Konkvistador comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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You need to develop that a bit more. It is important for the benefit of the reader and thinking in general to precisely and clearly separate genetic fitness and general well being in addition to pointing out the environment has changed.
I suggest people read up on Algernon's Law and its loopholes. In short:
Bostrom's formulation, called “evolutionary optimality challenge” (EOC):
The loopholes as given by Bostrom are:
And also in the current context of discussion (possibility of genetic differences between groups), if one accepts that say Askenazi Jews have a one stdv or half a stdv advantage over some populations due to genetic causes, looking at them today, they don't seem to have shorter or less happy lives or be undesirable people, so why not share that specific genetic wealth around? It has the neat side effect of basically rooting out one of the causes of anti-Semitism too, by reducing inequality, so it is hard to say it would hurt their interest as individuals or an ethnicity either.
Actually one doesn't need to demand genetic differences between groups for the argument that what we're seeing here probably fits either the first or the second loopholes, since we also have individual differences that are caused by genetics. We see that people with an IQ of 115 overall seem to statistically speaking today do better in nearly every measure of quality of life and many measures of psychological well being compared to people with an IQ of 85, they also live longer and are generally more desirable to have around.
I would add a fourth possibility:
Lack of time.
It seems likely to me that our civilization and technology developed at the earliest possible point it could have, in which case the high-IQ genes are simply not fixated yet, but would be if we hung around for a few (tens of) thousands more years. For that matter, there's no reason not to think we'd go well above our current maximum.
Apparently smart people have fewer children than average.
Algernon's Law is just the concept I was thinking of; I hadn't seen this link. Thanks!