot of ideas about world development in 1968. People took it seriously. Nations around the world encouraged the use of birth control and the adoption of new crops and agricultural practices to increase food output. The Green Revolution started in the late 1960s and was seen as essential thanks to books like The Population Bomb. Different nations adopted its policies to different degrees, but the recent rise in per capita income around the world was driven by the revolution that Ehrlich's book started.
The Population Bomb tends to get maligned much like the Club of Rome Report some years later. The Club of Rome, as it turned out, was surprisingly close to the mark. There were a few articles on it for its 50th anniversary. I was watching the eagles nearby the other day and thinking of Rachel Carson. They were beautiful birds, and it's just as well we have better pesticides and use them more carefully than DDT.
Ehrlich sounded an important alarm that led to what someone here called quasi-eugenic policies like partial sterilization through birth control. We also had the green revolution and big gains in development around the world, policies pushed in response to fears of Ehrlich's dystopian vision. Would China or India really be in better shape with two billion people or more each or having endured a famine killing hundreds of millions? In hindsight, Ehrlich sounds way off the mark, but that's because people took him seriously.
I would be curious to know just how far "outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible" the Green Revolution was. Was there really no serious dissent, or was it just given less airtime on the three extant tv stations?
They knew the Green Revolution was easy, they just didn't want it. Borlaug discussed it with his bosses at the Rockefeller Foundation and defied their orders. Since he was the only person to do it, they were right to forecast that no one would, at least on the scale of a decade.
Wait, are you saying the Green Revolution was somehow actually the work of one person going against the system? I would have thought the Green Revolution, while it had important figures, actually relied on millions of people acting within various systems.
No major movement is only ever just one person, but Normal Borlaug singularly made a massive difference and without him it's possible it would not have happened.
Ehrlich was one of the scientists pushing for the Green Revolution. Tropical agriculture had been neglected. The big ag outfits were focused on the temperate zone where the money was. It was considered a long shot, but one that had to be tried. Even proponents, rightly, expected that Improving tropical agriculture alone would not be enough without population control as well.
I think Borlaug had a staff of several dozen. First he spent a decade doing normal things that he was instructed to do, like disease resistance. Then he spent a decade adapting the wheat to fertilizer. Such a long project can't have been behind his boss's back, so he must have brought them around, but they definitely were against it at the beginning. Then he, personally, took the wheat from Mexico to India, which suggests a pretty small cast of characters. Other people played a bigger role of adapting it to India and pursuing the same strategy with other grains.
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain."
Did we? We banned coercive eugenics, but last I heard we aren't randomizing reproductive pairings, sperm banks show a sharp skew in preferences towards the over 6ft and accomplished, and assortative mating in humans seems to be a thing and the effect is likely getting stronger in USA.
Yeah. Even things like selective abortion for Tay-Sachs (as mentioned in the post) and Down Syndrome are very mainstream and widely, although not universally, accepted. Probably the meaningful distinction is between decisions made by parents and those imposed or encouraged by a government.
Widely accepted by readers of this blog (myself included). Not so long ago, Ohio tried to ban second-trimester abortions specifically in the case of Down syndrome. That seemed unbelievably perverse to me, but Facebook friends told me that my moral compass is simply not set up in the same way as most American's moral compass.
This is interesting, since then one would have to argue that the people behind the Ohio ban would see killing people as OK, or at least the lesser evil, compared to killing people for having Down's syndrome.
Surely it's pretty reasonable to hold that (a) a foetus is not covered by anti-discrimination legislation - specially that concerning serious defects, as opposed to, say, gender - whether or not you also hold that (b) a second-trimester foetus has *some* weight in a moral calculus that a six-week embryo does not have or barely has.
The (deep) flaw in the precautionary principle is that it pretends that there is only one reason of moral concern. What about the ethical undesirability of giving birth to a child who will be tremendously shortchanged by nature? (Or simply changing the family dynamics, which will now likely revolve around the very special needs of one child, and not those of existing children? Not to mention that many families will not have another child after a child with Down's is born: family finances will not allow it.)
It is not so much that I cannot see why some people might choose to virtue-signal on this issue (until they themselves get a Down diagnosis for their foetus; then the great majority aborts). It's more that this sort of diagnosis seems to be the most obvious and common reason for a responsible person to abort in the second semester and not before.
Again: even if you grant a foetus some moral weight, it is a fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a desire to live, or equal rights, or any such thing. As a life, it is something real, but it is only potentially a person - and we consider choices between potential futures all the time.
It is completely consistent to believe that any person has equal rights, and the right to live, but that foetus don't get a right to be born - and that giving birth to a child with Down's is not just not obligatory, but grossly immoral. (That is not necessarily my opinion, mind you; I am simply claiming that these opinions are consistent.)
This is so basic that I am starting to suspect that you simply are arguing for the sake of arguing. I won't waste my time on discussing this matter with you (whoever or whatever it is that you are) further.
Let's say that an all-knowing genie told you that if you have sex on Tuesday, you'll have a kid with Downs. If you have sex on Wednesday instead, you'll have a kid without Downs. If you want to have a kid, is it immoral to have sex on Wednesday but not Tuesday? What if, prior to the genie appearing, you were planning on having sex on Tuesday?
>There's this conceptual mistake people seem to make where they think the pregnancies are interchangeable... But that's a distinct individual who will never live
It's not a mistake, it's that fundamental nature of how probability works, if a fetus is not yet a person. Unless you have a convincing reason as to why the cutoff for when life begins *has to* be at conception, an unborn fetus has the same probabilistic value as not choosing to have a baby at all. i.e. you can make the same argument that any time you use birth control that's a "a distinct individual who will never live"; or for that matter *any* opportunity you have to impregnate someone that you do not take (including morally objectionable ones).
In other words, it's not a useful argument to make, because it's ultimately totally unrelated to the actual argument, which is the Schelling point for where personhood begins. It's an argument that, in the proper sense, begs the question.
If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would be opposed to *any* abortion of a fetus at that stage, Down's syndrome or no, on the grounds that this would be murder. If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is not a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would believe that aborting a fetus with Down's is not "killing folk for having medical conditions" but rather preventing a person from being born with a medical condition. Rather like not having unprotected sex with your sibling prevents inbred children from being born.
I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6 months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that *only* people with Down's should be protected from early infanticide.
Yes, it seems maximally perverse to you and to me, but not necessarily to others. Of course, again, this was back when Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land, so the point of these laws was to stake a position.
"No person shall purposely perform or induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the person has knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion, in whole or in part, because of any of the following: (1) A test result indicating Down syndrome in an unborn child; (2) A prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in an unborn child; (3) Any other reason to believe that an unborn child has Down syndrome."
_In theory_, if there's a case where the mother's health is in danger and the foetus has Downs, and you say "the mother is in danger, so we must abort", the law as written doesn't criminalize that. I would not want to be that _in practice_ prosecutors wouldn't say "obviously this is just a fig-leaf and at least part of the reason for the abortion is that the foetus had Down's".
PS. Of course one can believe (and in fact I suspect that many people do believe) that a foetus at 6 months is not a person, yet is both alive and human, and, by that token (or simply by virtue of being a living *animal*) , deserves *some* moral consideration - while at the same time not being conceivable as an individual in any but a potential sense. Then the question is whether you are willing to kill a foetus to prevent a person from being born with a particularly cruel, limiting and incurable condition.
Most people who operate in that framework would say "yes" (or "sadly yes"), though the contrary is not utterly absurd prima facie. Then it also makes sense for testing to become effective and available as early in the pregnancy as possible.
Beroe is just being honest; Galton was the guy who coined the term (at least according to himself) and the rosy visions he had of healthy young university men getting Certificates Of Fitness awarded over their lifetimes by their teachers, etc. and going on to marry suitable young ladies at an early age and having a minimum of three sons who would pull up the average of the "V and above" classes (the very cream of the human crop), with his little talks and lectures to local societies interested in Eugenics...
.... well, in practice, it all ended up in the heaps of skulls. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
This board seriously needs a mute-user function. It gets tiresome having to scroll past the same hobbyhorses from the same few usernames under every post.
Antisemitism in Europe had been intense for millennia, and the salient difference in the early 20th century was that they finally had the industrial capacity to conduct much larger pogroms than before.
Delays in genetic enhancement technology are extraordinarily harmful. I think the stigma prevents open discussions and serious evaluations of the possible returns.
There are two big holdups. One is that we barely understand how anything works. It's rarely as simple as fixing a single gene, and doing so is too likely to reveal other genetic dependencies. The other is that we have extremely limited capabilities to modify genes. CRISPR is a big advance, but it may make undesired modifications and miss others. There has been a lot of progress, so we should keep up and even expand the funding even if it seems to be off on a tangent. CRISPR, for example, came from studying insect immune systems. You never know what is going to turn up where.
"you give a license to the left to blame white people for everyone else's problems"
Isn't that ... exactly what's been happening? I can't tell if your conditional phrasing is just a rhetorical posture or if you've actually been living in a cave.
I thought this was gonna be a GEB review and I got excited!
I believe he reviewed GEB back in the squid314 days.
ooh is there a link you can share? i googled but was unsuccessful
In hindsight it wasn't really a review, just a one-paragraph recommendation
https://web.archive.org/web/20110326010130/http://www.raikoth.net/nonficrecommend.html
(I don't know the conversational norms regarding posting Scott's old stuff. Please delete if this breaks them.)
As I understand it, what happened was that Scott went looking for jobs, all the prospective employers kept reading squid314 (which came up in Google searches for "Scott Siskind", unlike SSC) and telling him that having a blog was incompatible with being a psychiatrist (as he told it, it wasn't even the content of the blog, just the blog's existence), and so he burned squid314 and went pseudonymous.
However, Cade Metz burned Scott's pseudonymity (and Scott made peace with that in the first post of ACX, "Still Alive"), so that's now a sunk cost and this probably isn't such a big deal anymore.
I enjoyed GEB back in the day, but it's not really a great book.
I'd agree that, if your objective is to understand Godel's incompleteness theorems, there are substantially better ways to do so today than working your way through GEB.
However, as a piece of art, I judge GEB to still be on the efficient frontier. (Granted, that may just be because I haven't been exposed to works that surpass it; happy to look at nominations!)
'The Pleasures of Counting' is really great. It's a lot more technical than GEB, but still very approachable.
This article is excellent! It's pretty impressive that your attempt to steelman the cooky anti liberal eugenicists sounds infinitely more persuasive than any actually existing anti liberal eugenicist.
Errr, I read the post as perfectly mastering two ITTs here - Intellectual Turing Test: similar to but not exactly steelmaning. Scott showing he can present both positions as eloquently as their best resp. adherents would. - Knowing Scott's writings over the years, his own position is actually very close to the "cooky eugenicist". As is mine. (Not sure what "anti liberal" means in this context. Anti-Lefty? Anti-D? Me from Europe. Oh, no need to explain.)
Case and point, this line got a chuckle out of me from the irony:
>I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”.
since a younger version of Scott professed support for a very similar proposal (I believe it was UBI-contingent-on-sterilization). I can only assume this was a self-aware jab at his earlier beliefs.
:D Yes, though I am not sure that Scott is really convinced this is such an evil thing. I assume a) he is no longer that worried about the left side of the curve: We shall be able to provide for them. b) he is wondering more how to get the right side to reproduce. Lately, The Zvi wrote repeatedly about how to incentivize those to have kids (and Scott met his wife discussing Singapore's attempts to lure academics into breeding ). - After "the singularity", none of this may matter no more.
That's because the left has so successfully tabooed the topic that only the kooks will publicly advocate for it.
But *why* was it tabooed? I mean it's obviously a good idea. The clear reason is that you can't trust any human authority to implement it without bias. And the historical evidence is that you can't.
Fortunately, there's now a better option. (Well, it's almost ready.) CRISPR geneline editing. This should first be tested against things like Huntington's disease, thalassaemia, and perhaps sickle-cell anemia, and then gradually expanded into other generally accepted conditions, and it should REQUIRE totally voluntary acceptance. Perhaps it should even be charged for, though I'd prefer that it be considered a public health measure. The real question is should "cosmetic changes" be allowed? Genes to increase height, e.g. I'm inclined to think that should be discouraged, perhaps by a high tax.
I mean I just think that's an empty criticism. You can't trust humans to administer any policy without bias. That's just the nature of humans and power. Eugenics is no special exception and I think that having strictly-enforced rules against violence (which we already have) is more than sufficient to protect against abuses. Having completely voluntary incentives for low IQ people to not reproduce would be perfectly fine.
The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Actually, eugenics is a special kind of thing here, but it's not unique. Nationalism is the same kind of thing, and so is racism. There are a few others. Their defining characteristic is the claim "My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes.". Anything of that nature is too dangerous to allow humans to control it, so should currently be tabooed. And the part that makes it too dangerous is " so we should rule and you should submit". Even if the first part is objectively true, that part is too dangerous.
Note that by this argument there are forms of eugenics that should not be tabooed. And forms of racism. But the general term is used to include the should-be-prohibited subcategories, and thus should not be acceptable.
"My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes."
And that distinguishes them from ... what other political organization, exactly? Again, I feel this is an empty criticism.
Every political group wants the power to force their outgroup to submit. You don't prevent that by tabooing group identification, you prevent it by having a carefully constructed constitution. The greatest historical strife has arguably arisen over religious differences, but that wasn't fixed by outlawing religion - it was solved by making sure that religious ideology was explicitly barred from government policy. Saying that ethnicity-based identity groups pose a unique threat is, I believe, an isolated demand for rigor.
I would submit that nationalism at least *doesn't* necessarily demand that the outgroup submit. It *can*, of course, but it can also say "my group is good and should rule *here*, we're fine with you lot ruling yourselves over there as long as you don't try to tell us what to do here". There is such a thing as e.g. a Swedish nationalist, and they aren't secretly plotting to recreate the Kalmar Union.
It's the supposedly more enlightened -isms of the 20th and 21st century that demand they should rule everywhere, as soon as they can get around to it.
Yes, they all want it. It's quite common. This doesn't make it good. And there are degrees of "submit", with some being worse than others. I don't think there *is* a general answer that doesn't involve evil. Negotiated settlements aren't always possible (and even those are often due to threats rather than to "this is the best we can do".
Part of the problem is that everybody engages in motivated reasoning. And this is only "empty criticism" if you insist on seeing everything as binary rather than as a graduated scale.
It's a matter of path dependency. We've seen eugenics used to justify some pretty horrible stuff. Sure, humans are smart, so we can do horrible stuff with just about anything, but history matters. Maybe some brilliant monster will use cute kitten photos to kill millions of people somehow, but even PETA hasn't managed this yet. So, we'll consider cute kitten photos safe and acceptable until proven otherwise. There are stupider policy approaches.
>The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Ding ding ding. People don't want to have to struggle with the reality of how much actual difference there is in the clay.
There's work using CRISPR on sickle cell anemia. There have been some apparent cures. Interestingly, they don't do it by fixing the defective gene but, rather, enabling a the fetal red blood cell gene which is usually turned off early in life. I think read a complicated explanation of why in Science, but in one eye, out the other.
> Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
That's simple: intelligence has no correlation to morality. The "evil genius" is a well-known media trope for a reason! There are plenty of very good smart people, and plenty of very bad smart people.
One of the biggest intellectual failings of the past few decades has been the loss of this understanding, via the gradual conflation of concepts of good and evil with concepts of smart and stupid. We've tended to think that all hard-thinking people will be right-thinking people who agree with us, and anyone who disagrees with our perspective on morality can only do so because they're too dumb to grasp the simple truth. But nothing could be further from the truth; bad people have been using their intellect in pursuit of evil since time immemorial. There's no good reason to expect them to stop now.
The example that the ‘intelligence uber alles’ people point to is often that criminality is associated with low IQ and correspondingly decreases with high IQ, etc.
But of course this is a ridiculous argument; it is only natural that society does not criminalize evil that can be rationalized, and the sort of evil that high-IQ people do is almost always legal at the time, or impossible to punish. The common man complains that one can buy justice with riches—not wrong, but you can buy the government with smarts, too, and you can get away with a lot between the cracks of the law.
Criminality also isn't monotonic wrt IQ. It peaks at 85, and decreases below that just as it decreases above.
I bet if you could run the universe many times criminality peaks where you are least employable with no safety net.
I believe the bit about not being employable, not about lacking a safety net. Crime doesn't pay. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html
I think below a certain threshold most people or societies understand you can’t work and care for you. It’s when you’re in the gray zone above that where it seems like you could work if you tried that things get hard.
Lots of crime is committed by kids who aren't expected to work at all. Crime shot up when the "Great Society" expanded welfare.
The interesting part is Galton's views of what is "obviously" desirable, moral, indicative of excellence, improving society, etc. He wants to adjust religion to get rid of it, or at least model it to something 'sensible' that sensible people of the modern era can use as a kind of prop to the idea of eugenics and so on.
But things we take for granted arising out of the whole liberal mindset would appall Galton. So what are we assuming are the "obvious" traits a society must have, that properly applied eugenics will cultivate, that future generations will think belong in the Stone Age?
Excellent point. There's an important and seemingly characteristic ingredient of unexamined presumption in eugenics arguments about what is desirable.
This is a standard argument against eugenics that doesn't make it into the fictional dialogue, at least not directly: People are just very bad judges of what good traits look like and trying to select for them is likely to incorporate their culturally-bound biases in a way that misses important goods. Scott does allude to some of the effects of this problem in the atrocities of historical eugenics resulted in where societies made some retrospectively absurd judgments about who were to be seen as defective, but the problem of biased judgment here has a larger scope than that..
More generally, eugenics acts as an elite reproduction scheme where the advocates of eugenics tend to see themselves, at least in some ways, as part of the elite. You see a similar pattern with the overlapping world of IQ and modern race science where the people into it usually, though not always, think of themselves as part of the cognitively blessed and this implied sense of superiority permeates a lot of what they say.
The shift over time is a hard one to put your finger on. Think it’s important to lay out the game and its goals.
You've got part of the answer. If the perceived payoff is high, and the perceived risk is low, people are likely to do the thing. Legal status is just one way of adjusting what people see the payoff and risks to be, but there are others. And, of course, "perceived" is significantly affected by your time horizon.
E.g., most people try not to fart in a loud an obnoxious manner in the presence of those they consider powerful in their social group. Legal status has no bearing here, but social standing has a lot. OTOH, for awhile I was with a group where flatulence was considered acceptable. (We were eating a lot of beans and cooked cabbage.) Among that group, covering up a fart was considered undesirable. So many people tried to emphasize the noise of their farts.
Below 85, and it's hard to commit crimes that you would get away with (rather like a cat hiding behind a curtain with feet sticking out).
Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
Excuse me? I am very good at hiding, which is why I have survived for as long as I have.
> Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
I accidentally scrolled here, and without seeing the context I assumed you were talking about *age*. Wanted to say that 85 years is actually the perfect age to commit crimes, because if caught, your punishment won't be worse than what nature has already prepared for you anyway.
I think I'd rather be age 85 outside of prison than inside prison. So there's still some deterrent effect.
Perhaps that's because you can't actually measure criminality - you can only measure *detected* criminality - and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to get away with whatever nefarious deeds you choose to perform.
And I wonder about the monetary impact of crime as correlated to IQ? It seems like it would take multiple thousands of IQ 85 bank robbers to match the amount of money that an IQ 120* white-collar criminal like Bernie Madoff stole.
*Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
This will depend a lot on how you price violent crime. sure, it takes a *lot* of petty theft to equal Madoff, but how many *murders* would you say it's equivalent to in badness?
For the most violent of violent crimes, homicide, IQ probably has little correlation with homicide rates. According to UN study roughly 80% of homicides worldwide are between family members, of which the highest percentage of that being intimate partners. Maybe lower IQ families are killing themselves at higher rates, but I don't think anyone has tried to tease out that data.
As for other violent crimes—car jacking, muggings, etc.—I wonder how much IQ is a correlative. Starting in 1960s we had huge rise in the violent crime in the US, but it started to fall in the 1990s, and now it's down to 1960s levels. Seems like something other than IQ is involved, because the rates have varied over time, while IQ distribution has remained static (except for the steadily upward incline of the Flynn Effect).
The highest correlators for violent crime seem to be sex (with males perpetrating the vast majority of violent crimes), and age with males 18-30 being the most like to perpetrate violent crimes.
> Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
That’s surprisingly low.
Not if it's just IQ. Two standard deviations in IQ, and two standard deviations in Gumption, and one standard deviation in physical Charisma, is about as rare as three standard deviations in IQ alone but probably a better package for the CEO track. And the strictly superior "+3 standard deviations in everything" is so rare that there aren't enough of those to fill more than a tiny fraction of the CEO slots.
The really smart criminal masterminds get offers to take the fall and work the refs to get away scotfree. SBF could have pulled it off with a bit more patience. He got too greedy too soon.
But this is an arms race with another side[1]. People have an incentive to detect and deter "criminality" that meaningfully harms them; yes, that includes the challenging concentrated-benefits diffuse-harms pattern that is characteristic of a lot of high-IQ nefarious behavior.
It is easy to see instances of that pattern which are still insufficiently checked today. But we've actually patched a remarkable number of the more obvious holes of this type (this is a reason law is so complicated), and created an economy that provides good rewards to most high-IQ people who play it straight; in combination, this results in relatively few people being motivated to engage in serious white-collar crime.
1: Note that AGI has far more potential to overwhelm the defense in this arms race.
I wouldn't be surprised if this finding stemmed from back before our society did so many quasi-eugenic abortions of Down's Syndrome fetuses. There used to be a lot more Down's people and they made up a lot of the very low IQ population. They tend to be sweet-natured and not criminal knuckleheads.
Criminality peaks at 85 in the United States because the mean IQ of blacks is 85 and they are concentrated around the center of their bell curve just like other groups. No need for elaborate just-so stories about the optimum level of IQ for crime.
Embezzling enormous amounts of money is difficult to do with a below-average IQ, but it's still illegal. Rich people aren't fine with being defrauded just because the defrauder is smart. Bombers have relatively high IQs (the Unabomber being an obvious example), but we punish bombing as severely as cruder homicides.
Yeh. Of course smart people become criminals bit by and large we don’t legalise or nullify that criminality (with the exception perhaps of war criminality)
isn't this just the fact that there's a correlation, but the correlation is not one? People with relatively low IQs, have slightly higher probability of committing some kinds of street crime, but it's not all that huge difference in probability, and there's absolutely nothing that says the very smart people can't commit serious crimes, or that dumb people can't be scrupulously law-abiding.
You'd have to define how much is "that much". But you're right about there being no impossibility theorem for those combinations of traits.
Smart people often have better things they can do, i.e. something that pays well enough and doesn't have the downsides. The lower time preference also means you can see the downsides better.
Yeah I suspect a lot of the IQ crime correlation just comes down to being able to foresee the consequences. But I wonder if there's anything else going on there. For example, would we see the same pattern in crimes that were very unlikely to be detected?
Good question. But how would you test it?
Smart people tend to be nicer. One reason is they can more easily imagine themselves in a potential victim's shoes and not wish to do this.
IQ doesn’t correlate strongly with agreeability, nor is agreeability a good proxy for ‘niceness.’ What measure are you using for ‘niceness’?
Smart people tend to be richer, and its easier to be nice if you're rich.
Do you even know all the laws you are supposed to be abiding by? How do you know that you're not a criminal?
Too much attention is being focused on criminality at the expense of attending to "harming other people". The legal status of an act is significant to the extent that it adjusts the risks and the payoff of performing that action. But whether the act is desirable or not (from a social point of view) depends on whether it harms the society in which it occurs (or possibly in which the performer lives). And, of course, that judgement depends strongly on what you consider harm. And there are other valid points of view, e.g. I consider whether and action is wrong or not based on my judgement of whether it will harm me. The social context then becomes important because I live in the society, but it less important (to me) than more direct effects.
Also, the crime-IQ correlation has a major data censoring problem, since we can only identify someone as a criminal if they're caught committing a crime. Maybe the high-IQ criminals are disproportionately unlikely to be caught.
A Professor of Business Law at the University of Oslo once gave this definition of a thief: “A thief is a person that is in such a hurry to help himself to other people’s money that he does not have time to establish a limited liability company first.”
Not to mention that the laws are written by the high-IQ types.
Did not Don Corleone say that "One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns?"
If I recall correctly, self report data gives about the same correlation as Data from crime statistics.
Not really, because there's an independent way to judge this: which countries would a typical person with no criminal intent prefer to live in? An excessive high-IQ crime load can be expected to result in a country that's actually worse to live in than a typical low-population-IQ country.
I do think there are countries that fit this description: North Korea is the first that comes to mind, and there are a bunch of related examples. But at least for now, it is clearly the exception rather than the rule.
You are being quite unfair to the populace of North Korea. They can be expected to have the same variations and means as South Korea. They're just operating under a very different management. (And possibly with different resources, but I don't think that's significant.)
Re: North Korea, it should be obvious that the crime load is concentrated at the top, and that's enough to make the country not worth living in. I don't know why you'd expect most readers of my comment to interpret me as criticizing the *general population* of North Korea here.
Modern Russia is a more debatable and interesting case.
There are a lot of high IQ murderers in movies and TV shows. One cliche of screenwriting is that the murderer should turn out to be richer than the initial suspect.
But, that happens a lot more in "Law & Order" than in real life. You can look up statistics for murders in Manhattan. There aren't many and they mostly involve the usual suspects rather than some interesting Patrick Bateman-type Wall Streeter.
Similarly, there's a big demand for true crime stories involving middle class white people killing each other, such as on "20/20." But most of the true crime murderers on TV tend to be small-time dopes who think their spouse's $125,000 life insurance policy would be a bonanza.
Every violent crime is negatively correlated to IQ. That's a pretty big deal.
Hijacking government policy to legally extract subsidies from fellow citizens at gunpoint is a thing, but if one compares the size of the welfare state to the size of the corporate welfare state it doesn't support your argument that high IQ people do more of the legal sorts of plundering.
Depends on what you agree is legal plundering, definitionally. Unless you can demonstrate that you’ve found a method to capture everything that could possibly count in that category (including undetected crimes and corruption, and other easy parasitism that is not illegal), then I’m going to say no, I don’t agree that observation doesn’t support me. Rather the reverse.
More than this, I think we're failing to distinguish between all the different types of evil. A partial taxonomy:
1. You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence, through poverty, since the more desperate you get the more selfish you become.
2. Emotionally-led evil, you're just angry. This is the evil of (say) a violent domestic abuser.
3. Utilitarian evil, where you try to do good things and it winds up evil because you're a mortal human and humans are really bad at moral tradeoffs. Probably positively correlated with intelligence, because you gotta be pretty smart to talk yourself into doing something that looks obviously wrong.
I suspect most of the really big evildoers of history who might initially seem to be in Category 3 are actually in Category 2 as well. Lenin, Hitler, Bin Laden etc all claimed to kill for some higher moral principle, but inevitably wound up killing people they emotionally hated anyway.
Galton and Ehrlich, to the extent they were evil, seem to at least be pure category 3.
Hitler, and perhaps to a lesser extent Bin Laden, is an example of something else: elevating what most of us would consider to be deeply evil to the level of a principle, to the extent of going against personal self-interest or the self-interest of the collective cared about.
Lenin would be 3, with some elements of 2 (a mixture of genuine hatred of injustice with being pretty reasonably embittered by his older brother's hanging) but, more interestingly, 3b: digging yourself into a deeper and deeper utilitarian hole by convincing yourself that deontology is something to be ditched entirely.
Nah, this perception is the result of successful demonizing propaganda. Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters. They were strongly influenced by some of the widespread ideas of their respective societies and took them to their logical conclusions. Sure, now with the benefit of hindsight we might say that those ideas were uniquely bad, but they weren't seen as such in Hitler's time, and Wahhabism is plenty popular and respectable in Saudi Arabia even today.
You haven't read what I am saying. They were, in their way, "idealists"; it is just that their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals* (particularly in Hitler's case, actually).
No, I just disagree. I think that Hitler sincerely loved Germany and expected his policies to be beneficial to it. Your argument proves too much, you can blame anyone who ever starts a war that "their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals*", which some pacifists may believe, but certainly isn't the mainstream view.
The subjection and extermination of "foreign races" were germane to his program, to the point that they got in the way of his conduct of the war.
Maybe, maybe not. Hitler was not a nationalist in traditional sense. Hitler saw germans and Germany as means to an end.
> Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters.
Glorifying death wasn't considered depraved in Hitler's era. For a young man, dying was the poetic thing to do.
Consider "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers", a popular German book describing a depressed young man who later kills himself. After publishing, the book inspired many suicides. Such was the culture where Hitler grew up; he only fanned the flames of the existing romantic notions in popular culture for his political goals.
There is no contradiction between "wasn't a monster" and "glorified death". It may seem so to us, because from the historical perspective, we are living in an unprecedented bubble of wealth and empathy.
I would argue Lenin would be #1, also.
Difficult to believe: Lenin could have had a much more comfortable life if he hadn't got into politics, and he wasn't an idiot.
Yeah, I got the categories mixed up, actually.
>You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence,
Or not, because this describes plenty of lawyers, salespeople, financial people, and CEOs, who are just as happy doing selfish or unethical things which leave the other party worse off, just in legally-sanctioned (or even illegal-but-white-collar) ways. They're just smart enough to find ways to be selfish in which they are either unlikely to be punished or the punishment will be negligible (cf wage theft being an order of magnitude higher than "common criminal" theft).
But as a motive for criminal behavior it may well be negatively correlated. All the higher-IQ types you mentioned can operate perfectly legally, which being just as evil.
I'll push back on "perfectly legally" (using wage theft as an example again: very much a crime, it just goes unpunished), but I agree on the premise that it's not the sort of crime that tends to show up in crime stats.
But yeah. From a first order approximation, "crime" is just selfishness from people too poor (low-iq-as-a-class?) to get the state to take their side.
This is something probably already discussed in existing criminology literature, but I'm not quite sure where the line between 1 and 2 is drawn or if it should be drawn at all. A domestic abuser might have poor impulse control, or they might simply not give a shit about the well-being of their partner as long as their own well-being is taken care of. Or probably both.
I have a strong suspicion you can't make that assumption. To me it seems that for many people their sexual morality is walled off from their more normal morality. That seems to be what I observe among people I know, and it's certainly what's indicated by various popular and folk songs.
The thing is, you've misidentified the evil component of choice 3. The evil component there is the authoritarianism. This includes all aspects of "I know better than you, so I don't need to take your goals/intents/purposes/suffering/etc. into account.
Just being mistaken isn't evil. Forcing people to do things, even for actually good reasons, is already morally questionable. This leads to a whole bag of worms when you're trying to establish the rules for a society. (Yes, I think the making requirements were valid. But to call them questionable is definitely reasonable. They were a trade-off with evils on both sides.)
Real quick, what's the precise definition (or set of related definitions) of "Authoritarianism" that you're using here? Because I think I agree, contingent on how you're defining it, but it's a pretty broad term.
Authoritarianism is basically the belief that someone (the authority) has the right to tell everyone else how to act (Note the lack of restrictions in what they can say) and that the speaker (or someone he designates) has the right to speak in that name of that authority.
Okay, in that case I disagree, since that essentially amounts to a roundabout definition of a state. i.e. It applies equally well to authoritarian dictatorships and functional democracies.
The authority derived from a state is not inherently evil - in fact, it's arguably to best solution to many types of coordination problems - see Scott's own writings on the matter[1].
People don't usually use "authoritarian" so broadly, though - they usually reserve it for states where overuse of authority leads to harm. (And you seem to agree on that implicit definition based on what you said above, which makes me confused as to why you provided the definition you did.) The authority itself is not evil, it just lowers the barrier for committing utilitarian evil - so the evil in authority is when you put too much confidence in the moral authority it gives you.
...I feel like I've started rambling at this point
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
It's not inherently evil, but it inherently has tendencies in that direction. Being a democracy doesn't protect you against that. And good kings have existed. India even has legends of a good Emperor.
It's not the authority that is evil, it's the use the authority is put to. But authority has inherent in it the ability to commit evil without noticing it, and certainly without caring. You could ask various Indian tribes if being a democracy prevented the US from evilly exercising its authority.
Is authority the best solution? It's probably the only solution to living in groups. This doesn't mean it doesn't have inherent problems.
This. We have a basically mammalian brain, grounded in affect and emotion, but with a large, powerful and evolutively recent symbolic processing module tacked on. It's so poorly debugged, that it can destabilize the whole system, by overwhelming channels originally made to carry sense data with symbolic imaginations, and getting itself into insane loops - losing all sense of perspective at the drop of a hat, all the way into depression and mental illness.
And people want to help the human race by boosting up this system even more? It's a wonder that symbolic thinking hasn't gotten us to extinction yet, and people still think the solution is *more of it*?
You've got this exactly backward. Symbolic thinking has raised the human race out of the worst abuses of living in nature. It has lifted billions into living like kings and queens did only mere hundreds of years ago.
So yeah, people still think more of that would be a good thing.
Thanks for the obvious objection, it had to be said. I'm not actually proposing that we go "back to the trees", except maybe for the week-end.
My point is to propose that with intellect we may have reached a point where secondary effects are becoming important. Kind of like how cars and plastics have been a huge boon to mankind, but now we're breathing bad air and filling the seas with detritus.
If I had a magic wand to wish for an improvement to the human form, rather than straight up higher IQ, I'd rather ask for better inner integration, more groundedness and less tendency to feel threatened.
Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
If what you mean is that desperate people will undertake desperate acts, well, that's true. But symbolic thinking won't change the axioms and postulates that you're working from.
If you mean people think smarter people are better...I think you need to read popular media. They may like some of the results, but they don't make what you think is the obvious attribution.
> Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
That's not true. Quite the opposite in fact, because only intellect can question the premises underlying beliefs. For instance, why is the King supposed to be above the peasant? Divine right? Who is this "God" fellow anyway?
Those questions lead directly to giving up the premise that any particular person has more rights than any other.
Only poorly applied intellect can justify any morality, a sort of intellectual process that does not question its own premises.
Clearly false. Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time. And intellect is always used to justify the resulting conclusion. A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
What one CAN do is try to evoke challenged instincts within the disputant one is arguing with. Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind. (Of course, most argument is really directed at those listeners who haven't yet decided. Or is a form of social display.)
* For instinct the meaning I'm using is "non-verbal mental process". I don't like the term, but I can't think of a better one.
> Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time.
Yes, and only intellect can question the assumptions underlying each instinct to discover which is more justified, if any.
> A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
Which then raises questions about the axioms, thus contradicting your own claim.
> Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind.
This is not an argument that intellect cannot change people's minds, it's merely an indication that a particular approach is not suited to the problem at hand. We can achieve great heights by applying intellect to build towers, but no amount of intellect will build a tower to the moon.
You have to use intellect to solve the problem at hand in the most appropriate way (which only intellect can elucidate). For some people that might require pointing out deductive mistakes, for others that might be specific examples with emotional connections, for yet others it might require patiently listening to their concerns which led to them to a particular conclusion and then explaining how those concerns can be address in your approach.
Regardless, it remains simply false that intellect can justify any morality. Kant demonstrated quite clearly that pure reason can justify many moral prescriptions.
Hear hear!
I've seen criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis which goes (put somewhat uncharitably), "If you say that a Greater Intelligence would not necessarily be more moral, you go against the entire concept of moral progress altogether! And if we grant that education does not necessarily increase the morality of a population, by what right should the more educated populace be an authority at all on moral decisions?" (This style of thinking bothered me much less when it wasn't at risk of preventing avoiding an apocalypse.)
There aren’t rights period.
I would say both of the premises of that criticism are wrong, as you have put them.
> The "evil genius" is a well-known media trope for a reason
I suspect the reason is that they make more compelling villains than "evil idiots", in spite of their relative frequency.
Anyone who's in favour of the taboo and legal ban on incest because children of incest are disproportionately likely to have birth defects is already a eugenecist whether they like it or not. Spoken as a person who fully supports the taboo on incest.
I think few of these people are suddenly okay with incest provided that everyone involved is using contraceptives, which suggests that the birth defect argument is not their true reason but a rationalization.
I do agree that anyone using this rationalization is already in some sense a eugenicist, although I think the argument would benefit from tabooing the word "eugenics" completely.
I'm not sure about "few" here. German law criminalizes sex between adult siblings only when vaginal sex is involved - consensual incestuous sex acts that cannot possibly be reproductive are not criminalized.
(Interestingly, consensual incest between adults is legal in France, Spain and... Russia? That is odd. I knew about France because of two middle-aged siblings who moved from the UK to France for that reason.)
Interesting, I didn't know that. The German law is certainly evidence against my claim. Although even in that case I notice that the prohibition is against all heterosexual incest, with no contraception exception. Is that really where we would expect the equilibrium to land in a universe where most people did not have a reflexive disgust for incest?
German law was likely written by a bunch of rationalizing lawyer/politician types that followed the logical reasoning of reducing harm from birth defects. But I'd bet the broad majority of the population would socially ostracize anyone engaging in incest regardless of the legality.
Also, the law involved is a bit of a mess. The official reasoning behind it, as per the constitutional court, is mostly "well, it has been here for a long time" and the good to be protected is the family... For a law bound to relationships by blood, not by family, in a case in which the people involved didn't even know they're related by blood (both were adopted by different families, they later married and what they sued against was annulling their marriage because them having sex would be criminal).
There are better, non-eugenic reasons for tabooing incest. Mine is that incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common. As long as the liberal state gives broad deference to parental authority within the domestic sphere, a hyperstrict cultural shame campaign against any form of sexual contact with your (step) children or siblings is the most effective tool we have for protecting children from the people they have to get naked with on a regular basis.
Presumably any sex act which can be described as "sexual abuse" is already illegal under legislation against rape and sexual assault?
No, but at least parent-child incest potentially is under a law against abusing the position of someone being in your charge for sexual purposes. Of course, siblings can have a lot of informal authority without a formal authority to bind that to and all that authority can be used without having to physically assault or explicitly extort the victim
The rest of this comment was a result of me misreading the thread and writing something unrelated, so I removed it
That's a lot harder to prove when the perpetrator has such a degree of control over the entire physical and emotional context for such a long time.
> incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common
> ... is the most effective tool we have
seems like there's some tension here. do you think that there simply are no possible more effective tools? do we have evidence on how effective the cultural shame campaign is? it's not clear to me that we are in a position to know the answer to either of these questions.
I've heard a theory that expanding and strengthening the (pre-existing) taboo on incest was actually a sneaky way to consolidate state power, by hampering the ability of extended families to maintain local political factions through strategic marriages.
Excellent questions. I agree it's hard to measure prevalence and therefore the success of any interventions (Stoltenbergh 2011 have a meta-analysis which suggests CSA is more prevalent in North America, Africa and Australia but that it matters a lot how you ask). It's possible the stigma contributes to underreporting, but since harm reduction will inevitably require separating kids from their abusers it's hard to imagine a non-stigmatizing approach.
I think there are plenty of plausibly more effective programs, from age-appropriate sex ed starting in kindergarten to routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers. The problem with all of them is that they'd meet intense resistance from cultures that prize the "private sphere" and its right to be exempt from public scrutiny—here I'm heavily informed by theoretical arguments from feminists like Susan Okin and Carole Pateman about the historical emergence and function of the public/private dichotomy.
"routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers"
Well if you want to make sure actual abuse is skimmed over and non-abusive situations result in kids being hauled away, go right ahead with that brilliant idea. I think "trained" social workers are trained only in the particular ideological shibboleths of the day where they are trained, so you can shoot up heroin in front of your toddler* and still be considered a 'good mother' but if you don't agree that the same toddler is fully capable of deciding to socially transition their gender you are a horrible abuser bent on driving your kid to suicide.
*Based on story I heard at work about a social worker claiming a client was a good mother because she always turned her back when shooting up while her kid was in the room. How about maybe NOT SHOOTING UP HEROIN IN FRONT OF A TODDLER AT ALL, HUH? Naturally there were no moves afoot to take the kid away from such a 'good' mother.
That's a horrific story, Jesus.
If true, or course. Meanwhile 94,896 American children were removed from their homes and placed in out-of-home care due to parental drug use in 2019 (https://ncsacw.acf.hhs.gov/research/child-welfare-and-treatment-statistics.aspx), so even if true we can hope it's not typical.
I was shocked, and that's here in small-town Ireland. As I've said before, I thought I was cynical about human nature when I worked in education grants, then when I worked in social housing I discovered I wasn't nearly cynical enough.
Another argument is that even if there's no abuse, a nasty breakup would be harder on the family than if the couple wasn't related.
Galton from his 1909 collection of essays:
"The marriage of a brother and sister would excite a feeling of loathing among us that seems implanted by nature, but which further inquiry will show, has mainly arisen from tradition and custom.
…(4) The harm due to continued interbreeding has been considered, as I think, without sufficient warrant, to cause a presumed strong natural and instinctive repugnance to the marriage of near kin. The facts are that close and continued interbreeding invariably does harm after a few generations, but that a single cross with near kinsfolk is practically innocuous. Of course a sense of repugnance might become correlated with any harmful practice, but there is no evidence that it is repugnance with which interbreeding is correlated, but only indifference; this is equally effective in preventing it, but is quite another thing.
(5) The strongest reason of all in civilised countries appears to be the earnest desire not to infringe the sanctity and freedom of the social relations of a family group, but this has nothing to do with instinctive sexual repugnance. Yet it is through the latter motive alone, so far as I can judge, that we have acquired our apparently instinctive horror of marrying within near degrees.
…A great deal more evidence could easily be adduced, but the foregoing suffices to prove that there is no instinctive repugnance felt universally by man, to marriage within the prohibited degrees, but that its present strength is mainly due to what I call immaterial considerations. It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister would do now. "
I think Galton is wrong and it will trend in the opposite direction; incestuous marriage or partnerships will be regarded as "well if they're not having kids and it's all consensual, why not?" rather than making "non-eugenic marriages" socially repugnant.
Galton's cousin Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood.
It was American eugenicists who did most of the research that led to our modern laws against incest in Protestant countries. (Catholics had long been against cousin marriage.) British eugenicists were too loyal to the Darwin family to deal much with the topic.
Isn’t the current research mostly that Galton was right? That while systemic inbreeding is bad, the random first cousin marriage is barely even worth tracking.
There's a problem like that with first cousin marriage. Saudi Arabia is full of people with birth defects because they didn't have much of a dating scene. There's a theory that the Council of Agde, which sounds like a supermarket chain, with its prohibition on first cousin marriage had a major impact on Western European civilization.
If Sailer is correct here - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cousin-marriage-conundrum/ - it's not just a lack of a dating scene in the Arab world; it's a deliberate (or at least culturally evolved) strategy to keep wealth within one's family.
With regards to Ehrlich: I concede that Coria's characterization of him *in the beginning* can be argued. But it is now clear that his most famous argument was, and is, fundamentally incorrect (and has done real harm). Ehrlich declines to concede that his entire professional career made the world worse, which is his privilege. It is also a moral failing.
WAS it fundamentally incorrect? You say that based on what?
The way the future of the world is likely to play out is that China just barely managed to scramble onto the helicopter in time. Everyone later than China (Most of Africa and South Asia -- and probably most of the Arab world once the oil runs out) is probably doomed. The path of light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing to services is probably shutting down, visibly for political reasons but more importantly because machines will do the jobs. We won't need to argue about whether we should "export jobs" to Bangladesh or import Mexicans, we'll do neither and have robots doing the work.
Previously this was not a problem because excess farmworkers could move to the factory, excess factory workers could move to retail. That's probably over and, even if within the wealthy countries society is willing to help out via moves like UBI, that won't extend to those poor countries.
Now, if those countries had frozen their populations at the 1970 level, everything would have been so much easier. There would have been money to improve things starting at that point, money to build few but good schools and hospitals rather than many but bad. Entry onto the path to modernity a whole lot sooner.
It was not not fore-ordained that China would be the last one out; it could have been that South Asia and Africa escaped hopeless poverty first. But people chose to mock Ehrlich on minor points rather than on the big picture, and we are where we are today, simultaneously crying about whatever is the disaster du jour (not enough water! species dying!) while insisting that doubling the number of people is quite manageable and won't cause any problems, no sirree.
I don't think you really can call Ehrlich's mistakes "minor". Pretty much everything he predicted was directionally incorrect: death rates went down, not up. Countries like India and Egypt, which he advocated should stop receiving food aid because they were lost causes both massively increased production and are now able to afford imports of food from the global market for what they don't produce themselves. Percentage of the global population "undernourished" went down, not up, over time.
It's sort of why one should never warn the driver of an obstacle. They might swerve and avoid it. and you'd wind up being wrong to have warned them. Prophesy stories have a lot in common with time travel stories.
Except we didn't "swerve". Ehrlich's policies (such as taxing families increasingly by # of children, financial incentives for sterilization, research into mass-sterilizing agents for the US, and eliminating food aid to India and Egypt because they were lost causes) were, by and large, not adopted. Instead food production was massively increased.
Besides, Ehrlich explicitly claimed that the obstacle was unavoidable:
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
There was a level of triumphalism in the 1960s followed, starting in the late 1970s, by a more global rethinking in which the problems of the rapidly growing "third world" appeared increasingly intractable. I took a look at the What Can You Do? chapter of the Population Bomb. He has sections on letter writing, proselytizing, organizing action groups and so on. Perhaps the most controversial statement was that long term population growth should be zero, but the means of achieving it had to include changing attitudes, increased awareness of ecological limits, improving agriculture - especially tropical agriculture, improved contraception and a host of other things, most of which were implemented in various forms.
He addresses eugenics and argues against it. He points out that intelligence has genetic and environmental components, and, if someone is concerned about increasing overall intelligence, they should focus on improving education. The goal was to slow population growth to zero, increasing available resources and minimizing environmental degradation. He points out that belief in eugenics is usually directed against out groups, not something to be encouraged. I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause. Improving health care for children, vaccination, food support and propaganda in popular culture were the primary means of attitude change, though China did have its coercive one child policy. That wasn't Ehrlich. He wasn't running China.
His next chapter, What If I'm Wrong, is basically Pascal's wager. It's applicable today. Suppose we, even with existing technology, could support 20 billion people, what mistake would we be making by world stabilizing population under 10 billion. It's an easily correctable mistake. It would be easy to adjust attitudes and, in maybe 60 years, raise the population to 20 billion. His goal was to match population and resources by means other than famine, war or pestilence.
> I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause.
I will provide citations (using https://archive.org/details/populationbomb00ehrl/ as a reference since I don't have a physical copy), but all of these seem to be in Chaper 4, "What needs to be done", which discusses policy (as opposed to Chapter 5, "What can you do?" which is aimed at the individual level):
Taxing people for having children: p136 (his example involves increasing taxable income by $600 for the first 2 children, $1200 for subsequent).
Luxury taxes on goods used to raise children beyond the "essentials" (specifically mentioned as taxable: cribs and diapers): p137.
Establishing a Department of Population and Environment, which would research the development of mass-sterilizing agents (for use at home and to help underdeveloped countries): p138.
"Triage" of under-developed countries is necessary, as some will not be able to feed their population even with aid (he quotes "Famine 1975!" for his examples, and says it will be remembered as one of the most important books of our age): p160.
Making development aid to specific "areas" of under-developed countries, contingent on population control, including internal migration controls, because only some parts of countries will receive help: p164
Redrawing the political boundaries of under-developed countries to make the above easier: p165
"we should have applied pressure" on the government of India to sterilize all males with 3 or more children: p165
That’s all completely wrong. China is in trouble - albeit not as much as some western countries - because of its falling demographics. It is this that is causing some people to think that it’s boom is over, and certainly ageing populations are a major headwind to economic growth.
China is also in trouble for its not-falling-early-enough demographics. As much as they like to pride themselves on their unappologetic imperialist desires, the reason why they risk a world war by sending fishing vessels in territorial waters of others countries is because they have a big and hungry population that needs proteins to thrive and they don't have enough ressources at home.
Pointing to a large aging population and saying that the only solution is to add more children is litterally like pointing at a late-stage ponzi scheme and saying that the only solution is to add another layer. Sometimes you've got to blow the bubble and suffer the consequences.
This is totally false. China is not struggling to feed its population, and in any case buying food is much cheaper than war. Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
> buying food is much cheaper than war
That's not a dilemna that people ever have. In practice you buy food until you can't afford to buy it anymore, and then you make war whether you can afford it or not.
> Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
You're proving too much. As long as there is food being wasted in the parts of the world that are not overpopulated you could say the the world *as a whole* is not overpopulated and it's just a distribution issue ; denying that some regions of the world definitely are.
Obfuscation. Your central assertion (that China is preparing war because it is unable to feed its people) is completely false. They might be preparing war but its not because they can't feed their people. According to Google, Chinese food imports amount to 100b/yr, at a time when the Chinese current account surplus is 100b/month. This is not a country struggling to pay for enough food to feed itself. Nor is `inability to feed its population' the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine, or the US invaded Iraq.
The last time Chinese troops went into combat outside China was 1979.
Compare with the track record of the totally non-imperialist United States since that time.
I wish that in this forum a statement criticising the outgroup would not be taken as a defence of the ingroup.
The US are very imperialistic in practice but they don't assume it very well.
Russia is imperialistic in both declarations and acts, but has a moderate success.
China is imperialistic in stated desires but has so far not acted much on it (except on its next-doors neighbours).
>The last time Chinese troops went into combat outside China was 1979.
According to their opponents, the last time they went into combat outside their borders was 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%93India_skirmishes
Russia's supposed imperialism also has been with respect to neighbors, usually in response to western countries destabilizing those neighbors. I sup[pose one could count Syria and such in Africa, except that (unlike the United States), Russian troops are in those countries at the request of the recognized government there.
"outside china" does a lot of work when approximately all the flashpoints are regions China claims have always been theirs (and never mind the views of the locals).
I would argue that the CCPs' actions wrt Tibet, the Uighurs, the disputes in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and the persistent threat of something going down with Taiwan are all Imperialist.
I note also that Chinese troops do regularly skirmish on the border with India, though it's defensible to not regard that as "combat"
That's quite a stretch, but even if you were to redefine "China" to not include places in China, it would be but a pimple on the ass of Iraq alone.
They've been in combat with India more recently than that. I guess you could call it a police action or some such euphemism, but India and China are in earnest.
There's been some saber rattling, but unless I am mistaken, the only actual fighting was in 1961 or so.
Can you point to evidence that South Asia and Africa have missed the helicopter? The largest countries in each (India and Nigeria respectively) just clocked GDP growth rates of 8.7% and 3.6% respectively. Also, if machines can do lots of production...that should make us richer, not poorer. Wealth is determined by how much stuff you can produce, not by how many people it takes you to make stuff. Insert story about `if you don't want to use earth movers because digging with spades employs more people, then why use spades, hire even more people to scratch at the dirt with bare hands'
Mean wealth is determined by production, but median wealth is largely determined by distribution.
Are we sure having robots do the farming is a great idea? Do people farming now really want to re-invent themselves as robot management experts? Do they want to sell their farms and go do something else? If they don’t want to, are people sure they’ll be happier afterwards even though they think they won’t?
And then there’s the doomed continents.
I understand the concern, but there is a difference between robots doing literally all the farming, and robots doing most of the farming while a long tail of hobbyists of various sorts continue doing some farming as well. I look at the Amish, I don't see them seriously threatened, and as long as that remains true I'm not that worried.
I do always love the tension between the two widely held beliefs that “overpopulation isn’t a problem”, and “omg we are burning through the earths resources and biosphere too quickly. Seems like even before it was clear that the curve was working in our favor on item 1 it had become politically verboten. And on top of that even if we stabilize at 10 billion or whatever, it is literally twice as hard a problem as stabilizing at 5.
I agree Ehrlich's position seemed much more defensible in 1970 than today, although Coria's point was trying to draw a line between "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil", and while I think the amount of stupidity it takes to believe Ehrlich's position now has gone way up, I don't think that affects the dichotomy.
I kinda do think being wrong can make you morally culpable. Specifically, if you’re in a position of authority and you could be right by exercising a reasonable amount of intellectual discipline and spending a reasonable amount of effort, then you’re culpable for being wrong. Don’t know if this applies to 1970 Erlich or not. He seems to have been in a position of authority, and I expect he expended a reasonable amount of effort, but I would not be surprised to discover he was lacking in discipline.
I'd prefer to say that you're culpable for skipping your due diligence, rather than culpable for being wrong per se.
In particular, I think you remain culpable for skipping your due diligence even if you have the good fortune of being correct.
Is that a good stance for us to take, individually or especially as a society? There's got to be some room for blaming people for the results of their actions as well as their intentions, otherwise every true-believer mass murderer could get a pass. We should reserve the right to call out evil methods or evil suggestions, even if they seem right at the time. It's better to miss out on an opportunity for improvement if the alternative is a definite atrocity.
And what would due diligence look like in 1970, regarding population? Even by the 80s and 90s population was being taught in schools as a major issue (and maybe after that, I wouldn't know). The consensus opinion at the time was that he was correct, and that would have been the consensus even if he personally had never said a thing.
If a doctor kills a patient, but they believed their actions were going to save the patient, and there TRULY was no way they could have known better, then I do not think they are ethically culpable.
If you think a "true-believer serial killer" is different from "a doctor that accidentally kills several of their patients", I suspect that's probably because you think the "serial killer" actually DID have a way to know better and failed to exercise it. (If you think there's an ethical difference for some other reason, please share!)
Of course, society may sometimes need to defend itself from well-intentioned-but-wrong people by stopping them with force. I think defending yourself is conceptually distinct from punishing the other guy, though occasionally both may result in the same action being taken.
Society might even need to penalize that person as a deterrent, if there isn't a reliable way to distinguish between "well-intentioned but wrong" and "pretending to be well-intentioned to avoid punishment". I still think that's distinct from assigning ethical culpability to wrong people who genuinely couldn't have known better.
I think it's also worth noting that there can be situations where X is the best strategy conditional on Y being true, and it seems very likely that Y is true, but X is still not actually the best strategy when taking uncertainty into account. Sometimes the harm if you're wrong is so big that a small probability of that harm outweighs the larger probability of some benefit. Sometimes there's an alternative strategy that hedges your bets, which is slightly less helpful if Y is true but much less harmful if Y turns out to be false. If you do your best possible analysis of all available evidence and conclude, correctly, that there is a 95% chance that Y is true, that is still not the same as a 100% chance and does not license you to act as if it was a 100% chance.
I guess the short answer is that I'm a deontologist, and some approaches to solving problems are just simply off the table from the start. Mass-sterilization is one of those items. Experimental treatments (going back to your doctor example) is not.
I'm reminded a bit of the Olympic gymnast doctor who was giving the female gymnasts repeated and unnecessary genital examinations (there's apparently some reason to do a similar examination) and abusing these girls for years. He was able to claim, with some support, that he was not abusing them. What should have happened is probably some process to review the necessity of such procedures or to have a female doctor involved instead. We take the "well-meaning but wrong" possibility off the table by simply removing the possibility. Similarly, we don't know if the doctor is trying out the best treatments he knows and it happens to kill the patient, or he's intentionally killing the patient. We therefore have medical review panels and investigate the situation instead of taking his word for it.
Yes, and I'd argue that the threshold for what counts as "reasonable" amount of effort and discipline must rise dramatically with the severity of your proposed action. It could be argued that some actions are so drastic that no human agency could reasonably supply sufficient effort and discipline to justify them.
This sort of clause seems dangerous unless you have a way of determining this type of culpability a priori. This discipline you point at being essentially an internal psychological phenomenon, I doubt this would work.
I don't think it works very well as a basis for public judgements of culpability, but I'm sometimes happy to make them privately
I believe Bryan Caplan argues that "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil" are more continuous, rather than discrete (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery).
If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
Similarly, if you make policy decisions, with anything but the most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis, and those decisions have the potential to hurt millions of people, (let alone cases like Ehrlich's where you know you will be hurting people and the question is only the payoff), that would seem to also be on the evil spectrum, rather than a member of a totally different category.
By extension, then, anyone who makes policy decisions is evil (because we should all understand our flaws and that none of us is capable of consistently doing most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis.)
But policy decisions still need to be made. What do we do?
That's what deontology is for. If you can't confidently forecast the consequences, you can still evaluate the actions.
Simple rules like "no extermination camps" and "fair trial" go a really long way to preventing the worst kinds of mistakes. Deontology gets a bad rap around here sometimes, but it's a great system for preventing repeat bad outcomes.
Make as few as possible, of course. That's the moral argument for conservatism and libertarianism.
> If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
What if you shoot the bullets directly upward vs at an angle? Then you're back to just fine again? I'm being serious, by the way. Turns out, if you shoot a bullet directly up, it will come tumbling back down and be fairly harmless whoever/whatever it might hit. If you shoot it at an angle, whatever it hits will be very unhappy.
I feel this still fits. If there is a catogoric need to discharge the gun then;
Good: I've discovered and am confident that of we shoot strait up no one will get hurt
Mid: if I shoot it up at an angle it will probably be fine
Evil: I'll shoot it at that person because I didn't like them anyway
I dunno, man. I just find it hard to believe that the guy doesn't grasp, somewhere in the back of his head, just how bad he is at extrapolating from current data. Which may just be me, sure.
Not just you.
I often think about this in the context of HIV denialists, or vaccine-autism-ers, or other similar views. There was a point where their view was a little contrarian, but perfectly reasonable. By now they are completely utterly verifiably wrong and harmful. There’s probably a point in between where some lines were crossed. But the people who stick with it do so because of their instinct of resisting criticism in the early days, which was good for science, but now is bad for science.
Population Control a half century ago was a common cause among Republican Protestants, like the Rockefellers and Bushes, to back. Their specific concern was, I would guess, Irish Catholic Democrats: e.g., Bobby Kennedy had ten kids (and one is currently running for President). But white Catholic birthrates fell sharply and Protestants lost interest in the subject over time.
Ehrlich was had good intentions, and he was smart. World population was rising rapidly and would lead to resource related collapse. He presented three scenarios of collapse. For rhetorical reasons, he focused on the impact of rising world population on the US since his audience was largely in the US, but he ignored the fact that being rich, the US would be able to mitigate more of the effects than in a poorer nation. He sorted of assumed the US would be impacted much like some hypothetical average nation.
I remember the book, and I've recently reread it. It challenged a lot of ideas about world development in 1968. People took it seriously. Nations around the world encouraged the use of birth control and the adoption of new crops and agricultural practices to increase food output. The Green Revolution started in the late 1960s and was seen as essential thanks to books like The Population Bomb. Different nations adopted its policies to different degrees, but the recent rise in per capita income around the world was driven by the revolution that Ehrlich's book started.
The Population Bomb tends to get maligned much like the Club of Rome Report some years later. The Club of Rome, as it turned out, was surprisingly close to the mark. There were a few articles on it for its 50th anniversary. I was watching the eagles nearby the other day and thinking of Rachel Carson. They were beautiful birds, and it's just as well we have better pesticides and use them more carefully than DDT.
Ehrlich sounded an important alarm that led to what someone here called quasi-eugenic policies like partial sterilization through birth control. We also had the green revolution and big gains in development around the world, policies pushed in response to fears of Ehrlich's dystopian vision. Would China or India really be in better shape with two billion people or more each or having endured a famine killing hundreds of millions? In hindsight, Ehrlich sounds way off the mark, but that's because people took him seriously.
I would be curious to know just how far "outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible" the Green Revolution was. Was there really no serious dissent, or was it just given less airtime on the three extant tv stations?
As I note in this comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck/comment/16157431 David Friedman was skeptical of the doomer consensus at the time.
They knew the Green Revolution was easy, they just didn't want it. Borlaug discussed it with his bosses at the Rockefeller Foundation and defied their orders. Since he was the only person to do it, they were right to forecast that no one would, at least on the scale of a decade.
Wait, are you saying the Green Revolution was somehow actually the work of one person going against the system? I would have thought the Green Revolution, while it had important figures, actually relied on millions of people acting within various systems.
No major movement is only ever just one person, but Normal Borlaug singularly made a massive difference and without him it's possible it would not have happened.
Ehrlich was one of the scientists pushing for the Green Revolution. Tropical agriculture had been neglected. The big ag outfits were focused on the temperate zone where the money was. It was considered a long shot, but one that had to be tried. Even proponents, rightly, expected that Improving tropical agriculture alone would not be enough without population control as well.
I think Borlaug had a staff of several dozen. First he spent a decade doing normal things that he was instructed to do, like disease resistance. Then he spent a decade adapting the wheat to fertilizer. Such a long project can't have been behind his boss's back, so he must have brought them around, but they definitely were against it at the beginning. Then he, personally, took the wheat from Mexico to India, which suggests a pretty small cast of characters. Other people played a bigger role of adapting it to India and pursuing the same strategy with other grains.
"Such a long project can't have been behind his boss's back,"
This isn't actually true during that time period.
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain."
Did we? We banned coercive eugenics, but last I heard we aren't randomizing reproductive pairings, sperm banks show a sharp skew in preferences towards the over 6ft and accomplished, and assortative mating in humans seems to be a thing and the effect is likely getting stronger in USA.
Yeah. Even things like selective abortion for Tay-Sachs (as mentioned in the post) and Down Syndrome are very mainstream and widely, although not universally, accepted. Probably the meaningful distinction is between decisions made by parents and those imposed or encouraged by a government.
Widely accepted by readers of this blog (myself included). Not so long ago, Ohio tried to ban second-trimester abortions specifically in the case of Down syndrome. That seemed unbelievably perverse to me, but Facebook friends told me that my moral compass is simply not set up in the same way as most American's moral compass.
This is interesting, since then one would have to argue that the people behind the Ohio ban would see killing people as OK, or at least the lesser evil, compared to killing people for having Down's syndrome.
Surely it's pretty reasonable to hold that (a) a foetus is not covered by anti-discrimination legislation - specially that concerning serious defects, as opposed to, say, gender - whether or not you also hold that (b) a second-trimester foetus has *some* weight in a moral calculus that a six-week embryo does not have or barely has.
The (deep) flaw in the precautionary principle is that it pretends that there is only one reason of moral concern. What about the ethical undesirability of giving birth to a child who will be tremendously shortchanged by nature? (Or simply changing the family dynamics, which will now likely revolve around the very special needs of one child, and not those of existing children? Not to mention that many families will not have another child after a child with Down's is born: family finances will not allow it.)
It is not so much that I cannot see why some people might choose to virtue-signal on this issue (until they themselves get a Down diagnosis for their foetus; then the great majority aborts). It's more that this sort of diagnosis seems to be the most obvious and common reason for a responsible person to abort in the second semester and not before.
Again: even if you grant a foetus some moral weight, it is a fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a desire to live, or equal rights, or any such thing. As a life, it is something real, but it is only potentially a person - and we consider choices between potential futures all the time.
It is completely consistent to believe that any person has equal rights, and the right to live, but that foetus don't get a right to be born - and that giving birth to a child with Down's is not just not obligatory, but grossly immoral. (That is not necessarily my opinion, mind you; I am simply claiming that these opinions are consistent.)
This is so basic that I am starting to suspect that you simply are arguing for the sake of arguing. I won't waste my time on discussing this matter with you (whoever or whatever it is that you are) further.
Let's say that an all-knowing genie told you that if you have sex on Tuesday, you'll have a kid with Downs. If you have sex on Wednesday instead, you'll have a kid without Downs. If you want to have a kid, is it immoral to have sex on Wednesday but not Tuesday? What if, prior to the genie appearing, you were planning on having sex on Tuesday?
>There's this conceptual mistake people seem to make where they think the pregnancies are interchangeable... But that's a distinct individual who will never live
It's not a mistake, it's that fundamental nature of how probability works, if a fetus is not yet a person. Unless you have a convincing reason as to why the cutoff for when life begins *has to* be at conception, an unborn fetus has the same probabilistic value as not choosing to have a baby at all. i.e. you can make the same argument that any time you use birth control that's a "a distinct individual who will never live"; or for that matter *any* opportunity you have to impregnate someone that you do not take (including morally objectionable ones).
In other words, it's not a useful argument to make, because it's ultimately totally unrelated to the actual argument, which is the Schelling point for where personhood begins. It's an argument that, in the proper sense, begs the question.
" shortchanged by nature"
Hoo boy. Isn't *that* a completely generalizable justification for any given scale of genocide.
It's also our excuse for killing cows and onions. We all live on a slippery slope.
If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would be opposed to *any* abortion of a fetus at that stage, Down's syndrome or no, on the grounds that this would be murder. If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is not a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would believe that aborting a fetus with Down's is not "killing folk for having medical conditions" but rather preventing a person from being born with a medical condition. Rather like not having unprotected sex with your sibling prevents inbred children from being born.
I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6 months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that *only* people with Down's should be protected from early infanticide.
But that was exactly the reasoning behind the Ohio law: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ohio-abortion-down-syndrome-courts-d9da3bbd49db2d3369a9e9f154383c8f#:~:text=By%20JULIE%20CARR%20SMYTHApril,a%20case%20considered%20nationally%20pivotal.
Yes, it seems maximally perverse to you and to me, but not necessarily to others. Of course, again, this was back when Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land, so the point of these laws was to stake a position.
For those who are wondering, the following seems to be the actual text of the law: https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/solarapi/v1/general_assembly_132/bills/hb214/EN/05/hb214_05_EN?format=pdf
"No person shall purposely perform or induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the person has knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion, in whole or in part, because of any of the following: (1) A test result indicating Down syndrome in an unborn child; (2) A prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in an unborn child; (3) Any other reason to believe that an unborn child has Down syndrome."
_In theory_, if there's a case where the mother's health is in danger and the foetus has Downs, and you say "the mother is in danger, so we must abort", the law as written doesn't criminalize that. I would not want to be that _in practice_ prosecutors wouldn't say "obviously this is just a fig-leaf and at least part of the reason for the abortion is that the foetus had Down's".
PS. Of course one can believe (and in fact I suspect that many people do believe) that a foetus at 6 months is not a person, yet is both alive and human, and, by that token (or simply by virtue of being a living *animal*) , deserves *some* moral consideration - while at the same time not being conceivable as an individual in any but a potential sense. Then the question is whether you are willing to kill a foetus to prevent a person from being born with a particularly cruel, limiting and incurable condition.
Most people who operate in that framework would say "yes" (or "sadly yes"), though the contrary is not utterly absurd prima facie. Then it also makes sense for testing to become effective and available as early in the pregnancy as possible.