If the "right thing to do" is to not have kids, who do you think IS having kids?

[daylen]

At some point, an individual may realize that not everything can or should be objectified. "Science" is essentially a methodology that allows different observers to share their perceptions of how one thing changes with respect to another thing. These subjects first assume a set of axioms(*) along with their consequences.

It all comes back to subjective observation, and if you deny the axioms then none of the correlations exist. If you accept the axioms, then you can do some experimentation for yourself with the help of error correction. We are individually highly susceptible to bias in the form of non-uniform sampling of the underlying event space. Over a long enough time period, proper hypothesizing and falsification may lead an individual to become more confident in their own analysis. From an individuals perspective, the extra complexity of external sources may lead to misleading conclusions relative to their own personal experience (not that they shouldn't be taken into account).

(*) These axioms may be thought to originate from the study of formal logic (e.g. propositional calculus, predicate logic, set or type theory, math.. they all build on each other). All modern science is based on this stuff.

There is no firm boundary between an "objective" and "subjective" conclusion. The two may be reconciled by appealing to a framework that transcends both. Otherwise, your confidence in making decisions may diverge into two separate and irreconcilable camps. Beyond this there may be a plurality of transcendent frameworks. Adding or subtracting a value/principle may drastically alter conclusions or desirable outcomes.

..or maybe I am a crazy, delusional lunatic that should be put in an insane asylum. Do not listen to me.. figure it out for yourself. Question everything, and I believe that you will come to a similar perspective (hopefully with a different presentation).

[unemployable]

It's illegal for employers to use IQ tests.

Incorrect. Wonderlic tests and the like are used all the time. I've been given them in the screening process. Certainly nothing prevents a prospective employer from handing you problems and asking you to solve them (gotten that too and it was my easiest interview ever).

Here's a court ruling where an employer -- government , even -- was explicitly allowed to reject an applicant because he scored too high on a Wonderlic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic ... gal_Issues

[Kriegsspiel]

Well, not incorrect in every case. I was thinking of Griggs v Duke Power. The Wonderlic test was one of the IQ tests that the Supreme Court said "had a discriminatory (disparate) impact on African Americans." The majority opinion says "If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited." It seems problematic to me that they singled out black people when the ruling was going to apply to everyone, but anyways, that's what I was referring to.

[Kriegsspiel]

ANYWAYS, the whole reason I even brought it up was to bring up the heritability of IQ. In this article about The Bell Curve:

Claim 2: Intelligence is heritable.

Roughly speaking, heritability estimates how much differences in people’s genes account for differences in people’s traits. It is important to note that heritability is not a synonym for inheritable. That is, some traits that are inherited, say having five fingers, are not heritable because underlying genetic differences do not account for the number of fingers a person has. Possessing five fingers is a pan-human trait. Furthermore, heritability is not a measure of malleability. Some traits that are very heritable are quite responsive to environmental inputs (height, for example, which has increased significantly since the 1700s, but is highly heritable).

Most research suggests that intelligence is quite heritable, with estimates from 0.4-0.8, meaning that roughly 40 to 80 percent of the variance in intelligence can be explained by differences in genes. The heritability of intelligence increases across childhood and peaks during middle adulthood.

At this point, the data, from a variety of sources including adoptive twin studies and simple parent-offspring correlations, are overwhelming and the significant heritability of intelligence is no longer a matter of dispute among experts. For example, Earl Hunt contended, “The facts are incontrovertible. Human intelligence is heavily influenced by genes.” (Pg. 254). Robert Plomin, a prominent behavioral geneticist, asserted that, “The case for substantial genetic influence on g is stronger than for any other human characteristic.” (Pg. 108). And even N. J. Mackintosh, who was generally more skeptical about g and genetic influences on intelligence, concluded, “The broad issue is surely settled [about the source of variation in intelligence]: both nature and nurture, in Galton’s phrase, are important.” (Pg. 254).

but of course, his link to the heritability estimates is dead.

[unemployable]

cannot be shown to be related to job performance

So it's OK as long you have to do any math for the job

[Kriegsspiel]

Yes, it was incorrect to make it seem as if it is illegal in all cases.

[Mister Imperceptible]

The real question is, does Mr. I seduce the retired hedge fund manager and provide her with a 9th child that she desires, or does he seduce the headstrong doctoral candidate with no children and much fewer assets but still expensive tastes?

In the first instance I would have to share the woman with 8 prior kids, in the second instance I would have to share my bank account.

Either way, the Earth loses!

[jacob]

@Bankai - You'll have to dig a little deeper than the first result on a google search to convince me of non-existence While it is interesting that not much work has been done (alternatively, it's not something that is really being discussed on the public internet) whatever there has been done does confirm it. Also see https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-14279-001

Following Simonton’s (1985) theory, we tested a specific model, indicating that the optimal IQ for perceived leadership will appear at about 1.2 standard deviations above the mean IQ of the group membership. ... Accounting for the effects of leader personality, gender, age, as well as company, country, and time fixed effects, analyses indicated that perceptions of leadership followed a curvilinear inverted-U function of intelligence. The peak of this function was at an IQ score of about 120, which did not depart significantly from the value predicted by the theory.

That's substantially less than the original +/-2sd and also less than the +/-1.5sd of the other linked paper above. What matters here is the perception of leadership, that is, the how the followers perceive the leader's leadership. Even as more intelligent leaders actually perform better, they're not seen as such because the followers don't comprehend what the leader has in mind.

Incidentally, if it wasn't clear, the "communications gap" relates to the [mutual] inability to get or rather be on the same page ... not the literal inability to communicate things like "Please hold the door" or "I'd like fries with that" or "Clean up your room". A common opinion is that "if you're so smart, you should be able to figure out how to communicate with people who are not as smart". While true this is not a fair point because building a theory of mind of a significantly less intelligent human---having to figure out what information they're lacking and what particular conclusions they won't be drawing automatically on their own---is non-trivial(*) getting increasingly harder the wider the gap. To illustrate that point, Idiocracy comes to the rescue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUTZmSyDErg&t=1m05s ... noting that the communications gap is finally bridged or rather circumvented when Luke Wilson tells them he knows because he can talk to the plants. If this example sounds contrived, consider the typical climate change "debate" in which most people keep offering up helpful misinformed explanations like "it's the sun", "it's volcanoes", "climate has always changed", ... and (ironically) "CO2 is plant food", because doing the actual math is not (and never will be) in their purview.

(*) And unless you're in sales or in a similar charisma-based business not always worth the effort.

Thus the goldilock IQ of being smart enough to operate in the modern world but not so smart that surrounding humans think you're a pretentious nerd is about 120 as per the paper above. And of course this relates to the group which need not be the entirety of humanity, so if you live in an area that is only affordable by people with above-average intelligence; got into good schools with other above-average children, then picked a career that also requires above-average intelligence to work in ... then optimal intelligence is a bit higher. It's at 140+ that real trouble starts because the number of relatable people who still think you're cool beans drops rapidly. IOW, while it's quite feasible to find a bubble where 2sd does really well (e.g. academia or an engineering firm) ... these bubbles get a lot harder to find further out the scale.

Basically, it's Wheaton levels all over again. At +10 points up, the person is seen as funny, smart, etc. At +20 points up, it's a person you're willing to follow because they seem to know more/think better than you and everything they say just makes sense. At +30 points up, the person seems to know stuff but you don't see how much of it relates to you or anyone else for that matter. At +40 points up, the person seems like they're either rambling or pretentiously overcomplicating things that are either simple or unknowable/random as far as you are concerned.

Alternatively, it's typically a lot more "fun" (and even educational) to play chess with someone who is approximately at your own level.

Anyhoo ... going back to my original point. Insofar highly intelligent parents have children, the odds are higher that they will have to spend more time relating to their closer-to-average child than they prefer and thus become bad parents which then leads to children who albeit being above average intelligence are somewhat dysfunctional due to poor "leadership" from their highly intelligent parents. E.g. "I know you think did everything right and got me into all the right schools and activities, but you never understood me," said junior as professor Egghead picked him up from detention at the police station. IOW the idea that highly intelligent people should have more children to compensate for dysgenic fertility might not work as one might naively expect as it risks "dysphenic upbringings" ... but they probably already know that.

[chenda]

The government of Singapore has attempted to regulate dating in order to breed more intelligent citizens. Apparently they are particularly concerned that higher IQ women were having fewer children, and sought to provide special assistance to them to find an appropriately high IQ partner.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Okay, but then wouldn't it also be the case that a human with an IQ of 160 would be a worse pet owner (given average dog IQ of about 20 on human scale) than a human with an IQ of 40?

Also, the IQ scale was originally designed to be reflective of mental age, so, obviously, any adult of average IQ is not going to be terribly mentally stimulated while engaged in conversation with his 4 year old child. Nobody relates to their children as leader among peers.

[jacob]

That depends on what you mean in terms of using "pet owner" as an analogy to parent-child relationships.

[7Wannabe5]

Cross-post.

My point being that through the majority of formative years this imaginary issue of resentment for lack of understanding will not be an issue, given affection and decent basic care, and in the adolescent years it is universal no matter what, because offspring are programmed to flee nest towards dispersed mating. Parents do not relate to their children as leader to peers. That is much closer to a sibling relationship.

Also, there will be qualities other than intelligence inherent in the nature of any individual child that a parent will likely appreciate.

And, in terms of what general society is likely to value in terms of results of parenting, high IQ individuals will make better parents. It's easy to see that this is true if you imagine a situation in which a person with an IQ of 120 has to choose between leaving her child in the care of an individual with IQ of 160 vs. 80 for a few years.

[ellarose24]

Eventually the world will correct itself. I firmly believe that. Humans are overpopulated and like any animal there will be a culling of the herd. That sounds awful, but I think all of the things we are worried about in the future are simply going to be nature's way of correcting the problem of humanity. Either that, or humans WILL progress through the problems that are caused and find a sustainable way to live (lab-grown meet, inhabiting colonies outside of the earth, etc)

Either way I don't see the reason to not have children. I am not worried about it from an environmental perspective. I believe that nature can recoup itself. There have been many mass extinctions caused by humans. The only thing to worry about is what will happen to humanity--as we are inevitably tied to an equilibrium in nature that we are throwing off balance (and again, that will come back to balance--with us or not). Is the fact that there WILL be suffering for our children a reason to not have them? Great things come from suffering. Great generations have been born out of suffering. Humans NEED suffering as periodic reminders of what could be. I would argue the generations of us living in a world without suffering (at least for those of us in first world countries) has not led to anything great in itself. Depression and suicide are on the rise. Some philosophers believe suffering is the natural state of humanity--so would the fact that people will have a very hard and terrible future prevent me from having children? Not at all. Maybe they will live in a world that is better, maybe they will be one of the people to survive whatever nature has to throw at us, maybe they will die--all of those things are true whether or not there is some kind of global or environmental collapse.

People who have ignorant children will have the same outcomes. Some of those ignorant children will escape ignorance and become great people. In the end, I don't think it matter who has children and who doesn't. Nature will go on without us if it has to. If we get to be apart of it, there will still be great cultures and civilizations, regardless of the people who inhabit it. In the long run, we are all just humans. Most of our education comes from luck in how we were raised and what resources we had. I wouldn't say we're any 'better' of a human than those who grew up in poverty. At the base of it, we are all molds that can be formed one way or another.

[7Wannabe5]

Disagree. The current population of humans does represent a very unique juncture in the history of our species and even life on the planet.

[daylen]

@bigato This non-linear scaling is talked about in the ERE book under "Gauging Mastery".

0 hours - Novice
300 hours - Apprentice
1,000 hours - Journeyman
3,000 hours - Master
10,000 hours - Expert
30,000 hours - Genius

This is then mapped onto CCCCCC. These verbs highlight that each level is looking at the particular activity or problem in an entirely different way, therefore the appropriate classification of the objects in that field may be radically different at each level. The language changes to fit the new understanding. Individuals at a higher level can not only articulate generalities more concisely, but they can also specify details by constraining/limiting general cases.

This makes it hard to understand what someone at a lower level is actually referring to at times, because they may be using language with many layers of meaning/complexity in a very specialized way.

This can also happen independently from language. A craftsman may do something in a way that is optimal when taking into account error tolerance and other such variables that someone at a lower level would miss.

[Ego]

@Bigato, sadly, the nonlinearity goes in the other direction as well

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/pe ... most-study

The more extreme the opposition, Fernbach and his co-authors found, the less people knew about the science and genetics, but the more their “self-assessed” knowledge — how much they thought they knew — increased.

“If somebody is well calibrated, those two things should be pretty highly correlated: If I know how much I know, then if I know a little I should say I know a little, and if I know a lot I should say I know a lot,” Fernbach explained. “Therefore there should be a high correlation between self-assessed and objective knowledge.

“And indeed, that’s actually true for the people who are moderate, or people who have the attitude that is consistent with the scientific consensus,” he said.

However, as people become more extreme, that relationship degrades and flips so that people who think they know more actually know less.

[7Wannabe5]

Doesn't each level up require a bit of a jump beyond the march of hours?

[daylen]

There is a deep sense of irony to be found in studying statistics.. the better you understand all the ways in which data can fool an individual or herd the more confident you become that no one actually knows much of anything until they test their predictions.

..and the prediction rate for anything but physics is dismal. Much of the success in chemistry, biology, climate science, and so forth is from imposing boundary conditions that allow some problems to be handled with traditional physics methodology. Most "science" is classification.

EDIT: Sounds naive, . Yes, biology has its own models for different levels (of cells, bio-molecules, proteins, etc.) and these approximate structure and function. Computational simulation has greatly expanded our ability to make predictions in biology. You can name the sciences however you want, but the number of sub-fields is rather large and their distinctions are somewhat arbitrary. I find that a useful distinction to make instead is ( mechanics, systems, statistics ) where mechanics deals with organized simplicity, statistics deals with unorganized complexity, and systems deal with organized complexity. This is discussed in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Gen ... 0932633498

@7W5 I think the progression can vary quite dramatically depending on the individual. At any given time an individual may be a mixture with respect to different sub-areas. It all depends on how much you want to break things down.

[daylen]

The insurmountable problem of dealing with human behavior is that correlations will always be found if one is determined, and the repeatability of the results will always be limited by an observers ability to impose somewhat arbitrary distinctions on behavior. Not everyone agrees on the distinctions, thus social science is mostly left up to individuals to choose and test a model that is appealing to them.

[daylen]

To be fair, I may have been over-generalizing a bit about epigenetics in the other thread. Sure, it is possible to find correlations between low-level biological mechanisms and reliable measures at a higher level (e.g. stress via cortisol, air pollution, and so forth). For the most part, I would not get too excited about this stuff. With these kinds of studies there are many, many other factors that could be skewing the results. Some serious cross-validation and large sample sizes would be required to convince me of any universal truths. A few billion people is just not that big of a number given the potential for such a high degree of variation across so many levels.