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advancedatheist comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
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Only someone who hasn't spent much time around people with 2-digit IQ's would believe in "the psychological unity of humankind." The empirical evidence shows that at least in the area of IQ or the General Intelligence Factor (g), marginal differences can have profound practical consequences:
Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf
Nick Bostrom in one of his talks even argues that raising everyone's IQ by 10 points would revolutionize our society for the better, not by making the smartest people a little bit smarter, but by making hundreds of millions of the world's dumbasses substantially smarter so that they would become more educable, develop lower time preferences and make better decisions in life.
I looked at that sentence and thought "but people with 2-digit IQs make up 50% of the population! Surely I've spent plenty of time around them!" Then I read the article, and the description of people with IQs below 100% was surprising, to the point that I'm thinking maybe there's been some sample bias in who I'm spending my time around. (Just because about 50% of the people in my high school had IQ's below 100 doesn't mean there were the ones taking physics and calculus with me, and although I've met people in nursing school who are abominable at things that seem obvious to me, like statistics, nursing probably requires fairly high intelligence, so my "unbiased sample" is probably still biased.)
The idea is unpleasant enough that I think I have some ideological bias against intelligence being that important. Probably because it seems unfair that something basically fixed in childhood and partly or mostly genetic (i.e. beyond the individual's control and "not their fault") should determine their life outcome. I don't like the idea...but admitting that intelligence differences exist won't make it any more awful.
It's because what EY meant by the psychological unity of humankind was more along the lines of,
We might disagree about the last one, but the first four are pretty much fixed.