24 Comments

"We already know from studies of directly measured fertility and intelligence that intelligence and education correlates negatively, which must necessarily lower the average genetic score over time."

You wanted to write "intelligence and *fertility* correlate negatively", right?

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Emil concluded "if we are to be a space-faring species, we have to solve this problem."

Pardon my phrasing, but space colonization is pie in the sky compared to simply maintaining Earth as a planet worth living on. Low IQ individuals, and countries full of them, place almost no value on preservation of natural ecosystems. Honduras is a typical case; it set aside national parks and then let them be deforested by illegal logging. This happens worldwide in countries with low mean IQs. Even a collapse in birth rates in such countries may not help because natural habitats cannot be protected without the rule of law prevailing, which of course is often not the case in low IQ countries.

The only chance of saving a livable planet is if the low-fertility, high-IQ nations join together to enforce population stabilization in low-IQ countries.

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"Whatever the case, if we are to be a space-faring species, we have to solve this problem."

That is for sure. That is why I place my hope for the future on psychometrics and genetic enhancement.

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https://substack.com/home/post/p-154620106

How to get college educated women to have replacement fertility:

1) Go to church every week.

2) Don't sleep around or do drugs.

3) Try to get married not long after college (#1 and #2 may cause this)

4) Be White

College educated women that follow this pattern have replacement fertility. The further you differentiate from this strategy, the fewer children you have.

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That Lyman Stone article was mid as hell lol

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>maybe he was unfamiliar with it

No, I have him blocked. Even if he was, he probably would not have cited it.

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I’m unfamiliar with the paper or with who you are. Cheers.

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So your article was wrong?

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No, I have now read the paper. It doesn’t seem to contradict any of the points I made. It does raise some other arguments (the ongoing concern many hereditarians have with African fertility, etc), but doesn’t refute anything I said. Though it did raise an interesting question and then proceeed to ignore a lot of very relevant data. May try to write a post this week on it.

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"Here we see that dysgenics is actually stronger in less intelligent countries. Thus, there is a kind of Matthew effect where those who already have less are losing it faster than those with more. And this doesn't take into account brain drain which causes the same effect."

The last countries on the refered table are usually multiracial.

I can say something about Brazil. Through the decades, basic education in Brazil have become widespread in lower classes, which is mostly black. Furthermore, there is an increase in the already large black population and mixed people in the country. On the other hand, whites have a lower fertility, like in developed countries. All of that, contribute to the decline of the nation IQ.

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If there is a selection for the fertility-drive among Europeans, maybe this trend will be reversed

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Fertility is already quite heritable.

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Indeed. If your parents didn’t have kids, chances are you won’t either. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the joke..)

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What matters more: total intelligence or average intelligence? While average intelligence is falling, total intelligence is probably increasing and will likely increase more with AI.

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Total intelligence cannot currently be quantified because we don't have ratio scales.

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But we can quantify the total number of people above a threshold of intelligence. Is the total number of people above 115 increasing? And above 130? If the answer is yes, than maybe the average trend is not that much of a problem

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Why is Korea such a shithole then?

Or even getting outside of communism, its not like South Korea is doing all that great at modernity.

IQ is great and all but its more than a numbers game. You need cultural norms and institutions that can channel high IQ into productive cooperation, otherwise it can just get squandered away on nonsense.

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Your "not a problem" scenario could only be true if the upper 5% of the population were to constitute a dictatorship that controls the rest of the population pretty damn tightly. In these kinds of discussions, it seems to me that many people have not had real world experience interacting with low IQ individuals, and thus they do not understand that most of the societal chaos stems from the dumb choices made by such poorly endowed folks.

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And it's not like high IQ dictatorships have a great track record. How is North Korea doing again?

Republics are better then dictatorships but they require a big fat bell curve of virtuous midwits and not too big of an underclass.

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You've reiterated my point because the proportion of midwits is obviously decreasing.

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Is there any correlation between women in low fertility/high IQ countries having children later in life?

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The solution is already visible today, but I don't know if there will be the political will. Nyborg has credibly modelled the disastrous impact of the MENA masses admitted to Europe on the human capital of European countries. The first obvious point is to reduce this drastically, by introducing a strict meritocratic immigration system (e.g. only accepting immigrants above the national average IQ). The second and most important intervention is to encourage young families to have children, by giving free housing to graduates who have children under 30, and tax exemption for parents after 3 children. Genetic tools already allow gene editing of eggs, sperm or selecting zygotes. This will require a comprehensive understanding of the genetic basis of cognitive abilities - where there is still work to be done. Using sperm-egg collection from men-women of extreme ability could also be used to guide artificial insemination. The ultimate solution could be to expand the use of the artificial womb, which could produce a large number of offspring of above-average parents.

In a population below 80 IQ, a public campaign could be used to persuade women to have above-average offspring by artificial insemination. There should be a large financial support per child, even a pension for three children.

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The effect of low iq immigration is reduced average intelligece, but this effect is very small compared to the effect it has on reduced fertility because of crime, housing prices, wages, urbanization etc

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> The genotypic IQ decline will ruin the economic and social infrastructure needed for quality education, welfare, democracy and civilization. [...] existing fertility differentials may eventually lead to Western submission or civil resistance.

Unless the rest of Nyborg's paper goes on to support these claims (doing which would make it a very long paper, and a sociology and political studies paper), they are out of scope for a paper about the existence of these phenomena. Perhaps not sackable, but not very competent.

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