Category Archives: Politics

The future of intelligence inequality

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A few posts back I discussed Charles Murray’s interesting idea on the increasing role of intelligence in society. As I explained it:

[I]n earlier eras, having a bit more intelligence wasn’t that much of an advantage. If everybody was farming or doing manual labor you didn’t get much economic benefit from having an IQ of 120. But in the 20th century, being smart started to pay off big time. The rise of computers, complex physics, complex financial products etc. meant that having brains equalled power and money.

As a result, according to Murray, we’ve seen the rise of the intellectual class: smart people, usually coastal, who have segregated themselves off from the stinking, steaming masses (my words, not his.) You could reasonably make the case that the election of Donald Trump was the revenge of the great unwashed against the intellectual class.

So why should we really care? Well, many people question whether this disparity is about to get a whole lot worse. If we are on the verge of a genetic engineering revolution then the intelligent class many soon be able to become a whole lot more intelligent (and healthier, and better looking, etc.) This Vox interview with a science historian gets to the crux of it.

Well, let’s put it this way: If only rich people have access to these technologies, then we have a very big problem, because it’s going to take the kinds of inequalities that have been getting worse over recent decades, even in a rich country like ours, and make them much worse, and inscribe those inequalities into our very biology.

So it’s going to be very hard for somebody to be born poor and bootstrap themselves up into a higher position in society when the upper echelons of society are not only enjoying the privileges of health and education and housing and all that, but are bioenhancing themselves to unprecedented levels of performance. That’s going to render permanent and intractable the separation between rich and poor.

Currently, we might have a situation where some poor kid struggles to get through his computer coding class whereas a rich kid who got a Mac on his 4th birthday and had a personal tutor for years sails through it. In the future that poor kid is struggling against a rich kid who had his DNA genetically altered for high IQ (and had all the other stuff too.)

Good fucking luck, poor kid.

The debate on race and IQ

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I’ve been thinking a bit more about the work of Charles Murray, as discussed in my last post. As I mentioned, Murray is controversial because of his book “The Bell Curve.” What claims in the book earned him his notoriety?

I would say these two claims.

1. The claim that the mean average IQ for black people is lower than white people. (By about 15 points.)

2. The claim that IQ is largely heredity and not determined by environment.

Claim 1 sounds shocking and racist, but if it were a “fixable” problem then it would not be so bad. But claim 2 basically says it’s hard to fix.

So how correct are these claims? I’ll let you know right now that I don’t know. I’ve looked into this stuff before and, frankly, it’s a big headache and the data always seems to be changing.

There are a number of possible arguments one can make to counter claim 1. One is that the data is simply wrong. Another is that IQ is a meaningless measurement not correlated to anything that determines human fortunes. Another argument is that the claim is correct but it’s due to structural racism. For instance, it could be argued that a large segment of blacks live in crappy environments with poor nutrition and this drives down IQ. Related to that is the argument that culture at large generally pushes blacks towards non-achievement so they don’t apply themselves while taking the IQ test.

Let’s take those one by one.

The data is wrong
On the web are a number of people who make this claim but it doesn’t seem to be the majority view. A more standard view is to say the discrepancy exits but can be explained by non-hereditary factors.

IQ is meaningless. 
There are people who claim this and it strikes me as having some validity. Intelligence is a pretty vague concept and it’s hard to tie it down to a single digit. Nonetheless, IQ does seem to correlate pretty well to a person’s fortunes Additionally, intelligence seems to apply across a lot of disciplines. By this I mean a high IQ person can become good at math, and language, and music etc. There are few people who are awesome at math but totally baffled by music.

Lousy environments lead to low IQ
In the interview with Sam Harris, Murray seems to make the claim that much (most?) of what determines IQ is hereditary, not environmental. I’m not so sure. There does seem to be a fair amount of correlation between IQ and environment, nutrition etc. (though I’ve found people who dispute this.)

Low achievement culture leads to low IQ
I didn’t come across much discussion of this but it seems reasonable to me.

Personally the last two seem valid to me and could explain the entirety of a discrepancy between any races. (I’m not going to get into the “is race a real thing” debate here, though I have in the past.)

I’ll also say this. This debate is incredibly difficult to wrap your head around. This is true with statistics in general. You can observe trends in anything, but determining what is a cause of a trend and what’s just a correlation is really difficult. As a result, I think reasonable, intelligent people can come to differing conclusions. The automatic supposition that people who say there are genetically caused differences in intelligence are secretly neo-Nazis strikes me as pretty stupid. (Though genuine neo-Nazis surely appreciate their work.)

Charles Murray and the split in the Democratic Party

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I’ve been listening to a rather interesting interview Sam Harris did with Charles Murray. Murray is, of course, famous for authoring “The Belle Curve”, a controversial book that addressed issues of race and IQ.

Part of Murray’s thesis is this: in earlier eras, having a bit more intelligence wasn’t that much of an advantage. If everybody was farming or doing manual labor you didn’t get much economic benefit from having an IQ of 120. But in the 20th century, being smart started to pay off big time. The rise of computers, complex physics, complex financial products etc. meant that having brains equalled power and money.

As a result, according to Murray, we’ve seen the rise of the intellectual class: smart people, usually coastal, who have segregated themselves off from the stinking, steaming masses (my words, not his.) You could reasonably make the case that the election of Donald Trump was the revenge of the great unwashed against the intellectual class.

So far in the interview Murray hasn’t gotten into the future but certainly one can extrapolate various scenarios. Will the intellectual class arm itself with artificial intelligence and increase the brain gap even further? Are regular folks doomed?

Corollary to all this, I start to sense a schism in the Democratic party. There’s the identity politics folks—folks who hated Murray’s book—who often are members of this intellectual class, though probably more as academics than technologists or scientists. Then there’s the economic populists, headed by Bernie Sanders, who see this brain divide leading to significant economic inequality.

You can even see this battle playing out in the liberal journal, Salon. Not long ago I came across this article, an homage to identity politics thinking.

Bye bye, Bernie: He’s not fit to captain the Democratic ship if he can’t stop chasing the great white male

But just today we see, this:

Yes, Bernie would probably have won — and his resurgent left-wing populism is the way forward

Personally, I’m not wild about any of these options. I think identity politics suck and are ineffective politicking, but I generally still stand behind globalization and free markets, contra Sanders and crew.

Those “huh?” sentences and the fate of Steve Bannon

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I occasionally come across sentences that really baffle the mind. Consider this one from an article on Michael Anton, an advisor to President Trump.

A dandy compared to the famously rumpled Bannon who tells me presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner is the White House’s best-dressed aide in a skinny-tie-sort of way, Anton even wrote a book about Machiavelli and fashion; he’s a true-believing Trumper who is also an expert on fine wines.

I believe the sentence is saying that Anton, not Bannon, referred to Kushner as best-dressed but it’s tough to know for sure.

On a side note, I often find memes taking hold that don’t seem particularly justified. For instance, many in the press seem to feel Bannon is doomed in his role a Trump advisor. The reasons for this seem to be some rather offhand comments Trump has made. Personally, I don’t know Bannon’s fate but it seems presumptions to conclude he is finished. Anton, this article, agrees.

As for reports that Bannon, now dumped from his official seat on the NSC Principals Committee after widespread complaints that a political adviser to the president didn’t belong among his top national security advisers, might be on the outs altogether, Anton argues that’s overplayed too. “He still goes to the meetings,” Anton says. “He’s still a close adviser.”

Trump… whaddaya do with this guy?

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I peeked at the news app on my phone this morning, eager for news stories in the aftermath of Trump’s decision to bomb Syria. An Atlantic article appeared with the headline “Trump Was Always Going to Disappoint his Isolationist Supporters.” Another one on the Atlantic web site is titled “Donald Trump, Inevitable Hawk.”

One wonders, if the Atlantic was so confident of what Trump was always going to do, why they didn’t write an article about it two weeks ago? Events always look inevitable after they happen.

I don’t say this to pick on the Atlantic which I think is a great magazine. But they, like the rest of the press are jumping fropm narrative to narrative, desperate to explain Trump’s strategy and behavior. Give up, I say. There’s no ‘splainin’ it.

When Trump was elected we were told to expect the second coming of Hitler. This lasted until Trump failed to get his Obamacare repeal through and he became the bumbling, inept salesman. We were told Trump was basically a sleeper agent for Putin until he suddenly reversed course and bombed Syria.

Maybe all those things are true, maybe none. But people should stop pretending they know. How refreshing would it be to see an article that stated, “we don’t know what they fuck this guy is doing. We’re not even sure he knows.”?

UPDATE
I have to update this post with a bit more detail. I actually read the “Donald Trump, Inevitable Hawk” article and noticed this sentence.

While this episode may have been the one to finally debunk the pundit-pleasing myth of “Donald the Dove,” the truth is that Trump’s mutation into a missile-lobbing interventionist was, most likely, always inevitable.

How can something be “most likely, always” anything?

Kids these days…

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I was watching an interview with comedian/commentator Adam Corrolla yesterday. He was defending his views, views which some call conservative but what he merely saw as common sense. Part of his take on things is the idea that people who can’t afford to have kids shouldn’t have kids. Seems reasonable enough, I thought. But it sort of feels like something is missing. To simply tell young, poor kids to not have kids until they can afford them seems like a doomed effort.

So why is this? We all understand that teens and young adult just make bad choices. Neuroscience can even offer a reason why, noting that the frontal cortex of the brain—reportedly key to foresight and planning—is not fully developed until one is in their mid twenties.

But we don’t really need science to tell us that young people make stupid choices. This is because we’ve all been young people and made stupid choices. Following this tangent got me thinking about my teens and twenties and musing, “What the fuck was I thinking?” Not in a chastening sort of way but more that of mild bemusement.

I look back at the period after I graduated from high school and think, “What was my plan?” I realize I was both naive and also unaware of the real possibilities of life. Part of my plan was to start a band and become a rock star, a rather pie in the sky pursuit (though I know people who accomplished this.) On the flip side, I think I thought it unlikely, even if I went to college, that I could do something like become a lawyer or scientist. Nowadays I feel such vocations could be well within reach if I felt like committing to them, which I don’t.

As it was, I ended up working at a car wash for eight years before stumbling into a career in web development.

I feel around in my memories for some tidbit of information that could possibility serve as a guide to getting young people to value their future correctly. I don’t really find anything other than a sense of understanding how some kid raised poor with little sense of hope could turn to creating a family (or at least having lots of sex) as a source of pleasure.

But we all end up paying for that.

Your personal robot slave

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I’ve often talked here about why I think certain technological developments, namely AI, robotics and 3D printing could radically alter the landscape of employment. I am, of course, hardly the first person or only person to discuss this.

This Salon article is a worthy addition to the debate. The article posits that personal manufacturing robots and 3D printers could allow people to become a factory of one. Have you always wanted to produce and sell a line of rubber figurines in the form of the Loch Ness Monster? With your own personal manufacturing robot you could do so from your basement.

The article states:

This is already beginning to happen. In 2014, there were more than 350,000 manufacturing companies with only one employee, up 17 percent from 2004. These companies combine globalization and automation, embracing outsourcing and technological tools to make craft foods, artisanal goods and even high-tech engineered products.

Many American entrepreneurs use digitally equipped manufacturing equipment like 3D printers, laser cutters and computer-controlled CNC mills, combined with market places to outsource small manufacturing jobs like mfg.com to run small businesses. I’m one of them, manufacturing custom robotic grippers from my basement. Automation enables these sole proprietors to create and innovate in small batches, without large costs.

An interesting idea. Nonetheless, it feels somewhat utopian, doesn’t it? Are we really going to counter-balance the rise in unemployment caused by robots and 3D printers by turning households into small manufacturing units? This might work for a small subset of people, but it seems unlikely to be salve to the larger problem.

A commenter on the post makes a funny and similar point:

Some good points, but this techno-hipster bullcrap about the future being dufus hipster makers with at home 3D printers and trained on LEGO Mindstorms making artisanal pickle jar openers being the future only serves those who are selling the hipster shovels.

Hmm, that’s an understatement

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You have to find some humorin this Washington Post report on a political rally turned violent.

The video makes it hard to see what sparked individual violent incidents. At one point, two men began punching each other. A woman was hit in the face in the scuffle, further angering people. As that was going on, someone released a mist of pepper spray, and people in the dense crowd started coughing and rubbing their eyes.

Then, the mood of the rally soured, according to the video.

Yes, only then did the mood sour. Until then it was going swimmingly.

Connecting the dots between Scott Adams and “The Game”

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As anyone who reads this blog knows, I spent a lot of time during the election season commenting favorably on cartoonist Scott Adams’ analysis of Trump’s campaign. I even wrote a few articles over at acid logic on the subject, including this one where I compared Trump’s persuasion abilities to similar skills I had seen described in a book about the world of pickup artists called “The Game.”

As such I shouldn’t be too surprised when I read this profile on Adams and come across this passage.

[Adams] has an airy office upstairs, where the books on display include Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade and a signed copy of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, a book of strategies for seducing women. (Adams said he hadn’t read it.)

I would argue that “The Game” isn’t a strategy book, it about the people who use the strategies.

Another interesting tidbit about Adams in the profile.

Around the same time, Adams said, he was making up to $1 million annually from public speaking, charging up to $100,000 per speech, until in 2005 he suddenly lost the ability to talk with other people. The mysterious condition is known as voice dystonia. While Adams could still speak normally to himself and to his cat, and he could even sing and recite memorized poems, he could no longer have conversations. “I think that’s what led to the end of my marriage,” he told me. “Losing the ability to speak made me feel like a ghost. It was incredibly lonely.” The inexplicable condition, which doctors attributed to a possible mental condition, persisted for three years. Then Adams underwent an experimental surgery that involved cutting nerves that lead from the brain to the vocal cords and building a new path using nerves from elsewhere in the neck. A few months later, his voice returned.

Really, if you can still talk to your cat then nothing has been lost.

Donald the unprepared

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There are many reasons one could find Donald Trump grating. You can find people airing their grievances all over the web. But I’m starting to sense that a lot of it gets down to this: Trump’s way of dong things flies in the face of how we are “supposed” to do things.

What do I mean by this? The conventional view of how one tackles a project is that you do research, develop your processes and then apply a lot of elbow grease and get it done. You develop a plan and then follow through with the plan.

I suspect this goes back to the Protestant work ethic that was later codified in business manuals. It’s certainly how I tend to do things and it’s how the previous President, Barack Obama, (remember him?) did things.

Trump clearly doesn’t apply this method. Rather he throws a bunch of “stuff” up in the air and sees what sticks. Very little of what he throws up has much forethought applied; it just seems to be what strikes him at the moment.

During the long election season, I frequently commented on Scott Adams’ assertions about Trump. One of them was that Trump often “A/B tested” his messages. For instance, here, Adams alleged that Trump A/B tested his insulting nicknames for his opponents (e.g. “Crooked Hillary,” “Low Energy Jeb.”)

At other times Adams alleged that Trump kept his policy proposals deliberately vague to allow people to overlay their preferred policy in the details.

In essence Adams argues that Trump is intentionally not a planner or a “details guy.” I think Adams is right, and it’s this lack of interest on Trump’s part in planning, in structure, that bugs people (including me.) It goes against everything we’ve been told. The message of modern life is “develop a plan, work hard at it and you might succeed.” Then this Trump guy comes along, makes it all up on the spot and ends up being President.

Now one has to ask: Is there something to this “make it up as you go” approach? There is the obvious advantage that, in a fast moving, ever-changing world, it’s much easier to change your strategy on the fly if you aren’t wedded to a particular implementation. This is the idea in business books like “Teaching The Elephant to Dance.” And we have seen Trump change his implementation on many things. He was for criminalizing abortion until he wasn’t. He was for a Muslim ban until it was a partial ban. He was for deporting illegals but now he’s for… well, I’m not really sure. As many have commented, he has no firm ideology.

But it also seem that not applying the proper thought and planning can only blow up in your face eventually. And I think that many people’s concern (and mine.)