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bramflakes comments on Open Thread for February 3 - 10 - Less Wrong Discussion
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(bolded part mine)
Shouldn't this part be uncontroversial? Brains are expensive.
"Beyond mere statistical assertion" So his response to "All the statistics show racial IQ differences" is simply to say "that's irrelevant unless you have a concrete theory to explain why that happened"? A moment's reflection dismissing something as an "unlikely scenario" is exactly the opposite of how science should be done.
Beware of identifications and tautologies.
If there is a single variant with large effect, like torsion dystonia, then its appearance in one group is likely due to different tradeoffs. But if IQ is driven by mutational load, populations might differ in age of reproduction and thus in mutational loads without having different tradeoffs between traits. In the long run, elevated mutational load should select for simplified design, but that could be a very long run.
Yeah, that assertion also looks obviously true to me - heck, high intelligence seems to be maladaptive in current Western society!
and the obvious horror scenario
I guessed you had linked to Idiocracy.
That's not exactly about intelligence being maladaptive, though.
Of course, but the distinction isn't useful in this context. Proxies for intelligence, like large heads, became maladaptive, so intelligence itself declined along with cranial size. It remains valid for the original argument - that the assertion that for some groups, large craniums (or other traits that augment intelligence) may have become a liability, isn't controversial.
Have certain human societies been less full of complicated humans since the Toba bottleneck? Remember that human genetic diversity is quite low compared to other species.
Yes, evidently the ones with the lower IQs.
Even if the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis is correct, it isn't invulnerable to selective forces pushing in the other direction, like parasite load, lack of resources, small founder populations, island dwarfism, and so on. We've seen the Flores hominids, we know it happened.
Human intelligence won't miraculously keep increasing in any and all environments. Lack of genetic diversity doesn't factor into it.