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JoshuaZ comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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Yes, I think this would be my past self's reply (I don't remember making that particular argument, but it does sound like something I would say). Even if we granted that IQ-linked alleles were identical 100kya, we still wouldn't have to grant that IQ was the same! We know of many powerful environmental effects on phenotypic IQ: to give a recent example of interest to me, just iodine & iron deficiency will cost on average 15 IQ points. One might expect random diseases and parasites to cost even more. (And remember that aside from the effect on the mean, the tails of the bell curve are going to be affected even more outrageously.)
And we know IQ connects in all sorts of way to economic attitudes, activity, growth, etc, with patterns indicative of bidirectional causality; see http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4r01
More importantly, we have the equivalent of natural experiments on the importance of national IQ averages: African countries. There are countries where the limited samples suggest particularly low IQs; these are also the countries where economic growth is least, and anecdotally, charitable efforts like installing new infrastructure fail frequently.
Logically, it should be easier to leapfrog or catchup in growth based on existing technologies & methods, and this explains things like why it could take hundreds of millennia to go from apes to sub-Saharan Africa levels of wealth but South Korea could then go from sub-Saharan levels to industrialized democracy in something like 40 years. So, if the African countries with the least average intelligence can hardly maintain the existing infrastructures or per capita wealth, then this doesn't bode well for the prospects of them taking off, and is perfectly consistent with the observation of ~90 millennia of stagnation. (Now there's a 'great stagnation' for you!)
How much of the failure of the African countries is due to their average lower intelligence and how much is that a consequence of other systemic problems (e.g. lack of institutions) that also make the maintenance of modern technologies difficult?
In graphs of interacting cause & effects, that's not necessarily the best way to ask that question. Because IQ is predictive at least of general economic growth (but also increased by growth, 'bidirectional'), those systemic problems can be perfectly real and also rooted in lower IQs.
I get the impression that "average lower intelligence" is a big cause of systemic problems, like lack of institutions. I'm reminded of Yvain's example that, in Haiti, they could not understand sorting things numerically or alphabetically. This meant bureaucratic institutions were basically worthless: "where is your file? Let me look at all of the files and try to find yours."
Edit: Also, see this paper.
I was going to say, “well, maybe that's a failure of education, not of intelligence”, but...
Okay, I'm shocked. (It might still be something that people with IQ between (say) 70 and 90 can learn if they're taught it in elementary school but couldn't ever learn as adults if they haven't, but the “privileging the hypothesis” warning light in my brain is on.)
Tangentially, and specifically because I followed the link from LessWrong, this jumped out at me:
"Haitians have a culture of tending not to admit they're wrong[.]"
(Pretend that this sentence is a list of reasonable caveats about what to conclude from that.)
I'm pretty sure that that's a failure of education, not of intelligence. Education has the best effect at a young age, when habits are formed; it's a lot harder to educate someone later, unless that someone really wants to be educated.
Looking at that specific example, I can see why someone who is lazy, and unfamiliar with alphabetic sorting, might not want to try it. Mainly, that step one would be to figure out this whole 'alphabet' thing and memorise what order things go in (a significant neural effort, done now; somewhat easier if already literate, but note that 'literate' does not necessarily mean 'familiar with the order of the alphabet'); step two would be to sort in alphabetical order everything that's already in the office (a significant physical effort, done now); step three would be to actually bother to put new things in order instead of just toss them in a random drawer (an ongoing effort).
So much easier to just pretend to understand less than one does (admittedly, it does mean a bit more time searching for a piece of paper when someone asks, but that's a minor task, and won't have to be done immediately in any case).
You can get some benefit even without learning the order of the alphabet. If you divide things to groups by their first letter, even if the groups are sorted randomly, and the things in one group are sorted randomly, the search time should be at least 10 times shorter.
As a bonus, you can switch to this system gradually. Create empty groups for each first letter, and consider everything else as an "unsorted" group. When searching, first look in the group with given letter, then in the "unsorted" group. When finished, always put the thing into the group starting with that letter. Your system will sort gradually.
You are correct. This methodology will work, as long as we assume that no-one will put a piece of paper in the wrong (apparently sorted) file.
Was it ever explained to the Haitians in this way, though?
By this you mean that you think P(Can't understand sorting | low education, moderate intelligence)>P(Can't understand sorting | moderate education, low intelligence)?
If you had said "this might be the result of low energy," then I would have agreed that's a likely partial explanation, as you argued for that fairly well and it fits the rigors of a tropical climate. But I'm concerned that you're conflating education and energy.
No, I mean that I think that P(low education|group of humans who can't understand sorting)>P(low intelligence|group of humans who can't understand sorting).
The 'group' part is important; while education is often constant or near-constant among a community, intelligence is often not; thus, something that is true for an entire group is more likely a result of education than intelligence. Similarly, 'humans' is an important word, because I know that many humans are capable of sorting, and thus there is no species barrier.
Having said that, "low energy" is almost certainly also a contributing factor.
Childhood malnutrition reduces IQ. Major childhood trauma reduces IQ. No childhood education makes you massively unlikely to grasp formal logic, Ect, ect. Most third world countries are profoundly crippling places to grow up, - The good news is that any such place that manages to not be a circle of hell for a straight 20 year stretch should see its economy do a hard takeoff as a generation reaches adulthood that was not lobotomized.