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How minimal is our intelligence?
Gwern suggested that, if it were possible for civilization to have developed when our species had a lower IQ, then we'd still be dealing with the same problems, but we'd have a lower IQ with which to tackle them. Or, to put it another way, it is unsurprising that living in a civilization has posed problems that our species finds difficult to tackle, because if we were capable of solving such problems easily, we'd probably also have been capable of developing civilization earlier than we did.
How true is that?
In this post I plan to look in detail at the origins of civilization with an eye to considering how much the timing of it did depend directly upon the IQ of our species, rather than upon other factors.
Although we don't have precise IQ test numbers for our immediate ancestral species, the fossil record is good enough to give us a clear idea of how brain size has changed over time:
and we do have archaeological evidence of approximately when various technologies (such as pictograms, or using fire to cook meat) became common.
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Criteria for Rational Political Conversation
Query: by what objective criteria do we determine whether a political decision is rational?
I propose that the key elements -- necessary but not sufficient -- are (where "you" refers collectively to everyone involved in the decisionmaking process):
- you must use only documented reasoning processes:
- use the best known process(es) for a given class of problem
- state clearly which particular process(es) you use
- document any new processes you use
- you must make every reasonable effort to verify that:
- your inputs are reasonably accurate, and
- there are no other reasoning processes which might be better suited to this class of problem, and
- there are no significant flaws in in your application of the reasoning processes you are using, and
- there are no significant inputs you are ignoring
If an argument satisfies all of these requirements, it is at least provisionally rational. If it fails any one of them, then it's not rational and needs to be corrected or discarded.
This is not a circular definition (defining "rationality" by referring to "reasonable" things, where "reasonable" depends on people being "rational"); it is more like a recursive algorithm, where large ambiguous problems are split up into smaller and smaller sub-problems until we get to a size where the ambiguity is negligible.
This is not one great moral principle; it is more like a self-modifying working process (subject to rational criticism and therefore improvable over time -- optimization by successive approximation). It is an attempt to apply the processes of science (or at least the same reasoning which arrived at those processes) to political discourse.
So... can we agree on this?
This is a hugely, vastly, mindbogglingly trimmed-down version of what I originally posted. All comments prior to 2010-08-26 20:52 (EDT) refer to that version, which I have reposted here for comparison purposes and for the morbidly curious. (It got voted down to negative 6. Twice.)
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