"We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start."
I remember a few years ago the Chinese offering free genomic scans for the sufficiently intelligent. Did anyone sign up for that? Anyone know of how that story turned out? I assume they weren't going to share that info.
A number of LWers signed up (it was posted here) for the BGI high-IQ project; I believe they got copies of their data. As for the project as a whole: Hsu has mentioned some of how it went, including in a podcast last year which I believe got transcribed; basically, BGI made some disastrous strategic decisions in trying to develop & use a genome-sequencing competitor to Illumina and the high-IQ project got orphaned in the chaos, and is largely irrelevant now as similar high-IQ samples turned up nothing special (so the original premise, that either enric...
It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:
The only "anti-stupidity drugs" we have are nootropics. But the nootropics we have weren't developed as nootropics. Piracetam was, I think, developed to treat seizures. L-DOPA was developed to treat Parkinson's. No one knows who started using ginkgo biloba or what they used it for; it was used to treat asthma 5000 years ago. Adderall derives from drugs used to keep soldiers awake in World War 2.
And none of them are very good against stupidity. AFAIK, to date, not one drug has been developed by understanding and targeting the causes of different types of stupidity. We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.
We don't research these things because society doesn't want to research them. People don't conceive of stupidity as a disease that can be cured. We need, somehow, to promote thinking of stupidity as a mental illness. As something drug companies could make billions of dollars off of.