On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 11:18:21AM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
> That and the difficulty of creating intelligence.

It can't be the latter, because the intelligence that already exist was
not selected for. Consider again the fact that Jews have an average IQ
that is about one standard deviation higher than non-Jewish whites. This
clearly shows that the potential for higher intelligence is already in our
gene pool. How would you explain why the IQ distribution of the general
population does not look more like that of Jews?

(BTW, imagine what that would be like. America would have 13 times the
number of Nobel-level (by our standards) scientists as it actually does.)

> I argue that (a) can be an equilibrium.  We are rather smart in some areas,
> but the mechanisms in us that allow that are not up to the task of faking
> being dumb in other areas - we are actually dumb in those other areas.  This
> is/was an equilibrium because people who tried to fake often got caught.

I don't disagree that this occurs to some degree. But there must be
a limit to how smart you can be in one area and still be dumb in
another. I suggest we have already reached it, because otherwise the facts
are hard to explain.

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