1)”Wells believed the coming atomic bombs would be so deadly that we would inevitably create a utopian one-world government to prevent them from ever being used. Sorry, Wells. It was a nice thought”—I don’t know about utopian but, save for North Korea, this is more or less what we have since USSR lost the Cold War. USA single-handedly controls most of the world, and no nuclear weapon is sighted in active use.
2)”Find all the smartest people, make them marry each other for a couple of generations, and you’d get some really smart great-grandchildren”—unless they all die out from genetic diseases. This is the Ashkenazi evolutionary experiment (the one you link too) up to eleven.
3)”and that one reason we’re not smarter may be that it’s too hard to squeeze a bigger brain through the birth canal”—should be pretty much obliterated by modern Caesarian, but do we see burst of intelligence in last decades?
4)”If an alien species showed up in their UFOs, said that they’d created us but made a mistake and actually we were supposed to eat our children, and asked us to line up so they could insert the functioning child-eating gene in us, we would probably go all Independence Day on them; computers with more goal-directed architecture would if anything be even more willing to fight such changes”—phew, THAT metaphor finally explains why “just don’t let it self-modify” is not enough. Yudkowsky’s arguments, I’m afraid, did not come through to me on the necessary level… stupid, stupid brain.
“and that one reason we’re not smarter may be that it’s too hard to squeeze a bigger brain through the birth canal”—should be pretty much obliterated by modern Caesarian, but do we see burst of intelligence in last decades?
Reliable contraceptives, combined with unprecedented safety, mean that intelligence is not the evolutionary advantage it once was. People unable or unwilling to use condoms are selected for. Idiocracy is upon us.
Another possibility is that modern Caesarian has not been widespread enough, for long enough, for its effect on intelligence to be noticeable just yet.
Edit: On a related note, I thought of an amusing just so story. I wonder how much of the increase in allergies in the 1st world countries is due to latex allergy being an evolutionary advantage (as opposed to environmental reasons and the access to corticosteroids making a paranoid immune system advantageous in its own right). Probably not much, but amusing to think about.
1)”Wells believed the coming atomic bombs would be so deadly that we would inevitably create a utopian one-world government to prevent them from ever being used. Sorry, Wells. It was a nice thought”—I don’t know about utopian but, save for North Korea, this is more or less what we have since USSR lost the Cold War. USA single-handedly controls most of the world, and no nuclear weapon is sighted in active use.
2)”Find all the smartest people, make them marry each other for a couple of generations, and you’d get some really smart great-grandchildren”—unless they all die out from genetic diseases. This is the Ashkenazi evolutionary experiment (the one you link too) up to eleven.
3)”and that one reason we’re not smarter may be that it’s too hard to squeeze a bigger brain through the birth canal”—should be pretty much obliterated by modern Caesarian, but do we see burst of intelligence in last decades?
4)”If an alien species showed up in their UFOs, said that they’d created us but made a mistake and actually we were supposed to eat our children, and asked us to line up so they could insert the functioning child-eating gene in us, we would probably go all Independence Day on them; computers with more goal-directed architecture would if anything be even more willing to fight such changes”—phew, THAT metaphor finally explains why “just don’t let it self-modify” is not enough. Yudkowsky’s arguments, I’m afraid, did not come through to me on the necessary level… stupid, stupid brain.
Reliable contraceptives, combined with unprecedented safety, mean that intelligence is not the evolutionary advantage it once was. People unable or unwilling to use condoms are selected for. Idiocracy is upon us.
Another possibility is that modern Caesarian has not been widespread enough, for long enough, for its effect on intelligence to be noticeable just yet.
Edit: On a related note, I thought of an amusing just so story. I wonder how much of the increase in allergies in the 1st world countries is due to latex allergy being an evolutionary advantage (as opposed to environmental reasons and the access to corticosteroids making a paranoid immune system advantageous in its own right). Probably not much, but amusing to think about.