Yes, I think this would be my past self’s reply (I don’t remember making that particular argument, but it does sound like something I would say). Even if we granted that IQ-linked alleles were identical 100kya, we still wouldn’t have to grant that IQ was the same! We know of many powerful environmental effects on phenotypic IQ: to give a recent example of interest to me, just iodine & iron deficiency will cost on average 15 IQ points. One might expect random diseases and parasites to cost even more. (And remember that aside from the effect on the mean, the tails of the bell curve are going to be affected even more outrageously.)
More importantly, we have the equivalent of natural experiments on the importance of national IQ averages: African countries. There are countries where the limited samples suggest particularly low IQs; these are also the countries where economic growth is least, and anecdotally, charitable efforts like installing new infrastructure fail frequently.
Logically, it should be easier to leapfrog or catchup in growth based on existing technologies & methods, and this explains things like why it could take hundreds of millennia to go from apes to sub-Saharan Africa levels of wealth but South Korea could then go from sub-Saharan levels to industrialized democracy in something like 40 years. So, if the African countries with the least average intelligence can hardly maintain the existing infrastructures or per capita wealth, then this doesn’t bode well for the prospects of them taking off, and is perfectly consistent with the observation of ~90 millennia of stagnation. (Now there’s a ‘great stagnation’ for you!)
The trouble with epigenetic IQ drop as a theory is that hunter gatherers were (IIRC, anthropologists please confirm) better fed, taller and healthier than early farmers. This being due to a combination of better diet (not a monoculture of one or two staples) and also due to the beginnings of the peasant/ruler classes and taxation of surplus. You would expect the farmers to be the ones with epigenetic lower IQ.
I don’t think ‘epigenetic’ means what you think it means. But anyway: yes, there is anthropological evidence of that sort (covered in Pinker’s Better Angels and in something of Diamond’s, IIRC), and height and mortality are generally believed to correlate with health and presumably then to IQ.
The problem with that is that that is a problem for all theories of civilization formation: if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
So, suppose it takes less IQ to maintain a basic civilization than to start one from scratch (as I already suggested in my Africa example), and suppose civilization has some sort of self-reinforcing property where it will force itself to remain in existence even when superior alternatives exist (as it seems it must, factually, given the poorer health of early farmers/civilizationers compared to hunter-gatherers sans civilization).
Then what happened was: over a very long period of time hunter-gatherers slowly accumulated knowledge or tools and IQs rose from better food or perhaps sexual selection or whatever, until finally relatively simultaneously multiple civilizations arose in multiple regions, whereupon the farmer effect reduced their IQ but not enough to overcome the self-sustaining-civilization effect. And then history began.
if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started?
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often ‘go native’?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often ‘go native’?
Uh, going native is exactly what the vein of thought is predicting. The question is not why did some go native, but why didn’t all the rest?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
An old suggestion, but just as old is the point that civilizations routinely fail at military matters: it’s a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
it’s a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
That does happen a lot, but the barbarians in question tend to be nomadic pastoralists, very rarely foragers. About the only exceptions I can think of happened in immediately post-contact North America, and that was a fantastically turbulent time culturally—between the introduction of horses and 90+% of the initial population getting wiped out by disease, pretty much everything would likely have been up for grabs.
I don’t know offhand how healthy or long-lived pastoralist cultures tended to be by comparison with sedentary agriculturalists. I do know that they generally fell somewhere between foragers and agriculturalists in terms of sustainable population density.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake. They are self limiting.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake.
What civilization-wide infrastructure did the Mongols destroy in the process of creating the greatest land empire in history which then doomed them and limited their spread?
I suspect the connotations of “barbarian” are getting in the way here. The Mongols were highly mobile pastoralists and raiders; this did not get in the way of setting up sophisticated and creative institutions. (Nor did the latter undo the considerable net loss in poulation and extent of cultivation that accompanied the Mongol conquests.)
I think this is basically correct, but I’d express it in terms of cultural inertia rather than brainwashing. It’s not (usually) part of a planned campaign of retention, it’s just that learning a completely different culture and language and set of survival skills is a huge risk and would take a huge amount of effort: it might be attractive in marginal cases, but most people would likely feel they had too much to lose. Particularly if the relationship between the cultures is already adversarial.
There are probably pure-win half steps, like the kind of farming where you plant in the seasonal area you always come back to at a certain time of the year, as you follow the herds, or the kind where game is so plentiful you can afford to settle, hunt, and dabble in farming vegetables beside your settlement (such as in the American Pacific north west). Farming seems to be tied to settlement. Farms stabilize settlements; settlements nurture farms. And farms domesticate crops, making farming easier and supporting a larger population.
In the Mesopotamia region, there were settlements in the rainy hills where the local wildlife was conveniently easy to domesticate but farming was hard. Those moved down centuries later into the rainless flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, where only group effort could ensure irrigation, and group surpluses were needed to stave off bad harvests, but farming worked well. The “Ubaid period” (neolithic) was pretty egalitarian, but centralization emerges in the “Jemdet Nasr period” and kingship in the “early dynastic period” (Sumerian for king is “lugal”, “lu”=man, “gal”=big, and initially it seems to have been just a word for “boss”). With centralization and kingship, empires follow fast. Civilization was co-existing with non-farming groups, but civilization tempts even non-farmers to switch from hunting to raiding. Sumer got sacked repeatedly by nearby tribes.
I am thinking there was a demographic transition point, probably quite early, when the number of people that could be kept alive—not as healthy, but alive—by farming or equally by raiding the surplus of farmers, exceeded the carrying capacity of the local game and wild plants. At that point walking away from the fields was not possible. Therefore agriculture has a ratchet effect.
if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
I tend to think of this by analogy with gene-centered evolution. Just as natural selection selects for genes which are particularly good at reproducing themselves without any special regard for the well-being of their carriers, cultural evolution selects for similarly potent memetic systems without any particular regard for the well-being of the people propagating them.
From skeletal evidence forager lifestyles seem on average a lot healthier, but they also require much lower population densities. You can fit a lot more people per unit area with an agriculturalist lifestyle: if skeletal proxies are to be believed they’ll individually be weaker, sicker, and shorter-lived, but they’ll be populous enough that the much rarer foragers are going to have trouble displacing them. Cycle that over a few thousand years and eventually civilization ends up ruling the world, with the few remaining foragers pushed into little enclaves where agriculture is unsustainable for one reason or another. We’d occasionally see defections from one lifestyle to the other, but historically they don’t seem very common.
The tricky part of this model seems to be figuring out how forager populations self-limit without lowering quality of life to agriculturalist levels. I’m not anthropologist enough to have a definitive answer to this, but I’d speculate that forager resource acquisition isn’t as linearly dependent on population as agriculture is: put too many people in a given area and you end up scaring off game, overconsuming food plants, et cetera. Over time I’d expect this to inform territorial behavior and intuitions about optimal group size. Violence is probably also part of the answer.
We’d occasionally see defections from one lifestyle to the other, but historically they don’t seem very common.
Or, at least, they end up becoming irrelevant for the same reasons that the agriculturalists won in the first place. If Roanoke disappeared because all of the settlers decided to ditch the farm and live as Indians, there were still way more Europeans coming than the few Europeans that defected, and the new colonists could support a much higher population density than the ones that went native.
How much of the failure of the African countries is due to their average lower intelligence and how much is that a consequence of other systemic problems (e.g. lack of institutions) that also make the maintenance of modern technologies difficult?
In graphs of interacting cause & effects, that’s not necessarily the best way to ask that question. Because IQ is predictive at least of general economic growth (but also increased by growth, ‘bidirectional’), those systemic problems can be perfectly real and also rooted in lower IQs.
How much of the failure of the African countries is due to their average lower intelligence and how much is that a consequence of other systemic problems (e.g. lack of institutions) that also make the maintenance of modern technologies difficult?
I get the impression that “average lower intelligence” is a big cause of systemic problems, like lack of institutions. I’m reminded of Yvain’s example that, in Haiti, they could not understand sorting things numerically or alphabetically. This meant bureaucratic institutions were basically worthless: “where is your file? Let me look at all of the files and try to find yours.”
I was going to say, “well, maybe that’s a failure of education, not of intelligence”, but...
Not just “they don’t want to do it” or “it never occurred to them”, but after months and months of attempted explanation they don’t understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. [emphasis added]
Okay, I’m shocked. (It might still be something that people with IQ between (say) 70 and 90 can learn if they’re taught it in elementary school but couldn’t ever learn as adults if they haven’t, but the “privileging the hypothesis” warning light in my brain is on.)
I’m pretty sure that that’s a failure of education, not of intelligence. Education has the best effect at a young age, when habits are formed; it’s a lot harder to educate someone later, unless that someone really wants to be educated.
Looking at that specific example, I can see why someone who is lazy, and unfamiliar with alphabetic sorting, might not want to try it. Mainly, that step one would be to figure out this whole ‘alphabet’ thing and memorise what order things go in (a significant neural effort, done now; somewhat easier if already literate, but note that ‘literate’ does not necessarily mean ‘familiar with the order of the alphabet’); step two would be to sort in alphabetical order everything that’s already in the office (a significant physical effort, done now); step three would be to actually bother to put new things in order instead of just toss them in a random drawer (an ongoing effort).
So much easier to just pretend to understand less than one does (admittedly, it does mean a bit more time searching for a piece of paper when someone asks, but that’s a minor task, and won’t have to be done immediately in any case).
You can get some benefit even without learning the order of the alphabet. If you divide things to groups by their first letter, even if the groups are sorted randomly, and the things in one group are sorted randomly, the search time should be at least 10 times shorter.
As a bonus, you can switch to this system gradually. Create empty groups for each first letter, and consider everything else as an “unsorted” group. When searching, first look in the group with given letter, then in the “unsorted” group. When finished, always put the thing into the group starting with that letter. Your system will sort gradually.
I’m pretty sure that that’s a failure of education, not of intelligence.
By this you mean that you think P(Can’t understand sorting | low education, moderate intelligence)>P(Can’t understand sorting | moderate education, low intelligence)?
If you had said “this might be the result of low energy,” then I would have agreed that’s a likely partial explanation, as you argued for that fairly well and it fits the rigors of a tropical climate. But I’m concerned that you’re conflating education and energy.
No, I mean that I think that P(low education|group of humans who can’t understand sorting)>P(low intelligence|group of humans who can’t understand sorting).
The ‘group’ part is important; while education is often constant or near-constant among a community, intelligence is often not; thus, something that is true for an entire group is more likely a result of education than intelligence. Similarly, ‘humans’ is an important word, because I know that many humans are capable of sorting, and thus there is no species barrier.
Having said that, “low energy” is almost certainly also a contributing factor.
Childhood malnutrition reduces IQ. Major childhood trauma reduces IQ. No childhood education makes you massively unlikely to grasp formal logic, Ect, ect.
Most third world countries are profoundly crippling places to grow up, - The good news is that any such place that manages to not be a circle of hell for a straight 20 year stretch should see its economy do a hard takeoff as a generation reaches adulthood that was not lobotomized.
Yes, I think this would be my past self’s reply (I don’t remember making that particular argument, but it does sound like something I would say). Even if we granted that IQ-linked alleles were identical 100kya, we still wouldn’t have to grant that IQ was the same! We know of many powerful environmental effects on phenotypic IQ: to give a recent example of interest to me, just iodine & iron deficiency will cost on average 15 IQ points. One might expect random diseases and parasites to cost even more. (And remember that aside from the effect on the mean, the tails of the bell curve are going to be affected even more outrageously.)
And we know IQ connects in all sorts of way to economic attitudes, activity, growth, etc, with patterns indicative of bidirectional causality; see http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4r01
More importantly, we have the equivalent of natural experiments on the importance of national IQ averages: African countries. There are countries where the limited samples suggest particularly low IQs; these are also the countries where economic growth is least, and anecdotally, charitable efforts like installing new infrastructure fail frequently.
Logically, it should be easier to leapfrog or catchup in growth based on existing technologies & methods, and this explains things like why it could take hundreds of millennia to go from apes to sub-Saharan Africa levels of wealth but South Korea could then go from sub-Saharan levels to industrialized democracy in something like 40 years. So, if the African countries with the least average intelligence can hardly maintain the existing infrastructures or per capita wealth, then this doesn’t bode well for the prospects of them taking off, and is perfectly consistent with the observation of ~90 millennia of stagnation. (Now there’s a ‘great stagnation’ for you!)
The trouble with epigenetic IQ drop as a theory is that hunter gatherers were (IIRC, anthropologists please confirm) better fed, taller and healthier than early farmers. This being due to a combination of better diet (not a monoculture of one or two staples) and also due to the beginnings of the peasant/ruler classes and taxation of surplus. You would expect the farmers to be the ones with epigenetic lower IQ.
I don’t think ‘epigenetic’ means what you think it means. But anyway: yes, there is anthropological evidence of that sort (covered in Pinker’s Better Angels and in something of Diamond’s, IIRC), and height and mortality are generally believed to correlate with health and presumably then to IQ.
The problem with that is that that is a problem for all theories of civilization formation: if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
So, suppose it takes less IQ to maintain a basic civilization than to start one from scratch (as I already suggested in my Africa example), and suppose civilization has some sort of self-reinforcing property where it will force itself to remain in existence even when superior alternatives exist (as it seems it must, factually, given the poorer health of early farmers/civilizationers compared to hunter-gatherers sans civilization).
Then what happened was: over a very long period of time hunter-gatherers slowly accumulated knowledge or tools and IQs rose from better food or perhaps sexual selection or whatever, until finally relatively simultaneously multiple civilizations arose in multiple regions, whereupon the farmer effect reduced their IQ but not enough to overcome the self-sustaining-civilization effect. And then history began.
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often ‘go native’?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
Uh, going native is exactly what the vein of thought is predicting. The question is not why did some go native, but why didn’t all the rest?
An old suggestion, but just as old is the point that civilizations routinely fail at military matters: it’s a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
That does happen a lot, but the barbarians in question tend to be nomadic pastoralists, very rarely foragers. About the only exceptions I can think of happened in immediately post-contact North America, and that was a fantastically turbulent time culturally—between the introduction of horses and 90+% of the initial population getting wiped out by disease, pretty much everything would likely have been up for grabs.
I don’t know offhand how healthy or long-lived pastoralist cultures tended to be by comparison with sedentary agriculturalists. I do know that they generally fell somewhere between foragers and agriculturalists in terms of sustainable population density.
Insufficient opportunity and brainwashing.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake. They are self limiting.
What civilization-wide infrastructure did the Mongols destroy in the process of creating the greatest land empire in history which then doomed them and limited their spread?
The mongols were emphatically not barbarians, they introduced systems that were in most cases improvements over what they destroyed.
I suspect the connotations of “barbarian” are getting in the way here. The Mongols were highly mobile pastoralists and raiders; this did not get in the way of setting up sophisticated and creative institutions. (Nor did the latter undo the considerable net loss in poulation and extent of cultivation that accompanied the Mongol conquests.)
I think this is basically correct, but I’d express it in terms of cultural inertia rather than brainwashing. It’s not (usually) part of a planned campaign of retention, it’s just that learning a completely different culture and language and set of survival skills is a huge risk and would take a huge amount of effort: it might be attractive in marginal cases, but most people would likely feel they had too much to lose. Particularly if the relationship between the cultures is already adversarial.
There are probably pure-win half steps, like the kind of farming where you plant in the seasonal area you always come back to at a certain time of the year, as you follow the herds, or the kind where game is so plentiful you can afford to settle, hunt, and dabble in farming vegetables beside your settlement (such as in the American Pacific north west). Farming seems to be tied to settlement. Farms stabilize settlements; settlements nurture farms. And farms domesticate crops, making farming easier and supporting a larger population.
In the Mesopotamia region, there were settlements in the rainy hills where the local wildlife was conveniently easy to domesticate but farming was hard. Those moved down centuries later into the rainless flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, where only group effort could ensure irrigation, and group surpluses were needed to stave off bad harvests, but farming worked well. The “Ubaid period” (neolithic) was pretty egalitarian, but centralization emerges in the “Jemdet Nasr period” and kingship in the “early dynastic period” (Sumerian for king is “lugal”, “lu”=man, “gal”=big, and initially it seems to have been just a word for “boss”). With centralization and kingship, empires follow fast. Civilization was co-existing with non-farming groups, but civilization tempts even non-farmers to switch from hunting to raiding. Sumer got sacked repeatedly by nearby tribes.
I am thinking there was a demographic transition point, probably quite early, when the number of people that could be kept alive—not as healthy, but alive—by farming or equally by raiding the surplus of farmers, exceeded the carrying capacity of the local game and wild plants. At that point walking away from the fields was not possible. Therefore agriculture has a ratchet effect.
I tend to think of this by analogy with gene-centered evolution. Just as natural selection selects for genes which are particularly good at reproducing themselves without any special regard for the well-being of their carriers, cultural evolution selects for similarly potent memetic systems without any particular regard for the well-being of the people propagating them.
From skeletal evidence forager lifestyles seem on average a lot healthier, but they also require much lower population densities. You can fit a lot more people per unit area with an agriculturalist lifestyle: if skeletal proxies are to be believed they’ll individually be weaker, sicker, and shorter-lived, but they’ll be populous enough that the much rarer foragers are going to have trouble displacing them. Cycle that over a few thousand years and eventually civilization ends up ruling the world, with the few remaining foragers pushed into little enclaves where agriculture is unsustainable for one reason or another. We’d occasionally see defections from one lifestyle to the other, but historically they don’t seem very common.
The tricky part of this model seems to be figuring out how forager populations self-limit without lowering quality of life to agriculturalist levels. I’m not anthropologist enough to have a definitive answer to this, but I’d speculate that forager resource acquisition isn’t as linearly dependent on population as agriculture is: put too many people in a given area and you end up scaring off game, overconsuming food plants, et cetera. Over time I’d expect this to inform territorial behavior and intuitions about optimal group size. Violence is probably also part of the answer.
Or, at least, they end up becoming irrelevant for the same reasons that the agriculturalists won in the first place. If Roanoke disappeared because all of the settlers decided to ditch the farm and live as Indians, there were still way more Europeans coming than the few Europeans that defected, and the new colonists could support a much higher population density than the ones that went native.
How much of the failure of the African countries is due to their average lower intelligence and how much is that a consequence of other systemic problems (e.g. lack of institutions) that also make the maintenance of modern technologies difficult?
In graphs of interacting cause & effects, that’s not necessarily the best way to ask that question. Because IQ is predictive at least of general economic growth (but also increased by growth, ‘bidirectional’), those systemic problems can be perfectly real and also rooted in lower IQs.
I get the impression that “average lower intelligence” is a big cause of systemic problems, like lack of institutions. I’m reminded of Yvain’s example that, in Haiti, they could not understand sorting things numerically or alphabetically. This meant bureaucratic institutions were basically worthless: “where is your file? Let me look at all of the files and try to find yours.”
Edit: Also, see this paper.
I was going to say, “well, maybe that’s a failure of education, not of intelligence”, but...
Okay, I’m shocked. (It might still be something that people with IQ between (say) 70 and 90 can learn if they’re taught it in elementary school but couldn’t ever learn as adults if they haven’t, but the “privileging the hypothesis” warning light in my brain is on.)
Tangentially, and specifically because I followed the link from LessWrong, this jumped out at me:
“Haitians have a culture of tending not to admit they’re wrong[.]”
(Pretend that this sentence is a list of reasonable caveats about what to conclude from that.)
I’m pretty sure that that’s a failure of education, not of intelligence. Education has the best effect at a young age, when habits are formed; it’s a lot harder to educate someone later, unless that someone really wants to be educated.
Looking at that specific example, I can see why someone who is lazy, and unfamiliar with alphabetic sorting, might not want to try it. Mainly, that step one would be to figure out this whole ‘alphabet’ thing and memorise what order things go in (a significant neural effort, done now; somewhat easier if already literate, but note that ‘literate’ does not necessarily mean ‘familiar with the order of the alphabet’); step two would be to sort in alphabetical order everything that’s already in the office (a significant physical effort, done now); step three would be to actually bother to put new things in order instead of just toss them in a random drawer (an ongoing effort).
So much easier to just pretend to understand less than one does (admittedly, it does mean a bit more time searching for a piece of paper when someone asks, but that’s a minor task, and won’t have to be done immediately in any case).
You can get some benefit even without learning the order of the alphabet. If you divide things to groups by their first letter, even if the groups are sorted randomly, and the things in one group are sorted randomly, the search time should be at least 10 times shorter.
As a bonus, you can switch to this system gradually. Create empty groups for each first letter, and consider everything else as an “unsorted” group. When searching, first look in the group with given letter, then in the “unsorted” group. When finished, always put the thing into the group starting with that letter. Your system will sort gradually.
You are correct. This methodology will work, as long as we assume that no-one will put a piece of paper in the wrong (apparently sorted) file.
Was it ever explained to the Haitians in this way, though?
By this you mean that you think P(Can’t understand sorting | low education, moderate intelligence)>P(Can’t understand sorting | moderate education, low intelligence)?
If you had said “this might be the result of low energy,” then I would have agreed that’s a likely partial explanation, as you argued for that fairly well and it fits the rigors of a tropical climate. But I’m concerned that you’re conflating education and energy.
No, I mean that I think that P(low education|group of humans who can’t understand sorting)>P(low intelligence|group of humans who can’t understand sorting).
The ‘group’ part is important; while education is often constant or near-constant among a community, intelligence is often not; thus, something that is true for an entire group is more likely a result of education than intelligence. Similarly, ‘humans’ is an important word, because I know that many humans are capable of sorting, and thus there is no species barrier.
Having said that, “low energy” is almost certainly also a contributing factor.
Childhood malnutrition reduces IQ. Major childhood trauma reduces IQ. No childhood education makes you massively unlikely to grasp formal logic, Ect, ect. Most third world countries are profoundly crippling places to grow up, - The good news is that any such place that manages to not be a circle of hell for a straight 20 year stretch should see its economy do a hard takeoff as a generation reaches adulthood that was not lobotomized.