Ask A Genius 802: Late Stage IQ
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10/18
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Well, you want to talk about the world getting dumber and I want to kind of start that off with sort of late stage IQ. You’ve made this point originally I think. The idea that IQ as a cultural item has decreased over time in terms of psychology and stuff you’ll be using it for measuring certain things. It’s bare but it’s just not as important to most people most of the time anymore.
Rick Rosner: People don’t find it as useful as people 50 years ago did.
Jacobsen: Yes, even 20 years ago.
Rosner: Yeah. One reason is because we’re more aware of racism and other issues that might make IQ methodologies suspect but really I’m guessing the main reason is that people leave so many traces of themselves on social media and elsewhere, that we don’t need as many clues like IQ to help figure out what they’re about. If you’re looking at hiring somebody you’d be an idiot not to look at their social media. I’ve tweeted now over a hundred thousand times and working with you, we have more than a million words online and with the Lance we’ve got more than 200 hours of us arguing. So if somebody wants to know about me, you’ll find if you Google me but somebody else with as many traces online as I have, you wouldn’t need to know their IQ, you could just figure out what they’re about by just like reading up on them.
You and I started talking sometime in 2014 and at the time I believe that the smart phone, I think came out in 2008 maybe. So it hadn’t been out that long and we feel like we’ve had smart phones forever now and we forget what it was like before them. They were new back then and there were people who were doing all sorts of stupid shit because they have these amazing phones, mostly walking while looking at their phones. We’re used to that shit now; driving while texting, all that shit. I was of the belief that even though we were seeing stupid behavior from people with smart phones, that overall and eventually they would make people smarter having access to all the information in the world and all these apps that give you more power in the world, like ways that just help you navigate. Now, its eight years since we started talking.
Ever since Trump, a huge segment of the U.S population has seemingly become inextricably believers in bullshit, just unpersuadable jackasses. You could argue that just because people believe stupid shit doesn’t mean they’re stupid. But I see the social media products of these people and these people, I believe, many of them, the loudest ones of them; the people who are active on social media pushing Trumpy type stuff are indeed on average stupider based on not just what they believe but their syntax and grammar and spelling.
I know that phones will fuck you up, that if you’re unconscientious about just talking and speaking a tweet into a phone and just publishing it as is, it’ll go out with dumb errors but beyond that the Trumpy people are stupider. Now we’ve talked before about how you can believe a bunch of nonsense as most of the people through history have because we didn’t have the factual the data, the scientific evidence to not believe nonsense about the larger issues of the world but you could believe a lot of nonsense about big philosophical religious issues and still be quite smart in dealing with everyday things. If you’re a shoemaker you can be a smart shoemaker, if you’re a farmer you can be a smart farmer, etc.
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And yeah you may believe in this weird religious and you may fully embrace 14th century Catholicism because that might be the best philosophical system that you have access to and even though a lot of its nonsense, you can be smart in everyday life but when you look at Trumpy people they look and act as if a lot of them aren’t overly smart in everyday life. I mean like the people who show up at Trump rallies are clearly lunatics or idiots. In American society there are probably more lunatics overall because there are more forces making people embrace lunacy.
We’ve talked before about being part of a real living human community; part of a small town or a neighborhood where you get feedback from people and if you believe a bunch of stupid shit, people will call you on it but now people get more input from their selected media which can drown out community input or turn entire communities into idiots and lunatics. So to that extent people have gotten stupider since we’ve started talking with each other, not everybody but a huge chunk of American society. And then we can look at the implications of that as the rest of the world gets smarter because people who embrace technology in a way that makes them smarter, which you can definitely do, are limited.
I was just watching an episode of The Vow, Season Two, which is the HBO doc on Keith Raniere and NXIVM. This episode had interviews with people who got out of the cult and recognized it as a cult and people who left the cult because it fell apart because Raniere is in prison for life. But who maintain relationships with other people who were part of NXIVM and I guess there were adjunct junked organizations and who still believe in the claimed enterprise of NXIVM; it reminds me a lot of scientology which is human optimization which in itself is not a terrible or ridiculous thing. It’s just bad when bad people are doing it. Scientology’s pretty bad organization but I believe it’s possible to get positive effects from scientology for some people, if you take the right lessons, if you don’t let yourself be exploited. It’s tricky and maybe not the norm but human optimization is a not terrible individual objective. It may have been possible for people who had like glancing contact with NXIVM without going full cult to have gotten some benefits because when people think about how to adjust your attitudes and approaches to the world, they often come up with reasonable ideas about how to do that even as the their organizations sink into corruption and perversion.
But counter to all this is that we’re all just humans and have the same physical and mental equipment as dictated by our genes that humans did 90,000 years ago. Now we can optimize what we can do with that equipment but it’s still human and limited and the people in America who’ve been turned into idiots and lunatics certainly haven’t optimized themselves. It’s a bad time to not have optimized yourself, to have turned yourself into an idiot because beings in the world are coming who will be better than human, who will be technologically and biologically optimized to have better skills than just regular people who aren’t augmented.
[Recording End]
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