On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 12:37:53PM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
> Your story does have a certain plausibility. But you'd need to argue that
> the huge increase in IQ that has been documented during this last century
> isn't really an increase in intelligence. And doing that makes it harder
> to tak
Having taken the WWI era Army IQ test that was the basis for some of this, I
can verify that a significant amount of it seemed to be education based
(questions regarding brands of motor engines and whatnot probably posed
issues for immigrants who'd rarely seen and never driven cars, for example).
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> American Jews tested below average on Army intelligence tests conducted
> around the turn of the last century (1900)
I suspect this was not a pure IQ test but had a bias towards education, and
at that time, American Jews, especially recent immigrants, many not have
b
In a message dated 12/7/03 12:40:04 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Your story does have a certain plausibility. But you'd need to argue that
>the huge increase in IQ that has been documented during this last century
>isn't really an increase in intelligence. And doing that makes it harder
>to ta
On 12/1/2003 Wei Dai wrote:
> 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
--- Wei Dai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> How would you explain why the IQ distribution of the general
> population does not look more like that of Jews?
Flight.
Centuries of persecution has made Jews flee a territory many times. The
smart ones such as Einstein flee, and the less intelligent stay
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 high
On 11/30/2003 Wei Dai wrote:
I'm not saying that intelligence is not useful, just that its
social costs can help explain why we're not smarter. Of course
intelligence seems extremely useful, which is what makes our dumbness
puzzling. Is your position that the other known costs of intelligence
(more
On Sat, Nov 29, 2003 at 02:15:54PM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
> That's pretty weak evidence, compared to the vast experience each of us has
> in using cleverness to better get along in the world.
Using ourselves as samples suffers from a selection bias. We don't live in
a time and place where smar
At 02:15 PM 11/29/2003 -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
On 11/26/2003 Wei Dai wrote:
> There certainly do seem to be some situations in which it can pay not be
> seen as "too clever by half". But of course there are many other
situations
> in which being clever pays well. So unless the first set of
sit
On 11/26/2003 Wei Dai wrote:
> There certainly do seem to be some situations in which it can pay not be
> seen as "too clever by half". But of course there are many other
situations
> in which being clever pays well. So unless the first set of situations are
> more important than the second, it s
If anything, I think you could argue that the Holocaust contributed to a
higher than average Jewish IQ rather than the other way around. I'm sure
Jews able to avoid fatal persecution in WWII and in the USSR have several
qualities highly correlated with intelligence. An environment which values
ed
On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 04:47:17PM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
> There certainly do seem to be some situations in which it can pay not be
> seen as "too clever by half". But of course there are many other situations
> in which being clever pays well. So unless the first set of situations are
> mor
On 11/25/2003, Wei Dai wrote:
Besides the well-known costs of higher intelligence (e.g., more energy
use, bigger heads causing more difficult births), it seems that being
smart can be a disadvantage when playing some non-zero-sum games. Here is
one example. How often do these games occur in real li
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