juliawise comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: dvasya 02 September 2011 07:38AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2011 07:42:39AM 29 points [-]

It's a nice list, but I think the core point strikes me as liable to be simply false. I forget who it was presenting this evidence - it might even have been James Miller, it was someone at the Winter Intelligence conference at FHI - but they looked at (1) the economic gains to countries with higher average IQ, (2) the average gains to individuals with higher IQ, and concluded that (3) people with high IQ create vast amounts of positive externality, much more than they capture as individuals, probably mostly in the form of countries with less stupid economic policies.

Maybe if we're literally talking about a pure speed and LTM pill that doesn't affect at all, say, capacity to keep things in short-term memory or the ability to maintain complex abstractions in working memory, i.e., a literal speed and disk space pill rather than an IQ pill.

Comment author: juliawise 05 September 2011 12:26:27PM 4 points [-]

If this is true, it would affect my decisions about whether and how to have children. So I'd really like to see the source if you can figure out what it was.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 September 2011 02:40:32AM 6 points [-]

James Miller says:

Hi,

It wasn't me. Garett Jones, an economist at George Mason University, has been making these points. See

http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/JonesADBSlides

http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/JonesADR

Comment author: juliawise 06 September 2011 02:44:45PM 1 point [-]

That's helpful; thanks.