I find the idea interesting: To achieve a certain value of “total genius”, we either need a large population with a small fraction of geniuses, or a small population with a large fraction of geniuses.
(A third option is a small population with a small fraction of geniuses… and it takes a lot of time. The geniuses read each other’s books, rather than talk to each other directly. I think it was like this in the past. Very inefficient, because the information transfer by reading books is one-sided; does not allow collaboration in real time.)
I wonder how the heritability of IQ works, versus the reversion to the mean. Despite Pol Pot’s dystopian project, the average IQ in Cambodia seems to be… average. What would happen to a country where let’s say half of the children are produced by artificial insemination, and half of the sperm comes from fathers with IQ 130 and above? If the mother is average, the child is likely to be an average between 100 and 130, so 115. On one hand, nothing exceptional; on the other hand, if the baseline is now slightly higher, then the next generation… and here comes the question how exactly the reversion to the mean works, and whether the constant injections of IQ 130 genes in the population could outrun it.
Reversion to the mean happens because the phenotype is an imperfect proxy for the genotype, so if you select a person with phenotypic IQ of 130, maybe their genotypic IQ is only 124, and therefore their offspring with an IQ 100 person would only be IQ 112 in expectation.
However, this expectation applies to both the offspring’s genotypic and phenotypic IQ, so this is the only regression to the mean you’re going to see; it’s not going to regress further down the line.
I find the idea interesting: To achieve a certain value of “total genius”, we either need a large population with a small fraction of geniuses, or a small population with a large fraction of geniuses.
(A third option is a small population with a small fraction of geniuses… and it takes a lot of time. The geniuses read each other’s books, rather than talk to each other directly. I think it was like this in the past. Very inefficient, because the information transfer by reading books is one-sided; does not allow collaboration in real time.)
I wonder how the heritability of IQ works, versus the reversion to the mean. Despite Pol Pot’s dystopian project, the average IQ in Cambodia seems to be… average. What would happen to a country where let’s say half of the children are produced by artificial insemination, and half of the sperm comes from fathers with IQ 130 and above? If the mother is average, the child is likely to be an average between 100 and 130, so 115. On one hand, nothing exceptional; on the other hand, if the baseline is now slightly higher, then the next generation… and here comes the question how exactly the reversion to the mean works, and whether the constant injections of IQ 130 genes in the population could outrun it.
Reversion to the mean happens because the phenotype is an imperfect proxy for the genotype, so if you select a person with phenotypic IQ of 130, maybe their genotypic IQ is only 124, and therefore their offspring with an IQ 100 person would only be IQ 112 in expectation.
However, this expectation applies to both the offspring’s genotypic and phenotypic IQ, so this is the only regression to the mean you’re going to see; it’s not going to regress further down the line.