Thanks! What are your central examples of the activities in 2.F? Sport? Craft? Something else?
I think I never actually met anyone using 5.B. Probably because using this argument requires assuming that there are enough genuinely smart people to create a community when given a chance; and most people around me seem to believe that high IQ doesn’t really matter, and on the “unspecified but certainly very high” level where it does, those people are too few, not enough to create a functional bubble. Alternatively, other people believe that every above-average high school or every university is already de facto a school for high-IQ kids, and the IQ levels above this line don’t actually make a difference, so all such bubbles already exist. -- No one seems to believe that there could be a meaningful line drawn at IQ maybe 150, where the people are too few to create a (non-professional) community spontaneously, but sufficiently different from the rest of the population that they might enjoy actually living in such community if given a chance.
For 2.F I was indeed thinking sport, but actually I have very little idea whether such activities really exist and if so what they actually are. Plenty of smart kids like sport.
requires assuming that there are enough genuinely smart people to create a community
We’re already assuming that there are enough smart-in-whatever-sense people to have their own school. Depending on where the borderline between “smart” and “dumb” is drawn, there may be more or fewer “smart” schools, but each one will have to be of reasonable size.
Well, specific IQ levels are usually not mentioned in the debates I have seen. Which of course only makes the debates more confused. :(
When I think about it quantitatively, if we use Mensa as a Schelling point for “high IQ”, then 2% of the population have IQ over 130, which qualifies them as Mensa-level smart. Two percent may seem not too much, but for example in a city with population of half a milion (such as where I live), that gives 10 000 people. To better visualize this number, if you have an apartment building with 7 floors, that is 20 apartments, assuming on average 2.5 people per apartment that is 50 people per building, which gives us 200 buildings.
Of course assuming unrealistically that Mensa could somehow successfully convince all people in the city to take the test, and to convince those who pass to move together. But 200 buildings of Mensa-level people sounds impressive. (Well, if Mensa sounds impressive, which on LW it probably does not.)
Speaking of schools, let’s say that people live about 70 years, but there are more young people than old people, so let’s assume that for young people a year of age corresponds to 1⁄50 of the population, so if there are 10 000 Mensa-level people in the half-million city, that makes 200 children for each grade. That’s about 7 classrooms for each grade, depending on size. That’s like two or three schools. Again, depending on the assumption that Mensa could find those kids, and convince the parents to put them all into Mensa schools. (Which, under the completely unrealistic assumptions, could be built in the “Mensa district” of the city.)
To make this happen, it would require a smaller miracle, but it’s not completely impossible. Just making all people in one city interested in Mensa, making them take the test, and making them interested in moving to the “Mensa district” would require a lof of advertising. (And even then, there would be a lot of resistance.) But, hypothetically, if you had a millionaire, who would build the new district, hire a few celebrities to popularize the idea, and perhaps sell or rent the appartments only to high-IQ people for a discount… it could happen. If 10% of the target population would be convinced enough to move, you could get a “Mensa block” with 20 houses, 1 very small elementary school, and 1 very small high school. -- I am afraid this is the best possible outcome, and it already assumes a millionaire sponsor.
If you imagine a higher IQ level, such as IQ 150, even this is impossible.
So, while some people may fear that if we make smart people network with each other, they could take over the whole society, to me it feels like saying that as soon as dozen LessWrong fans start regularly attending a meetup, they will become an army of beisutsukai and take over the world. Nice story, but not gonna happen. If this is the reason against the schools for smart kids, the normies are safe.
Well, I approximately agree, but that’s just a classification of people into IQ layers. I’d like to go much further than that.
For example—sorry, today I am too lazy to do a google hunt—I think there was a research, probably by Terman, about why some high-IQ people succeed in life while others fail, often spectacularly. His conclusion was that it mostly depends on how well connected with other high-IQ people they are; most importantly whether they come from a generally high-IQ family. (My hypothesis is that the effect is twofold: first, the high-IQ family itself is a small high-IQ society; second, the older family members were already solving the problem of “how to find other high-IQ people” and can share their strategies and contacts with the younger members.)
If this is true (which I have no reason do doubt), then not allowing high-IQ children to associate with other high-IQ children is child abuse. It is like sending someone on train that is predictably going to crash. I will charitably assume that most people participating in this form of child abuse are actually not aware of what they are doing, so I don’t blame them morally… at least until the moment when someone tries to explain to them what are the actual consequences of their actions, and they just stick fingers in their ears and start singing “la la la, I don’t hear you, elitism is always bad”.
But perhaps a more important thing is this: the usual “compromise” solution of accepting that some children indeed are smarter than others, but solving it by simply having them skip a grade (that is, instead of company of children with similar age and IQ, you give them company of older children with average IQ, so that the “mental age” is kinda balanced) is just a short-term fix that fails in long term. Yes, you are providing the children an appropriately mentally challenging environment, which is good. But what you don’t give them, is the opportunity to learn the coping skills that seem necessary for high-IQ people. So when they reach the stage where there is simply no value X such that an average X years old person has the same mental level as the gifted person does now, the whole strategy collapses. (But by the time the gifted person is usually an adult, so everyone just shrugs and says “whatever, it’s their fault”. Ignoring the fact that the society spent the whole previous time teaching them a coping strategy that predictably fails afterwards.)
So, I believe that for a high-IQ person there is simply no substitute for the company of intellectual peers; even older children will not do, because that is a strategy that predictably fails when the person reaches adulthood. Some kids are lucky, because their parents are high-IQ, because their parents have high-IQ friends, who probably have high-IQ children, so by this social network they can connect with intelectual peers. But high-IQ kids growing up without this kind of network… need a lot of luck.
If this is true (which I have no reason do doubt), then not allowing high-IQ children to associate with other high-IQ children is child abuse.
You do understand that “true” here means “we built a model where the coefficient for a factor we describe as ‘connectedness’ is statistically significant”, right? I don’t think throwing around terms like “child abuse” is helpful.
Also, do you think the existence of the internet helps with the problem you describe?
I don’t think throwing around terms like “child abuse” is helpful.
Yeah, it’s probably a strategic mistake to tell people plainly that they are doing a horrible thing. It will most likely trigger a chain of “I am a good person… therefore I couldn’t possibly do a horrible thing… therefore what this person is telling me must be wrong”, which prevents or delays the solution of the problem. Whether you discuss social deprivation of high-IQ children, or circumcision, or religious education, or whatever, you have to remember that people mostly want to maintain the model of the world where they are the good ones who never did anything wrong, even if it means ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Especially if their opinion happens to be a majority opinion.
It’s just that on LW I try to tell it how I see it, ignoring the strategical concerns. As an estimate, let’s say that if normal child development is 0 units of abuse, and feral children are 100 units of abuse, then depriving a high-IQ child of contact with other high-IQ children is about 1 unit of abuse. (I specifically chose feral children, because I believe it is an abuse of a similar kind, just much smaller magnitude.) Sure, compared with many horrors that children sometimes suffer, this is relatively minor. However, people who systematically harm thousands of children in this way are guilty of child abuse. I mean those who campaign against existence of high-IQ schools, or even make laws against them. (As an estimate, I would guess that at least one of hundred such children will commit suicide or at least seriously consider it, as a result of the social deprivation.)
Also, do you think the existence of the internet helps with the problem you describe?
I think it helps, but not sufficiently. I may be generalizing from one example here, but internet connection simply doesn’t have the same quality as personal interaction. That’s why e.g. some people attend LW meetups instead of merely posting here. And generally, why people still bother meeting in person, despite almost everyone (in developed countries) having an internet connection. -- As a high IQ child, you may find other high IQ children on the internet, but unless there is a specialized school for such children, you still have to spend most of your time without them.
Another problem is that the topic is mostly taboo, so even with internet you may simply not know what to look for. To explain, I will use homosexuality as an analogy (obviously, it is not the same situation, I just find this one aspect similar) -- if you know that homosexuality is a thing, and if you know that you happen to be a gay, then you can just open google and look for the nearest gay club, and if you are lucky, then something like that exists in your town. But imagine that you happen to be gay, but you never heard about homosexuality as a concept. No one ever mentioned that; you are not aware that it exists, or that other people may be gay, too. All you know is that other boys of your age seem to be interested in girls, and you don’t quite understand why. So, you open google and… what? “Why I am not so interested in girls?” But in a society where this topic is taboo, the first 100 pages of google results will probably contain information that for different boys attraction in girls develops at a different age, or that maybe this is a sign from God to become a celibate priest, or that you should lower your unrealistic standards for female beauty, or that you need to learn more social skills and go out more and meet more girls until you find one that will attract you… some people will say there is something wrong with you, some people will say everything is perfectly okay and all problems will solve themselves in time, but no one will even hint that maybe your lack of attraction to girls may be because you are gay, which is a fact of life, and a solution for such people is to find company of other gays.
Analogically, if you have a very high IQ, and your problem is that there are not people with sufficiently high IQ around you, but you are not aware of the fact that a very high IQ is a thing, what will you write in google? “How not to feel alone?” “How to communicate with people?” “How to feel understood?” And you will get advice like “when interacting with people, you should talk less, and listen more”, which is all perfectly true and useful, but all it does is that it helps you connect to average people on their level, which is not the thing you are starving for. (It’s like a recipe for a gay how to maintain erection while having sex with a girl. It may be a technically perfect advice, it may even work; it’s just not the thing that the gay truly desires. Similarly, the high-IQ person may learn to be able to maintain conversation with an average person, talking on the average person’s terms; it’s just not fulfilling their deep intellectual desires.) Some of the advice will tell the problem is in you: you don’t have enough social skils, you are too proud, you have unrealistic expectations of human interaction; other advice will tell you to calm down because everything is going to magically become okay as soon as you stop worrying. But if you happen to be a high-IQ person, the advice you need is probably “you feel different from other people because you are different, but don’t worry, there is a ‘high IQ club’ down the street, you may find similar people there”. (Which is what Mensa tries to be. Except that Mensa is for people with IQ 130, so if you happen to be have IQ 160, you will feel in Mensa just as lonely as an average Mensa member feels among the normies.)
So, analogically to gays, we need to make it generally known that “having a high IQ” is a thing, and that “meeting other people with the similar level to IQ” is the only solution that actually works. And then, people will know what to type in google. And then, having an internet will solve this problem. But most people still have beliefs that are analogical to “homosexuality is a sin, it is unnatural, it shouldn’t be encouraged, it corrupts the youth, it will make God send floods on us, you just have to pray and become hetero”; except that they say “IQ is a myth, it is an unhealthy elitism, there are multiple intelligences and everyone has one, IQ doesn’t mean anything because EQ is everything and you can increase your EQ by reading Dale Carnegie, and if you believe in IQ you will develop a fixed mindset and fail at life”. And you may start believing it, until you happen to stumble upon e.g. a LW meetup and experience your best intellectual orgasm in life, and you suddenly easily click with people and develop fulfilling relationships.
(Where the analogy with gays fails is that people usually don’t create fake gay clubs full of hetero people, but there are groups of people who believe themselves to be smart even when they are not. So a person googling for something like a high IQ club may still be disappointed with the results.)
I don’t think the problem is strategic concerns, I think the problem is connotations.
The connotations for child abuse are “call the cops and/or child protective services which will take the child away from the parents and place him/her into foster care” and “put the parents in jail and throw away the key”. Child abuse is not merely bad parenting.
you may simply not know what to look for
What do you mean? Finding your tribe / peer group isn’t a matter of plopping the right search terms into Google. I think it mostly works through following the connections from things and people you find on the ’net. If you consistently look for “smarter” and follow the paths to “more smarter” X-), you’ll end in the right area.
internet connection simply doesn’t have the same quality as personal interaction
Well, of course. But imagine things before the internet :-/
Yeah, the Dark Ages before 1980s were a cruel place to live.
I think it mostly works through following the connections from things and people you find on the ’net. If you consistently look for “smarter” and follow the paths to “more smarter” X-), you’ll end in the right area.
I tried this, and maybe I was doing it wrong or maybe just not persistently enough, but essentialy my findings were of two kinds:
1) Instead of “rational smart” I found “clever smart” people. The kind that has a huge raw brainpower, but uses it to study theology or conspiracy theories. Sometimes it seemed to me that the higher-IQ people are, the more crazy they get. I mean, most of the conspiracy theories I knew, I knew them because someone shared them on a Mensa forum, and not jokingly. Or the people who memorized half of the Bible, and could tell you all the connections and rationalizations for anything. They were able to win any debate, they had high status in their community, and they didn’t have a reason to change this.
Essentially, before I found LW, I was using a wrong keyword to google. Instead of “highly intelligent” I actually wanted “highly intelligent and rational”. But I didn’t know how to express that additional constraint; it just felt like “highly intelligent without being highly stupid at the same time”, but of course no one would understand what I meant by saying that. (Did I mean “even better knowledge of the Bible”? Nope. Oh, so “knowedge of how the illuminati and jews rule the world”? Eh, just forget it.)
2) A few (i.e. less than ten) individuals who were highly intelligent and rational, but they were all isolated individuals. Sometimes lonely and lost, just like me. Sometimes doing their thing and being quite successful at it, but admitting that most people seem stupid or crazy (they would tell it more diplomatically, of course) and it is very rare to find an exception. The latter were usually very busy and seemed to prefer being left alone, so when I suggested something like connecting smart and rational people together, there were like “nah, I don’t have time for that, I have already found my own thing that I am good at, it makes me happy, and that’s the only rational way for a smart person to have a happy life”. But I suspect it was simply “better to hope for nothing, than to be disappointed”.
This thread started with talking about establishing schools/communities/etc. of high-IQ people. Note: all high-IQ people. Now you are pointing out that IQ by itself is not sufficient—you want people with both high IQ and appropriate culture/upbringing/interests.
I wonder… but yeah, this is extremely speculative… whether the reason why high-IQ people don’t have more rationality could be analogical to why feral children don’t have better grammar skills.
That is, whether putting high-IQ people together, for a few generations, would increase the fraction of rationalists among them.
Disconnected people don’t create culture. High IQ is biological, but rationality is probably cultural.
But yeah… changing the topic, and the thread is too long already.
I don’t know about that. Social skills and culture are not rationality, they are orthogonal to rationality.
Epistemic rationality is not cultural—it’s basically science, and science is based on matching actual reality (aka “what works”) . There was a comment here recently about Newtonian physics being spread by the sword (the context was a discussion about how Christianity spread) which pointed out that physics might well have spread by cannons—people who “believe” in Newtonian physics tend to have much better cannons than those who don’t.
Instrumental rationality is not such a clear-cut case because culture plays a great role in determining acceptable ways of achieving goals. And real-life goal pursuit is usually more complicated than how it’s portrayed on LW.
people who “believe” in Newtonian physics tend to have much better cannons than those who don’t.
Yeah, I should have said “subculture” instead of “culture”. Because as long as people at the key places in the country believe in physics, they can also bring victory for their physics-ignorant neighbors.
Epistemic rationality is not cultural—it’s basically science and science is based on matching actual reality
But you still learn science at school, and some people still decide that they e.g. don’t believe in evolution, or believe in homeopathy. So although science means “matching the territory”, the opinion that “matching the territory could be somehow important” is just an opinion that some people share and others don’t, or some people use in some aspects of life and not in others, free-riding on the research of others.
No, you don’t. You learn to regurgitate back a set of facts and you learn some templates into which you put some numbers and get some other (presumably correct) numbers as output. This is not science.
the opinion that “matching the territory could be somehow important” is just an opinion that some people share and others don’t
That, um, depends. Most people believe that “matching the territory” with respect to gravity is important—in particular, they don’t attempt to fly off tall buildings. The issues arise in situations where “matching the territory” is difficult and non-obvious. Take a young creationist—will any of his actions mismatch the reality? I don’t expect so. If he’s a regular guy leading a regular life in some town, there is no territory around him which will or will not matched by his young creationist beliefs. It just doesn’t matter to him in practice.
I don’t think the concern would be that “they could take over the whole society”. It would be more that smart people (more accurately: people in various groups that correlate with smartness, and perhaps more strongly with schools’ estimates of pupil-smartness) already have some tendency to interact only with one another, and segregating schools would increase that tendency, and that might be bad for social cohesion and even stability (because e.g. those smart people will include most of the politicians, and the less aware they are of what Ordinary People want the more likely they are to seem out of touch and lead to populist smash-everything moves).
that might be bad for social cohesion and even stability
This is a complicated argument. Are you basically saying that it’s “good” (we’ll leave aside figuring out what it means for a second) for people to be tribal at the nation-state level but bad for them to be tribal at more granular levels?
For most cohesion you want a very homogeneous population (see e.g. Iceland). Technically speaking, any diversity reduces social cohesion and diversity in IQ is just one example of that. If you’re worried about cohesion and stability, any diversity is “bad” and you want to discourage tribes at the sub-nation levels.
The obvious counterpoint is that diversity has advantages. Homogeneity has well-known downsides, so you’re in effect trading off diversity against stability. That topic, of course, gets us into a right into a political minefield :-/
Just to clarify, I am describing rather than making arguments. As I said upthread, I am not claiming that they are actually good arguments nor endorsing the conclusion they (by construction) point towards. With that out of the way:
that it’s “good” [...] for people to be tribal at the nation-state level but bad for them to be tribal at more granular levels?
The argument doesn’t have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level. I guess most people do endorse tribalism at the nation-state level, though.
For most cohesion you want a very homogeneous population [...] any diversity reduces social cohesion
If you have a more or less fixed national population (in fact, what we have that’s relevant here is a more or less fixed population at a level somewhere below the national; whatever scale our postulated school segregation happens at) then you don’t get to choose the diversity at that scale. At smaller scales you can make less-diverse and therefore possibly more-cohesive subpopulations, at the likely cost of increased tension between the groups.
(I think we are more or less saying the same thing here.)
The obvious counterpoint is that diversity has advantages.
Yes. (We were asked for arguments against segregation by ability, so I listed some. Many of them have more or less obvious counterarguments.)
The argument doesn’t have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level.
Concerns about social cohesion and stability are mostly relevant at the nation-state level. This is so because at sub-state levels the exit option is generally available and is viable. At the state level, not so much.
In plain words, it’s much easier to move out if your town loses cohesion and stability than if your country does.
you don’t get to choose the diversity
You don’t get to choose the diversity, but you can incentivise or disincentivise the differentiation with long-term consequences. For an example, look at what happened to, say, people who immigrated to the US in the first half of the XX century. They started with a lot of diversity but because the general trend was towards homogenisation, that diversity lessened considerably.
This again depends a lot on the specific IQ values. There are probably many politicians around the Mensa level, but I would suspect that there are not so many above cca IQ 150, simply because of the low base rate… and maybe even because they might have a communication problem when talking to an average voter, so if they want to influence politics, it would make more sense for them to start a think tank, or becomes advisors, so they don’t have to compete for the average Joe’s vote directly.
Thanks! What are your central examples of the activities in 2.F? Sport? Craft? Something else?
I think I never actually met anyone using 5.B. Probably because using this argument requires assuming that there are enough genuinely smart people to create a community when given a chance; and most people around me seem to believe that high IQ doesn’t really matter, and on the “unspecified but certainly very high” level where it does, those people are too few, not enough to create a functional bubble. Alternatively, other people believe that every above-average high school or every university is already de facto a school for high-IQ kids, and the IQ levels above this line don’t actually make a difference, so all such bubbles already exist. -- No one seems to believe that there could be a meaningful line drawn at IQ maybe 150, where the people are too few to create a (non-professional) community spontaneously, but sufficiently different from the rest of the population that they might enjoy actually living in such community if given a chance.
For 2.F I was indeed thinking sport, but actually I have very little idea whether such activities really exist and if so what they actually are. Plenty of smart kids like sport.
We’re already assuming that there are enough smart-in-whatever-sense people to have their own school. Depending on where the borderline between “smart” and “dumb” is drawn, there may be more or fewer “smart” schools, but each one will have to be of reasonable size.
Well, specific IQ levels are usually not mentioned in the debates I have seen. Which of course only makes the debates more confused. :(
When I think about it quantitatively, if we use Mensa as a Schelling point for “high IQ”, then 2% of the population have IQ over 130, which qualifies them as Mensa-level smart. Two percent may seem not too much, but for example in a city with population of half a milion (such as where I live), that gives 10 000 people. To better visualize this number, if you have an apartment building with 7 floors, that is 20 apartments, assuming on average 2.5 people per apartment that is 50 people per building, which gives us 200 buildings.
Of course assuming unrealistically that Mensa could somehow successfully convince all people in the city to take the test, and to convince those who pass to move together. But 200 buildings of Mensa-level people sounds impressive. (Well, if Mensa sounds impressive, which on LW it probably does not.)
Speaking of schools, let’s say that people live about 70 years, but there are more young people than old people, so let’s assume that for young people a year of age corresponds to 1⁄50 of the population, so if there are 10 000 Mensa-level people in the half-million city, that makes 200 children for each grade. That’s about 7 classrooms for each grade, depending on size. That’s like two or three schools. Again, depending on the assumption that Mensa could find those kids, and convince the parents to put them all into Mensa schools. (Which, under the completely unrealistic assumptions, could be built in the “Mensa district” of the city.)
To make this happen, it would require a smaller miracle, but it’s not completely impossible. Just making all people in one city interested in Mensa, making them take the test, and making them interested in moving to the “Mensa district” would require a lof of advertising. (And even then, there would be a lot of resistance.) But, hypothetically, if you had a millionaire, who would build the new district, hire a few celebrities to popularize the idea, and perhaps sell or rent the appartments only to high-IQ people for a discount… it could happen. If 10% of the target population would be convinced enough to move, you could get a “Mensa block” with 20 houses, 1 very small elementary school, and 1 very small high school. -- I am afraid this is the best possible outcome, and it already assumes a millionaire sponsor.
If you imagine a higher IQ level, such as IQ 150, even this is impossible.
So, while some people may fear that if we make smart people network with each other, they could take over the whole society, to me it feels like saying that as soon as dozen LessWrong fans start regularly attending a meetup, they will become an army of beisutsukai and take over the world. Nice story, but not gonna happen. If this is the reason against the schools for smart kids, the normies are safe.
You might find this interesting: The 7 Tribes of Intellect.
Well, I approximately agree, but that’s just a classification of people into IQ layers. I’d like to go much further than that.
For example—sorry, today I am too lazy to do a google hunt—I think there was a research, probably by Terman, about why some high-IQ people succeed in life while others fail, often spectacularly. His conclusion was that it mostly depends on how well connected with other high-IQ people they are; most importantly whether they come from a generally high-IQ family. (My hypothesis is that the effect is twofold: first, the high-IQ family itself is a small high-IQ society; second, the older family members were already solving the problem of “how to find other high-IQ people” and can share their strategies and contacts with the younger members.)
If this is true (which I have no reason do doubt), then not allowing high-IQ children to associate with other high-IQ children is child abuse. It is like sending someone on train that is predictably going to crash. I will charitably assume that most people participating in this form of child abuse are actually not aware of what they are doing, so I don’t blame them morally… at least until the moment when someone tries to explain to them what are the actual consequences of their actions, and they just stick fingers in their ears and start singing “la la la, I don’t hear you, elitism is always bad”.
But perhaps a more important thing is this: the usual “compromise” solution of accepting that some children indeed are smarter than others, but solving it by simply having them skip a grade (that is, instead of company of children with similar age and IQ, you give them company of older children with average IQ, so that the “mental age” is kinda balanced) is just a short-term fix that fails in long term. Yes, you are providing the children an appropriately mentally challenging environment, which is good. But what you don’t give them, is the opportunity to learn the coping skills that seem necessary for high-IQ people. So when they reach the stage where there is simply no value X such that an average X years old person has the same mental level as the gifted person does now, the whole strategy collapses. (But by the time the gifted person is usually an adult, so everyone just shrugs and says “whatever, it’s their fault”. Ignoring the fact that the society spent the whole previous time teaching them a coping strategy that predictably fails afterwards.)
So, I believe that for a high-IQ person there is simply no substitute for the company of intellectual peers; even older children will not do, because that is a strategy that predictably fails when the person reaches adulthood. Some kids are lucky, because their parents are high-IQ, because their parents have high-IQ friends, who probably have high-IQ children, so by this social network they can connect with intelectual peers. But high-IQ kids growing up without this kind of network… need a lot of luck.
You do understand that “true” here means “we built a model where the coefficient for a factor we describe as ‘connectedness’ is statistically significant”, right? I don’t think throwing around terms like “child abuse” is helpful.
Also, do you think the existence of the internet helps with the problem you describe?
Yeah, it’s probably a strategic mistake to tell people plainly that they are doing a horrible thing. It will most likely trigger a chain of “I am a good person… therefore I couldn’t possibly do a horrible thing… therefore what this person is telling me must be wrong”, which prevents or delays the solution of the problem. Whether you discuss social deprivation of high-IQ children, or circumcision, or religious education, or whatever, you have to remember that people mostly want to maintain the model of the world where they are the good ones who never did anything wrong, even if it means ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Especially if their opinion happens to be a majority opinion.
It’s just that on LW I try to tell it how I see it, ignoring the strategical concerns. As an estimate, let’s say that if normal child development is 0 units of abuse, and feral children are 100 units of abuse, then depriving a high-IQ child of contact with other high-IQ children is about 1 unit of abuse. (I specifically chose feral children, because I believe it is an abuse of a similar kind, just much smaller magnitude.) Sure, compared with many horrors that children sometimes suffer, this is relatively minor. However, people who systematically harm thousands of children in this way are guilty of child abuse. I mean those who campaign against existence of high-IQ schools, or even make laws against them. (As an estimate, I would guess that at least one of hundred such children will commit suicide or at least seriously consider it, as a result of the social deprivation.)
I think it helps, but not sufficiently. I may be generalizing from one example here, but internet connection simply doesn’t have the same quality as personal interaction. That’s why e.g. some people attend LW meetups instead of merely posting here. And generally, why people still bother meeting in person, despite almost everyone (in developed countries) having an internet connection. -- As a high IQ child, you may find other high IQ children on the internet, but unless there is a specialized school for such children, you still have to spend most of your time without them.
Another problem is that the topic is mostly taboo, so even with internet you may simply not know what to look for. To explain, I will use homosexuality as an analogy (obviously, it is not the same situation, I just find this one aspect similar) -- if you know that homosexuality is a thing, and if you know that you happen to be a gay, then you can just open google and look for the nearest gay club, and if you are lucky, then something like that exists in your town. But imagine that you happen to be gay, but you never heard about homosexuality as a concept. No one ever mentioned that; you are not aware that it exists, or that other people may be gay, too. All you know is that other boys of your age seem to be interested in girls, and you don’t quite understand why. So, you open google and… what? “Why I am not so interested in girls?” But in a society where this topic is taboo, the first 100 pages of google results will probably contain information that for different boys attraction in girls develops at a different age, or that maybe this is a sign from God to become a celibate priest, or that you should lower your unrealistic standards for female beauty, or that you need to learn more social skills and go out more and meet more girls until you find one that will attract you… some people will say there is something wrong with you, some people will say everything is perfectly okay and all problems will solve themselves in time, but no one will even hint that maybe your lack of attraction to girls may be because you are gay, which is a fact of life, and a solution for such people is to find company of other gays.
Analogically, if you have a very high IQ, and your problem is that there are not people with sufficiently high IQ around you, but you are not aware of the fact that a very high IQ is a thing, what will you write in google? “How not to feel alone?” “How to communicate with people?” “How to feel understood?” And you will get advice like “when interacting with people, you should talk less, and listen more”, which is all perfectly true and useful, but all it does is that it helps you connect to average people on their level, which is not the thing you are starving for. (It’s like a recipe for a gay how to maintain erection while having sex with a girl. It may be a technically perfect advice, it may even work; it’s just not the thing that the gay truly desires. Similarly, the high-IQ person may learn to be able to maintain conversation with an average person, talking on the average person’s terms; it’s just not fulfilling their deep intellectual desires.) Some of the advice will tell the problem is in you: you don’t have enough social skils, you are too proud, you have unrealistic expectations of human interaction; other advice will tell you to calm down because everything is going to magically become okay as soon as you stop worrying. But if you happen to be a high-IQ person, the advice you need is probably “you feel different from other people because you are different, but don’t worry, there is a ‘high IQ club’ down the street, you may find similar people there”. (Which is what Mensa tries to be. Except that Mensa is for people with IQ 130, so if you happen to be have IQ 160, you will feel in Mensa just as lonely as an average Mensa member feels among the normies.)
So, analogically to gays, we need to make it generally known that “having a high IQ” is a thing, and that “meeting other people with the similar level to IQ” is the only solution that actually works. And then, people will know what to type in google. And then, having an internet will solve this problem. But most people still have beliefs that are analogical to “homosexuality is a sin, it is unnatural, it shouldn’t be encouraged, it corrupts the youth, it will make God send floods on us, you just have to pray and become hetero”; except that they say “IQ is a myth, it is an unhealthy elitism, there are multiple intelligences and everyone has one, IQ doesn’t mean anything because EQ is everything and you can increase your EQ by reading Dale Carnegie, and if you believe in IQ you will develop a fixed mindset and fail at life”. And you may start believing it, until you happen to stumble upon e.g. a LW meetup and experience your best intellectual orgasm in life, and you suddenly easily click with people and develop fulfilling relationships.
(Where the analogy with gays fails is that people usually don’t create fake gay clubs full of hetero people, but there are groups of people who believe themselves to be smart even when they are not. So a person googling for something like a high IQ club may still be disappointed with the results.)
I don’t think the problem is strategic concerns, I think the problem is connotations.
The connotations for child abuse are “call the cops and/or child protective services which will take the child away from the parents and place him/her into foster care” and “put the parents in jail and throw away the key”. Child abuse is not merely bad parenting.
What do you mean? Finding your tribe / peer group isn’t a matter of plopping the right search terms into Google. I think it mostly works through following the connections from things and people you find on the ’net. If you consistently look for “smarter” and follow the paths to “more smarter” X-), you’ll end in the right area.
Well, of course. But imagine things before the internet :-/
Yeah, the Dark Ages before 1980s were a cruel place to live.
I tried this, and maybe I was doing it wrong or maybe just not persistently enough, but essentialy my findings were of two kinds:
1) Instead of “rational smart” I found “clever smart” people. The kind that has a huge raw brainpower, but uses it to study theology or conspiracy theories. Sometimes it seemed to me that the higher-IQ people are, the more crazy they get. I mean, most of the conspiracy theories I knew, I knew them because someone shared them on a Mensa forum, and not jokingly. Or the people who memorized half of the Bible, and could tell you all the connections and rationalizations for anything. They were able to win any debate, they had high status in their community, and they didn’t have a reason to change this.
Essentially, before I found LW, I was using a wrong keyword to google. Instead of “highly intelligent” I actually wanted “highly intelligent and rational”. But I didn’t know how to express that additional constraint; it just felt like “highly intelligent without being highly stupid at the same time”, but of course no one would understand what I meant by saying that. (Did I mean “even better knowledge of the Bible”? Nope. Oh, so “knowedge of how the illuminati and jews rule the world”? Eh, just forget it.)
2) A few (i.e. less than ten) individuals who were highly intelligent and rational, but they were all isolated individuals. Sometimes lonely and lost, just like me. Sometimes doing their thing and being quite successful at it, but admitting that most people seem stupid or crazy (they would tell it more diplomatically, of course) and it is very rare to find an exception. The latter were usually very busy and seemed to prefer being left alone, so when I suggested something like connecting smart and rational people together, there were like “nah, I don’t have time for that, I have already found my own thing that I am good at, it makes me happy, and that’s the only rational way for a smart person to have a happy life”. But I suspect it was simply “better to hope for nothing, than to be disappointed”.
This thread started with talking about establishing schools/communities/etc. of high-IQ people. Note: all high-IQ people. Now you are pointing out that IQ by itself is not sufficient—you want people with both high IQ and appropriate culture/upbringing/interests.
I wonder… but yeah, this is extremely speculative… whether the reason why high-IQ people don’t have more rationality could be analogical to why feral children don’t have better grammar skills.
That is, whether putting high-IQ people together, for a few generations, would increase the fraction of rationalists among them.
Disconnected people don’t create culture. High IQ is biological, but rationality is probably cultural.
But yeah… changing the topic, and the thread is too long already.
I don’t know about that. Social skills and culture are not rationality, they are orthogonal to rationality.
Epistemic rationality is not cultural—it’s basically science, and science is based on matching actual reality (aka “what works”) . There was a comment here recently about Newtonian physics being spread by the sword (the context was a discussion about how Christianity spread) which pointed out that physics might well have spread by cannons—people who “believe” in Newtonian physics tend to have much better cannons than those who don’t.
Instrumental rationality is not such a clear-cut case because culture plays a great role in determining acceptable ways of achieving goals. And real-life goal pursuit is usually more complicated than how it’s portrayed on LW.
Yeah, I should have said “subculture” instead of “culture”. Because as long as people at the key places in the country believe in physics, they can also bring victory for their physics-ignorant neighbors.
But you still learn science at school, and some people still decide that they e.g. don’t believe in evolution, or believe in homeopathy. So although science means “matching the territory”, the opinion that “matching the territory could be somehow important” is just an opinion that some people share and others don’t, or some people use in some aspects of life and not in others, free-riding on the research of others.
No, you don’t. You learn to regurgitate back a set of facts and you learn some templates into which you put some numbers and get some other (presumably correct) numbers as output. This is not science.
That, um, depends. Most people believe that “matching the territory” with respect to gravity is important—in particular, they don’t attempt to fly off tall buildings. The issues arise in situations where “matching the territory” is difficult and non-obvious. Take a young creationist—will any of his actions mismatch the reality? I don’t expect so. If he’s a regular guy leading a regular life in some town, there is no territory around him which will or will not matched by his young creationist beliefs. It just doesn’t matter to him in practice.
I don’t think the concern would be that “they could take over the whole society”. It would be more that smart people (more accurately: people in various groups that correlate with smartness, and perhaps more strongly with schools’ estimates of pupil-smartness) already have some tendency to interact only with one another, and segregating schools would increase that tendency, and that might be bad for social cohesion and even stability (because e.g. those smart people will include most of the politicians, and the less aware they are of what Ordinary People want the more likely they are to seem out of touch and lead to populist smash-everything moves).
This is a complicated argument. Are you basically saying that it’s “good” (we’ll leave aside figuring out what it means for a second) for people to be tribal at the nation-state level but bad for them to be tribal at more granular levels?
For most cohesion you want a very homogeneous population (see e.g. Iceland). Technically speaking, any diversity reduces social cohesion and diversity in IQ is just one example of that. If you’re worried about cohesion and stability, any diversity is “bad” and you want to discourage tribes at the sub-nation levels.
The obvious counterpoint is that diversity has advantages. Homogeneity has well-known downsides, so you’re in effect trading off diversity against stability. That topic, of course, gets us into a right into a political minefield :-/
Just to clarify, I am describing rather than making arguments. As I said upthread, I am not claiming that they are actually good arguments nor endorsing the conclusion they (by construction) point towards. With that out of the way:
The argument doesn’t have anything to say about what should happen at the nation-state level. I guess most people do endorse tribalism at the nation-state level, though.
If you have a more or less fixed national population (in fact, what we have that’s relevant here is a more or less fixed population at a level somewhere below the national; whatever scale our postulated school segregation happens at) then you don’t get to choose the diversity at that scale. At smaller scales you can make less-diverse and therefore possibly more-cohesive subpopulations, at the likely cost of increased tension between the groups.
(I think we are more or less saying the same thing here.)
Yes. (We were asked for arguments against segregation by ability, so I listed some. Many of them have more or less obvious counterarguments.)
Concerns about social cohesion and stability are mostly relevant at the nation-state level. This is so because at sub-state levels the exit option is generally available and is viable. At the state level, not so much.
In plain words, it’s much easier to move out if your town loses cohesion and stability than if your country does.
You don’t get to choose the diversity, but you can incentivise or disincentivise the differentiation with long-term consequences. For an example, look at what happened to, say, people who immigrated to the US in the first half of the XX century. They started with a lot of diversity but because the general trend was towards homogenisation, that diversity lessened considerably.
This again depends a lot on the specific IQ values. There are probably many politicians around the Mensa level, but I would suspect that there are not so many above cca IQ 150, simply because of the low base rate… and maybe even because they might have a communication problem when talking to an average voter, so if they want to influence politics, it would make more sense for them to start a think tank, or becomes advisors, so they don’t have to compete for the average Joe’s vote directly.