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army1987 comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Most of the problems described in this post seem to be things that are not really practical to do anything about, but this caught my eye:
Really we need to stop using the word "eugenics." In the real world it really isn't smart to keep insisting on the "official" definition of a word decades after it acquired negative connotations for actually pretty good reasons.
(It's funny how the instance of ‘eugenics’ after which that happened was actually dysgenic BTW.)
Even better (or worse) than that. It was dysgenic for the German population. It was probably eugenic for the Jewish population. So what the Nazis managed to do was to help make the Jews racially superior to the Germans.
In other words, they managed to massacre 6 million people in order to achieve the exact reverse of what they said they wanted to do.
For the avoidance of doubt: (1) I think what they did was a horrible terrible thing, (2) although it was probably eugenic for the Jewish population it was dyseverythingelse for them, and in particular (3) I am certainly not suggesting, e.g., that Jewish people should be glad it happened or anything similarly monstrous. Also (4) of course neither "the Jews" nor "the Germans" is a particularly well-defined group biologically and I am not suggesting otherwise, and (5) I am not claiming that this sort of "racial superiority" is something anyone should be aiming at. Oh, and (6) I am also not suggesting that the worst thing about what they did is that it didn't achieve their goals. It would have been just as awful if it had.
I'm not sure my premises are correct, but this might be an example of LW's excessive emphasis on genes. I think you're saying that smarter Jews were more likely to survive the Holocaust. This might be true for German Jews (a lot of warning, a lot of people with resources to move-- and still, only 25% got out), but not so true about Polish Jews, where it happened very fast-- and that's where a very high proportion of the Holocaust happened.
Also, a major focus at LW is on extraordinarily smart people. Even if Ashkenazi Jews went from an average IQ of 115 to 117, where are the great mathematicians and physicists? I tentatively suggest that there was something special about Jewish culture (or possibly Jewish culture + surrounding Gentile culture when the latter was benign) in Germany, Austria, and possibly Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and it's gone.
When looking at the question of whether something intended as a eugenic program was in fact eugenic or dysgenic, an emphasis on genes seems highly appropriate, no? (I agree that the eugenic or dysgenic effect isn't the only or the most important thing we should care about -- the six million people murdered would seem like one other thing, for instance -- and I already said that as clearly as I could.)
Yes, I'm suggesting that probably smarter Jews were more likely to get out early and more likely to find ways to survive. (Of course plenty of smart ones died and plenty of not-so-smart ones lived too.) If so, then the Holocaust will have had a (probably rather small) eugenic effect on the Jewish population.
26% of all Nobel prizewinning physicists to date, and 29% of all Fields medallists to date, are at least half-Jewish by ancestry, according to jinfo.org. I haven't checked their figures.
I agree this is likely the case, but I think those where likely doomed at the end of WW1 not WW2, as I credit the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires as their incubators. We are unlikely to see the Kaisers return. It is most unfortunate because the intellectual beacon that was Vienna and groups like the Martians won't ever be seen again.
Can you expand on what was special about the culture? I just had the cultural explanation as a hypothesis, but I don't have details.
I don't know much about the Holocaust, however, due to the shape of a Bell Curve, very small changes in the average result in large changes at the tail ends.
I think that depends on the cause of the change.
Other than lack of homogeneity, why would this not be true?
I'm not sure I understand your question, but eliminating the left tail of a bell curve would change the average but not necessarily extend the right tail.
What exactly happens depends on the model, but I think it would be very difficult to build a model with nonzero heritability that produced a bell curve and where truncating the left tail did not affect the right tail.
Usually bell curves occur from the sum of many small discrete variables. That appears to be true for IQ. Under this model, any form of selection has basically the same effect, at least in the long term. If the old equilibrium had random mating and the next generation is also produced by random mating, then a new bell curve will be produced in the very next generation. If the old distribution were due to assortative mating, and that continues, it will take longer to reach equilibrium. But it will affect the right tail eventually.
Added: no, more than a generation to equilibrium.
Well, since IQ is forced to be a bell curve by definition, the fact that it is a bell curve doesn't count as evidence for anything.
Here's a short-term analysis that may be more convincing.
I assume perfect heritability and pm's choice of 50% selection, both to make the effects larger. I assume additive genetics because that's what we expect from the assumption of a bell curve. The far right tail is largely produced from two parents both on the right half, even on the tail. The farther right you go, the more true this is. Assuming mating is at random. For each person who could have a right tail child, if only they found the right mate, eliminating half of the population that wouldn't do doubles their odds of having an appropriate mate and thus a right tail child. Thus, the right tail is twice as big. The further out we go, the closer it is to twice as big. If everyone has twice as many children to make up for the population being cut in half, then the tail is four times as big.
If there is strong assortative mating, the people on the right tail weren't going to going to have children with the left half and the first effect doesn't apply, since the selection only eliminates pairings that weren't going to happen. Indeed, assortative mating is very similar to truncation selection, so combining the two is redundant in the first generation.
In the first generation, the left tail does not look at all gaussian. In the long term, it does become gaussian. In the short term right becomes a thicker tail, but in the long term the variance has gone down and the right tail becomes smaller, starting at two standard deviations from the original mean.
If you did that then after one or two generations, regression to the mean would set the average IQ right back to where it was (almost). If you eliminated enough of the left tail over several generations to actually change the average to a stable higher value, then the right tail would be extended.
Like I said I'm not commenting on the effect of the Holocaust because I don't know anything about it.
If UberHitler kills everyone with IQ<100, that raises the average IQ without increasing the number of people with high IQ. After a few generations, you are back to a Gaussian with a smaller variance (you lost some genetic diversity) and a slightly larger mean, which means that at some IQ level that is sufficiently high you have fewer people with that IQ .