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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition) - Less Wrong
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Are you sure? For myself, I should say that moving to a world where everyone's two standard deviations smarter than me might be a blow to my pride, in fact it would be a huge blow to my entire self-concept and conceived role in existence, but I'd expect the fringe benefits to more than make up for it.
I am not sure, of course, since I don't trust my ability to imagine such a world too much. But the simplest model I have is that my status would be such as the current status of people having IQ around 85, with all consequences: difficulty to find decently paid work, perhaps chronic unemployment, risk of being legally declared mentally retarded and possibly locked up in some institution... I am not sure about the fringe benefits, but I care a lot about status and it's not only because of pride.
When you consider this, consider the difference between our current world (with all the consequences for those of IQ 85), and a world where 85 was the average, so that civilization and all its comforts never developed at all...
Even if it were true that average IQ 85 meant that civilisation never developed at all (an assumption I find dubious), being a chief in a neolithic tribal society still doesn't sound dramatically worse than being a village idiot in a civilised society.
Also, saying that I would profit from a marginal decrease in average IQ at level 100 doesn't imply that I would profit from similar decrease at any level. I am pretty sure I wouldn't want everybody else being dramatically different from me, thus there is some point below which I wouldn't like the average IQ to plunge. This point may lie quite above the level where civilisation of any kind becomes impossible.
Until you get a toothache.
Few people spend most of their lives having toothache, even in primitive societies.
In primitive societies, few people spend most of their lives having teeth.
My understanding was that pre-contact or historical primitive societies had fairly decent dental health, with low tooth decay - such problems being more of a sugar-heavy modern society issue.
I am not an expert, but isn't the entire reason we have two sets of teeth that we could be reasonably expected to lose much of the first set anyway by the time the others appeared? By what mechanism would the second set last significantly longer?
Gwern is correct here -- paleolithic populations tended to have excellent dental health if skeletal evidence is anything to judge by, and the case of modern forager groups is often determined mainly by the degree to which they now consume high glycemic-index commodities. Chukchi and Eveny groups in Russia have appalling dental health statistics due to poor nutrition and lots of refined sugar (to the point that one Eveny nickname for sugar is "the white death" -- they have really high rates of diabetes too). Khoisan folks in South Africa, on the other hand, tend to have excellent teeth when they eat something like their traditional diet.
I've always thought the reason we have milk teeth is that there's just no room for adult teeth in a small child's jaw.
True, but when they do, they surely must suffer horribly... and of course it's not just about dental care, but medical care in general. For example, the first time I had a bladder infection, at twenty-something, it was very bad (peeing blood and all). I really think I might have died without antibiotics.
And of course, there are lots of other things I'd miss about modern society. Books, the internet, showers...
Hell yeah.
That said, don't overestimate IQ relative to other important cognitive and behavioral traits.
It's not just pride and self concept. Your relative status in society would take a huge hit.
Everyone smarter than you by two standard deviations? You're the stupidest human in the world, by two standard deviations? Let's just confine ourselves to conscious humans without brain damage. I can't think you even mean that.
Let's go even higher and just take 2 sd as the lower bound, from which you are 2 sd lower. You're fine with being in the bottom 0.003%?
If everyone else is that smart, then we will probably soon no longer be in a scarcity economy, and we'd probably be functionally immortal to boot. At that point, I'd take it, period. Even if I was just effectively some ordinary person's pet, I'd still be waaay ahead of where I am now.
Being an immortal pet might get rather depressing. I don't think that's how you dreamed your future life, and regardless of dreams, I don't think a lot of your basic drives will be satisfied as a pet.
But better to be alive as a pet, than dead. If that's really the trade off, then I might take it too. But that's practically what it would take for me - a choice between being alive as a pet, or dead/
Exactly. I like life enough to suffer degradation in one aspect to reap super-massive benefit on the 'being alive' front. Plus, if I can hang in there, then they may be able to enhance my cognition up to parity eventually. I don't see this situation as being permanent.
And remember, living in a world in which the average person is as smart as an upper-level computer programmer still isn't nearly as humbling as the fact that a well-organized cubic centimeter of carbon could be millions of times smarter than anyone.
I figure this to be a good general rule on these matters: unless you designed your own brain, you should not be proud of your own brain.
Do people get any points for taking good care of their brains and stocking their brains with ideas and information?
Sadly, in our world, the influence you have over yor brain is quite small compared to environmental and old-age factors we have no control over. So you can take pride in taking care of your brain, but it's hard for you to be very effective right now, even on the scale of existing human variation.
When a good brain becomes unusable for a while
For me at least, that's the primary / most effective source of points in the first place. Doing some meta related to that earns them even more points from me just because of the apparent scarcity (i.e. I rarely see people outside LW do any of it).
But what would I have designed my own brain with?
It's not just a matter of pride -- ISTM that people with very different IQs usually find each other boring (EDIT: see johnlawrenceaspden's comment -- his experience is pretty much the same as mine). Now if I have IQ 120 it doesn't matter under this aspect whether the average IQ is 100 or 140, but if I had IQ 90, moving to a world where the average person has IQ 140 would mean that it'd be very hard for me to find suitable conversational partners, as everybody else would find me terribly stupid and uninteresting, and I would find everybody else hard to understand.
Changes made to future generations don't deprive you of conversational partners less than 20 years younger than you. And they can invent ways to bring you up to their level.
Changes don't guarantee one conversational partners, either. Do you see very many current retarded adults hanging around their kid peers all day? For that matter, the elderly hang around their grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the modern world probably less than at any time in humanity's history...
All I meant was that most of your friends, colleagues, and mates are not going to be 20+ years younger anyway, which limits the loss if it is hard to keep up with and understand some of the young whipper-snappers.