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prase comments on Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition) - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
That's plausible, but what about wisdom teeth? They appear when the jaw is already full-sized; I have heard that they wouldn't historically be a problem because you'd have lost teeth and there would be room for them.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that. I've been taught that they're vestigial, and that our ancestors had bigger jaws. But they can in fact grow into the space left by an extracted tooth. It happened to me, a few decades ago. I had a bad back molar, and instead of making a crown or something, the dentist pulled it, saying the wisdom tooth behind it would replace it. And it did!
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...