One of the major concerns here are Gattaca-type scenarios, where when you’re looking for very smart people you’ll throw out all of the applications from females to maximize your odds of getting a very smart person. Obviously someone with the time to look at every application wouldn’t do that, as the smartest applicant could still be a female. But usually there are some factors that you use first to throw away some of the stack so you don’t have to look at them all.
That may be happening already. (Statistical discrimination is one model for employment discrimination, and as I recall it doesn’t hold up too badly; better than the Becker model, at least.) It’s not an intrinsically “Gattaca” idea.
Of course, in a world where there was a biological “fix” for low IQ, you’d have the issue of whether it should be voluntary (I’d say yes) and whether people who don’t opt for it should get preference from schools and employers (I’d say no, but tentatively) and what to do about access (it’s complicated.) But I’m fairly confident that if IQ matters for real life outcomes, then a world where it can be improved technologically is a better one.
One of the major concerns here are Gattaca-type scenarios, where when you’re looking for very smart people you’ll throw out all of the applications from females to maximize your odds of getting a very smart person. Obviously someone with the time to look at every application wouldn’t do that, as the smartest applicant could still be a female. But usually there are some factors that you use first to throw away some of the stack so you don’t have to look at them all.
That may be happening already. (Statistical discrimination is one model for employment discrimination, and as I recall it doesn’t hold up too badly; better than the Becker model, at least.) It’s not an intrinsically “Gattaca” idea.
Of course, in a world where there was a biological “fix” for low IQ, you’d have the issue of whether it should be voluntary (I’d say yes) and whether people who don’t opt for it should get preference from schools and employers (I’d say no, but tentatively) and what to do about access (it’s complicated.) But I’m fairly confident that if IQ matters for real life outcomes, then a world where it can be improved technologically is a better one.