Isn’t polygenic embryo selection already online and affordable? Panmixia plus polygenic embryo selection is fine, even if it only adds a few points per generation.
I strongly doubt we’ll ever get to Panmixia. Will Amish, Mennonites, and Haredim mix with other Americans? If anything I think embryo selection could result in more genetic differentiation.
There aren't that many unmixed people left in Latin America, so this force does not seem to be sufficiently strong. It's not like there are ethnicity equivalents of Amish that allow 0 outbreeding. Even Jews allow for converts to join and that's also true for the Amish.
Latin America has seen genetic mixing for 500 years to a greater or lesser extent. For sure social pressure toward marital endogamy exists but far less than a United States never mind an India.
Despite all this mixing there remains lots of within- and between-group variance in cognitive ability.
You haven't provided any arguments explaining why there wouldn't be assortative mating in equilibrium. See Clark on how such equilibria have been extremely stable throughout history.
Assortative mating like in Greg Clark's work does not result in permanence. That's the whole point of his estimates, namely, that one can estimate heritability and assortative mating indirectly and these values are not 1.0 anywhere.
The point of his estimates are that the current equilibrium of heritability and assortative mating patterns has been sustained for the last 400 years. Yes, eventually any *individual* lineage will regress to the mean. But that doesn’t mean the total variance disappears, because reassortment continues to occur.
“In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. This world will have a dramatically lower variation in intelligence. There will be very few people above 130 IQ.”
This is fallacious. Current geographical boundaries preventing admixture are being broken down but social structures will remain and even adjust.
High-IQ individuals and populations will always find ways to practice marital endogamy. I grew up alongside a low-IQ ethnic group and believe me there was more chance of me procreating with someone from two continents away.
If you think this is impossible I urge you to learn about Hindu marriage custom and practice.
Religiousness is in free fall and Indians already outbreed quite frequently in the west.
Latin America already shows you how long it can take to get to panmixia (~500 years of mixing to get to the present admixture and clustering) and also how inevitable it is once people live together.
Panmixia doesn’t even exist within countries never mind a whole continent. See Colombia where three very discrete populations (Indigenous, Africans, Europeans) have been mixing for 500 years:
It's like you don't read the post at all. What did I say about it taking a while, and we are interested in the limit here where equilibrium is reached?
Panmixia could occur under social conditions which oblige humans for multiple generations to mate with people identified as their phenotypic and genotypic opposites. I doubt this is likely.
Otherwise innovation indeed depends on the number of people in the right tail of the cognitive distribution. This is a function of the distribution itself but also population. Tyler Cowen has made the reasonable point that innovation is more likely in a world of ten billion people than one billion.
Our author speaks of the “grand leveling” as taking 100’s of years. Given our past history of only a couple of hundred years to get to our present predicament, are you so sure? Especially wrt to Whites who seem not to practice ethnocentrism as compared to most other races. I’m told that the greatest threat to Jews for example is out marriage. Can there be a more clannish grouping of people?
In the last two centuries the Amish population of the US has grown about 100x to its present population of 400k. With very little conversion or marrying in.
I have no doubt something like this will happen again in a different shape and form.
Bryan Caplan says his idea of open borders is modelled on the UAE where foreign workers are treated as indentured servants with no pathway to citizenship. Yet he seemingly makes no distinction between this kind of immigration and the immigration from Somalia to Sweden.
Unviable in democracies (recall 'guest' worker programs in Germany etc.), and probably will fail in UAE eventually too (how many countries have this system? almost none).
But this is the nub: Caplan effectively advocates for global _capitalism_, but you are saying that you don't believe in this, you think that advocating for that is merely letting oneself be instrumentalised by the global socialists and therefore increasing the likelihood of what you describe, which is global socialism, effectively.
Rather Straussian view, which logically extends to saying that one should perhaps deny IQ differences so as to argue for increasing the focus on "development in situ" and against "brain drain" ...
Bryan Caplan is first rate at casuistry and putting words in other,s mouth . His mibating with the GREAT ALEXANDER is famous .
The guy is a moral realist which is evolutionary not possible ( see cofnas ) . He has never ever sketched out the politics of 10 trillion bill on the side philosophy of immigration. Even if he has alluded to it sometimes , it is mostly fantastical delusion of no political rights and zero tribalism among humans .
Caplan has also argued that that people must enjoy life because they could easily jump off a tall building and die painlessly if that was not the case. Another idea of his was that that crime cannot be so bad, since crime victims could just move elsewhere if it bothered them so much.
They generally imply that it is irrational to believe it since humans are evolved to believe in morality, even if it is false, because belief is adaptive (this assumption could be checked in some survey data, it's probably true, but I don't know a study).
Another end stage of global capitalism is when our remaining non-monetary relationships have been brought into the money economy, including partners (with AI boyfriends/girlfriends) and the mother-baby relationship (with artificial wombs and robot nannies).
Could we substitute "income" for "hours spent working" in the fertility chart? Maybe it is the lack of leisure time in the middle class that kills fertility?
Here's an interesting titbit- I've been doing a little of side research into political leanings, ingroup and openness to new experiences. It turns out that political leanings are heritable (from twin research with heritability of around 40%). Amygdala size is the crucial factor- although environmental and epigenetic conditions can also influence amygdala size, there is a strong genetic component, which necessarily means higher ingroup. It's not that this portion of the population won't intermarry, it just means it will be rare, as the person from a different ancestor group they are marrying would have to have a very similar culture and/or hold very similar values.
The other issue is that such large amygdala portions of the population, who have high ingroups also tend to be more religious, which in turn means more kids. The low amygdala size cosmopolitans will slowly reduce their representation within the population, through having fewer kids. If current conditions prevail, in 200 years, the world will be significantly more socially conservative.
Because it was a social liberalism still grounded in community- ingroup. As I stated, environmental and epigenetic conditions during childhood can quite significantly influence amygdala size. It's why we don't see WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic) phenomenon anywhere near as much outside the West, and where it is found it is to be found in the Developed Non-Western nations. Basically, if one were looking to find specific demographics within populations where the emergence of environmentally caused smaller amygdalas the two things one would look for would be negative population growth and high rates of female participation in the workforce. It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a good screening process for where to look and measure.
For the most part, before the 1920s life was much, much harder everywhere. The only groups which wouldn't have had the environmental side of larger amygdalas would have been the middle classes (by which I mean the British definition) and the aristocracy. Within the aristocracy, this likely caused the cultural liberals inculcated with a sense of noblesse oblige- the Bertrand Russell's and FDR's. In the middle classes and particularly upper middle classes this created a resentful intelligentsia, although it did also spur the formation of a new class of creative intent upon social critiques- Oscar Wild being a prime example. But for those with an innate genetic proclivity towards lower amygdala size, but from humbler social origins and with the environmental factors which mitigated this tendency, it likely produced the charismatic social reformers, and was likely particularly common amongst Labour movement leadership. These men were often deeply rooted in their communities, not possessing the lack of homophily and oikophobia of the modern Left- to paraphrase Oscar Wilde this mixture produced men who were standing in the gutter, but looking up at the stars.
It's two effects- not one, and because of the reduction of the environmental effect in large segments of Western population, we can imagine a line of demarcation at 1945. It's why Orwell reversed the numbers of his book 1984. Through his wartime work at the Ministry of Propaganda, he believed the era of 1984 had begun as early as 1948. Orwell was an interesting case. He was lower middle class. He was probably something of a hybrid between the charismatic labour inclination and resentful middle class. He supported socialism, but recognised its innate tendency towards totalitarianism. He bitterly complained that the Left was often motivated more by a hatred of the wealthy, than a desire to improve the condition of the poor, for whom they often had disdain.
I think you overestimate the degree of immigration that will happen in an open borders world. Greece's economy was in the toilet after 2008 and unemployment was above 25 percent but you didn't exactly see Greece completely depopulate in last ten years
This thesis depends on IQ being 100% genetic. Nobody who has looked into it actually believes this - even Douglas Murray thinks it's a 50-50 genetic environmental split IIRC.
In practice, people moving from poor countries to rich countries would see their IQ rise due to better nutrition and sanitation and medicine.
> Most ethnics marry within their group, but not all of them, and all of them engage in some level of outbreeding. If we wait long enough (100s of years), there will be genetic panmixia. In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. This world will have a dramatically lower variation in intelligence. There will be very few people above 130 IQ.
Um, there's still assortative mating and natural selection.
An "open borders libertarian" does NOT want rich countries to be welfare states. Without welfare, immigrants from poor countries will relocate only to the extent they can be more productive. Most could expect to suffer in continued poverty wherever they migrate, so they will just stay home.
Migration today is nothing like migration to the New World a century or three ago. People used to come to America to work hard and make a better life. Some still do, but most are here just for the handouts. That is not what libertarians want.
This is true, but begs the question. Rich countries *are* welfare States. Few I know of effectively shut down welfare to migrants. This is the mistake made by Libertarians. They make up a fantasy/ideal world and then posit their models on that. Also, it is well known that migrants are different people than the bulk of their country’s population. What happens when these outlier immigrants bear children who tend to mimic their home country’s mean in IQ as well as other traits? This problem is address by Garret Jones in his book, “The Culture Transplant…”
Yes, obviously most rich countries are welfare states. My point is that welfare is progressive, not libertarian. Libertarians should not be blamed for welfare, as Kirkegaard kind of suggests they should.
Kirkegaard's article purports to show that open borders lead inevitably to an unfortunate consequence for human civilization. But in fact, open borders is not the main culprit - welfare is.
Last I checked the OECD is doing just fine. It's humming along with GDP and living standard and technology progressing bit by bit. As long as you don't fuck that up (say by instituting an Open Borders experiment) life will just keep getting better and better and it's already pretty good.
Whatever problems you have with the modern OECD, I can't see Open Borders making them any better.
The obvious play is to not break what works. The best hope for the third world is that at some point the first world figures out a way to fix there genetics. The longer the first world stays the first world the more opportunity we have for that to happen one day.
Right, but you are talking about a hypothetical Open Borders libertarian world. If we are talking about Open Borders plus democracy, not much point worrying about panmixia, since it will probably just collapse into outright chaos in few decades.
The point I make is that Libertarians postulate an open borders concept of everyone selling their labor at market value in a competitive world, but the welfare state negates that assumption since such labor is subsidized by the very people they compete against. The market is neither fair nor balanced, yet Libertarians keep touting such while ignoring observable reality. In that they deserve blame. As to Begging the Question, I could have been clearer but it seems Libertarians are assuming an essential aspect of their argument wrt open borders.
You seem to believe that all libertarians are ignorant, foolish people who fail to understand that welfare exists and makes open borders impractical. No doubt some libertarians are idiots, but most are not. I would agree that a libertarian who advocates for open borders in a welfare state is advocating for a dangerous policy. But the progressives who advocate for both open borders AND welfare are much worse.
The Libertarian Party in America is generally useless. I see you spell libertarian here with a capital "L", so perhaps you are referring to the Party, rather than libertarians in general?
The party has certain formal beliefs and organized think tanks. The common libertarian is much more reasonable/sensible. You think I don’t know? I was a card carrying libertarian for 20 years and in this State performed certain functions on behalf of the party, like audit election results with Rep’s and Dem’s.
You are absolutely correct that welfare is the problem, not immigration. It is fair to note, however, that until the welfare state is ended mass open immigration is a very bad idea. I do feel Caplan is a little slippery on this one, using data from a time when eg illegals getting benefits was much less common to make arguments about what will happen in the future. Not to mention what mass immigration from cultures where redistribution and welfare is normal and expected will do to the culture of their new country.
Yes, I agree. Large-scale immigration is very destructive in our foolish welfare state. It's bad enough paying our own people to be lazy and incompetent. Paying foreigners to be lazy and incompetent is even worse.
Wouldn’t assortative mating for education and social class maintain an intellectual elite? Moreover, with AGI and ASI in the near future(max 10-15 years), human cognition for tech progress and decision making will increasingly be irrelevant. Even excluding genetic interventions for higher IQ, the midwit PMC would be able to govern with AI giving instructions and being decision makers.
This is already how it works in Mexico. The elite gets more Euro the higher their level, and stays that way by the elite men of all races of Mexico preferring the most European-looking women.
I also don't see any reason to believe improved A.I. won't just do the same thing every technological breakthrough does and disproportionately reward smart people. Smart people come up with better questions and tasks to ask of A.I, are better at understanding and interpreting what A.I. gives them, and are more likely to spot when and how the A.I. goes wrong. That's not gonna change as the A.I.s get smarter.
"Moreover, with AGI and ASI in the near future(max 10-15 years), human cognition for tech progress and decision making will increasingly be irrelevant."
AI is vastly overrated. It will never replace high-cognitive human ability or critical thinking.
My greatest fear, and I use AI daily as a tool, is that it will elevate more and more incompetents into positions of authority/control. Look at the incompetents/mediocrities we have recently ferreted out that have made nationwide news by rising to high positions fraudulently “all on their own”. Now imagine they have AI access to create even a greater illusion of competence/knowledge.
Just other day I fed into AI (ChatGPT) symptoms (and some hypotheticals) of my current medical condition and out popped diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and prognosis—all without confirmation that the information fed to it was correct. Indeed, the output seemed even more considered and informative than my 5 minute chat with my physician the week before. To the extent that my “chat” with GPT expanded my discussion items scheduled in followup with physician tomorrow, it seems all for the best. To the extent I might decide to save a few dollars and cancel the appointment, seems very dangerous.
"My greatest fear, and I use AI daily as a tool, is that it will elevate more and more incompetents into positions of authority/control. Look at the incompetents/mediocrities we have recently ferreted out that have made nationwide news by rising to high positions fraudulently “all on their own”."
That is not a fear of mine. Those corrupt people of no integrity were allowed to do those things through the insouciance of the populace. The cure is vigilance.
By your logic, the incompetence of these individuals will be tempered by their ability to use AI. Therefore, they will be less likely to make very stupid decisions.
One rises to the level of their incompetency as the “Peter Principle” dictates. The rise stops when the incompetency is revealed through “error”. I maintain that such error will be magnified in ill effect at higher levels of authority, which AI may well help them to achieve.
So far AI—and I’m *no* expert—seems only as good as to the data that’s fed into it. As mentioned, folks on the far right side of the Bell curve are needed to expand and extent such knowledge. More can be learned of this potential problem in Dutton’s, “The Genius Famine”.
"So far AI—and I’m *no* expert—seems only as good as to the data that’s fed into it."
Exactly so. AI is a computer program with advanced, complex algorithms that do what humans tell it to do.
"As mentioned, folks on the far right side of the Bell curve are needed to expand and extent such knowledge."
Again, excellent point. AI is an excellent tool to help mankind gain knowledge. It can sort, analyze, and utilize vast amounts of data faster than humans.
So are we. But we can extrapolate out of range of our training data, or at least some of us can.
I think that human brains are sth like GPT++ 9, perhaps very smart humans are more like 11. I used ++ as crude shorthand to indicate that there is a lot of very sophisticated scaffolding around the "transformer" element of our brains.
LLMs are already capable of some originality. With sufficient increases in memory, the required tools for reference/authoritative memory and for depth of field, as well as various algorithmic improvements, they will catch up, and then they will overtake us.
What comes next will be wild, I am almost certain I will live to see it, I hope I survive it.
"LLMs are already capable of some originality. With sufficient increases in memory, the required tools for reference/authoritative memory and for depth of field, as well as various algorithmic improvements, they will catch up, and then they will overtake us."
I hope you are right! There is some evidence that human brains, in addition to the chemical communication which is non-binary, use quantum effects. I am relatively confident that we can develop algorithms for whatever the chemistry is doing, but maybe human level (let alone human+) will require large-scale quantum computing.
OTOH maybe the chemistry and quantic parts are only relevant to decision-making/"free will". In the case we would absolutely get smarter than human (at some tasks) slaves... which only transfers the risk to their masters, which is almost worst 😭
"In the case we would absolutely get smarter than human (at some tasks) slaves... which only transfers the risk to their masters, which is almost worst."
I take it you mean 'smarter than current humans'. I place my belief in human genetic enhancement as a means of increasing human intelligence and other positive traits. I feel we are on the cusp of transitioning from natural selection as a means of human evolution to a self-induced human ascendance. In other words, we have evolved to the point where we can begin to control our evolutional destiny.
"Since most innovation depends on the right tail of intelligence, this is a very bad outcome for human civilization."
Indeed it is. When something is diluted, it is less of what it was. This also applies to populations.
That sounds like a very unlikely outcome. People choose a partner with similar intelligence, not a random partner.
This only makes panmixia slower, and in the limit, that's the same result.
Isn’t polygenic embryo selection already online and affordable? Panmixia plus polygenic embryo selection is fine, even if it only adds a few points per generation.
I strongly doubt we’ll ever get to Panmixia. Will Amish, Mennonites, and Haredim mix with other Americans? If anything I think embryo selection could result in more genetic differentiation.
Assumed away in this scenario along with AI deus ex machina and some other wildcards.
If a country becomes like Africa, are pacifistic religious groups going to be effectively protected from rape?
Won’t genetic drift still occur even in a scenario of rapidly increased mixing?
What I took from Reich’s “Who we are and how we got here” is that genetic drift is powerful over long periods.
But how much slower? Do the Maths. If it's a 1,000 years then the AI deus ex machina is not so outlandish.
There aren't that many unmixed people left in Latin America, so this force does not seem to be sufficiently strong. It's not like there are ethnicity equivalents of Amish that allow 0 outbreeding. Even Jews allow for converts to join and that's also true for the Amish.
Latin America has seen genetic mixing for 500 years to a greater or lesser extent. For sure social pressure toward marital endogamy exists but far less than a United States never mind an India.
Despite all this mixing there remains lots of within- and between-group variance in cognitive ability.
Same thing I said in the post.
You haven't provided any arguments explaining why there wouldn't be assortative mating in equilibrium. See Clark on how such equilibria have been extremely stable throughout history.
Assortative mating like in Greg Clark's work does not result in permanence. That's the whole point of his estimates, namely, that one can estimate heritability and assortative mating indirectly and these values are not 1.0 anywhere.
The point of his estimates are that the current equilibrium of heritability and assortative mating patterns has been sustained for the last 400 years. Yes, eventually any *individual* lineage will regress to the mean. But that doesn’t mean the total variance disappears, because reassortment continues to occur.
Precisely. We all know bright people from poor backgrounds who married up and out of their social status.
And of course the reverse.
“In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. This world will have a dramatically lower variation in intelligence. There will be very few people above 130 IQ.”
This is fallacious. Current geographical boundaries preventing admixture are being broken down but social structures will remain and even adjust.
High-IQ individuals and populations will always find ways to practice marital endogamy. I grew up alongside a low-IQ ethnic group and believe me there was more chance of me procreating with someone from two continents away.
If you think this is impossible I urge you to learn about Hindu marriage custom and practice.
Religiousness is in free fall and Indians already outbreed quite frequently in the west.
Latin America already shows you how long it can take to get to panmixia (~500 years of mixing to get to the present admixture and clustering) and also how inevitable it is once people live together.
Panmixia doesn’t even exist within countries never mind a whole continent. See Colombia where three very discrete populations (Indigenous, Africans, Europeans) have been mixing for 500 years:
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size%3Dmedium%26id%3D10.1371/journal.pone.0164414.g002&tbnid=yziJ-okzdOa-FM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id%3D10.1371/journal.pone.0164414&docid=Yn5Ls2kMrAPtwM&w=600&h=384&hl=en_GB&source=sh/x/im/m5/5&kgs=246b8a83e78bfd08
I am comfortable in the belief that humans in 500 years will still display plenty of genotypic and phenotypic diversity.
It's like you don't read the post at all. What did I say about it taking a while, and we are interested in the limit here where equilibrium is reached?
Panmixia could occur under social conditions which oblige humans for multiple generations to mate with people identified as their phenotypic and genotypic opposites. I doubt this is likely.
Otherwise innovation indeed depends on the number of people in the right tail of the cognitive distribution. This is a function of the distribution itself but also population. Tyler Cowen has made the reasonable point that innovation is more likely in a world of ten billion people than one billion.
Our author speaks of the “grand leveling” as taking 100’s of years. Given our past history of only a couple of hundred years to get to our present predicament, are you so sure? Especially wrt to Whites who seem not to practice ethnocentrism as compared to most other races. I’m told that the greatest threat to Jews for example is out marriage. Can there be a more clannish grouping of people?
In the last two centuries the Amish population of the US has grown about 100x to its present population of 400k. With very little conversion or marrying in.
I have no doubt something like this will happen again in a different shape and form.
To add this is about 10x natural population growth in the US over the same period.
We all know what Einstein said about compound interest.
Bryan Caplan says his idea of open borders is modelled on the UAE where foreign workers are treated as indentured servants with no pathway to citizenship. Yet he seemingly makes no distinction between this kind of immigration and the immigration from Somalia to Sweden.
Unviable in democracies (recall 'guest' worker programs in Germany etc.), and probably will fail in UAE eventually too (how many countries have this system? almost none).
But this is the nub: Caplan effectively advocates for global _capitalism_, but you are saying that you don't believe in this, you think that advocating for that is merely letting oneself be instrumentalised by the global socialists and therefore increasing the likelihood of what you describe, which is global socialism, effectively.
Rather Straussian view, which logically extends to saying that one should perhaps deny IQ differences so as to argue for increasing the focus on "development in situ" and against "brain drain" ...
Bryan Caplan is first rate at casuistry and putting words in other,s mouth . His mibating with the GREAT ALEXANDER is famous .
The guy is a moral realist which is evolutionary not possible ( see cofnas ) . He has never ever sketched out the politics of 10 trillion bill on the side philosophy of immigration. Even if he has alluded to it sometimes , it is mostly fantastical delusion of no political rights and zero tribalism among humans .
Caplan has also argued that that people must enjoy life because they could easily jump off a tall building and die painlessly if that was not the case. Another idea of his was that that crime cannot be so bad, since crime victims could just move elsewhere if it bothered them so much.
Little interest in human nature.
What are the problems with those two arguments?
Evolutionary debunking accounts are *arguments* against moral realism. They don't make moral realism impossible.
They generally imply that it is irrational to believe it since humans are evolved to believe in morality, even if it is false, because belief is adaptive (this assumption could be checked in some survey data, it's probably true, but I don't know a study).
This doesn’t make moral realism impossible.
Another end stage of global capitalism is when our remaining non-monetary relationships have been brought into the money economy, including partners (with AI boyfriends/girlfriends) and the mother-baby relationship (with artificial wombs and robot nannies).
Could we substitute "income" for "hours spent working" in the fertility chart? Maybe it is the lack of leisure time in the middle class that kills fertility?
Here's an interesting titbit- I've been doing a little of side research into political leanings, ingroup and openness to new experiences. It turns out that political leanings are heritable (from twin research with heritability of around 40%). Amygdala size is the crucial factor- although environmental and epigenetic conditions can also influence amygdala size, there is a strong genetic component, which necessarily means higher ingroup. It's not that this portion of the population won't intermarry, it just means it will be rare, as the person from a different ancestor group they are marrying would have to have a very similar culture and/or hold very similar values.
The other issue is that such large amygdala portions of the population, who have high ingroups also tend to be more religious, which in turn means more kids. The low amygdala size cosmopolitans will slowly reduce their representation within the population, through having fewer kids. If current conditions prevail, in 200 years, the world will be significantly more socially conservative.
Interesting! But why did the last 200 years see social liberalism flourish?
Because it was a social liberalism still grounded in community- ingroup. As I stated, environmental and epigenetic conditions during childhood can quite significantly influence amygdala size. It's why we don't see WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic) phenomenon anywhere near as much outside the West, and where it is found it is to be found in the Developed Non-Western nations. Basically, if one were looking to find specific demographics within populations where the emergence of environmentally caused smaller amygdalas the two things one would look for would be negative population growth and high rates of female participation in the workforce. It wouldn't be proof, but it would be a good screening process for where to look and measure.
For the most part, before the 1920s life was much, much harder everywhere. The only groups which wouldn't have had the environmental side of larger amygdalas would have been the middle classes (by which I mean the British definition) and the aristocracy. Within the aristocracy, this likely caused the cultural liberals inculcated with a sense of noblesse oblige- the Bertrand Russell's and FDR's. In the middle classes and particularly upper middle classes this created a resentful intelligentsia, although it did also spur the formation of a new class of creative intent upon social critiques- Oscar Wild being a prime example. But for those with an innate genetic proclivity towards lower amygdala size, but from humbler social origins and with the environmental factors which mitigated this tendency, it likely produced the charismatic social reformers, and was likely particularly common amongst Labour movement leadership. These men were often deeply rooted in their communities, not possessing the lack of homophily and oikophobia of the modern Left- to paraphrase Oscar Wilde this mixture produced men who were standing in the gutter, but looking up at the stars.
It's two effects- not one, and because of the reduction of the environmental effect in large segments of Western population, we can imagine a line of demarcation at 1945. It's why Orwell reversed the numbers of his book 1984. Through his wartime work at the Ministry of Propaganda, he believed the era of 1984 had begun as early as 1948. Orwell was an interesting case. He was lower middle class. He was probably something of a hybrid between the charismatic labour inclination and resentful middle class. He supported socialism, but recognised its innate tendency towards totalitarianism. He bitterly complained that the Left was often motivated more by a hatred of the wealthy, than a desire to improve the condition of the poor, for whom they often had disdain.
Who will invent the vaccines then?
I think you overestimate the degree of immigration that will happen in an open borders world. Greece's economy was in the toilet after 2008 and unemployment was above 25 percent but you didn't exactly see Greece completely depopulate in last ten years
This thesis depends on IQ being 100% genetic. Nobody who has looked into it actually believes this - even Douglas Murray thinks it's a 50-50 genetic environmental split IIRC.
In practice, people moving from poor countries to rich countries would see their IQ rise due to better nutrition and sanitation and medicine.
Ok so basically the whole world will become Brazil, or even worse, South Africa.
> Most ethnics marry within their group, but not all of them, and all of them engage in some level of outbreeding. If we wait long enough (100s of years), there will be genetic panmixia. In that world, there will be no purebred ethnics left, and no high or low intelligence genetic clusters as we see now. This world will have a dramatically lower variation in intelligence. There will be very few people above 130 IQ.
Um, there's still assortative mating and natural selection.
There is a big hole in this argument.
An "open borders libertarian" does NOT want rich countries to be welfare states. Without welfare, immigrants from poor countries will relocate only to the extent they can be more productive. Most could expect to suffer in continued poverty wherever they migrate, so they will just stay home.
Migration today is nothing like migration to the New World a century or three ago. People used to come to America to work hard and make a better life. Some still do, but most are here just for the handouts. That is not what libertarians want.
Voters like welfare states, and this is also true for migrants to the rich countries who vote even more for them.
This is true, but begs the question. Rich countries *are* welfare States. Few I know of effectively shut down welfare to migrants. This is the mistake made by Libertarians. They make up a fantasy/ideal world and then posit their models on that. Also, it is well known that migrants are different people than the bulk of their country’s population. What happens when these outlier immigrants bear children who tend to mimic their home country’s mean in IQ as well as other traits? This problem is address by Garret Jones in his book, “The Culture Transplant…”
That is not what "begging the question" means.
Yes, obviously most rich countries are welfare states. My point is that welfare is progressive, not libertarian. Libertarians should not be blamed for welfare, as Kirkegaard kind of suggests they should.
Kirkegaard's article purports to show that open borders lead inevitably to an unfortunate consequence for human civilization. But in fact, open borders is not the main culprit - welfare is.
Welfare states are unavoidable in democracies, and democracy is unavoidable too.
You may be right on both counts.
In which case we are doomed regardless, and open borders don't matter much. They just accelerate the decay a bit.
"Doomed"?
Last I checked the OECD is doing just fine. It's humming along with GDP and living standard and technology progressing bit by bit. As long as you don't fuck that up (say by instituting an Open Borders experiment) life will just keep getting better and better and it's already pretty good.
Whatever problems you have with the modern OECD, I can't see Open Borders making them any better.
The obvious play is to not break what works. The best hope for the third world is that at some point the first world figures out a way to fix there genetics. The longer the first world stays the first world the more opportunity we have for that to happen one day.
Right, but you are talking about a hypothetical Open Borders libertarian world. If we are talking about Open Borders plus democracy, not much point worrying about panmixia, since it will probably just collapse into outright chaos in few decades.
The point I make is that Libertarians postulate an open borders concept of everyone selling their labor at market value in a competitive world, but the welfare state negates that assumption since such labor is subsidized by the very people they compete against. The market is neither fair nor balanced, yet Libertarians keep touting such while ignoring observable reality. In that they deserve blame. As to Begging the Question, I could have been clearer but it seems Libertarians are assuming an essential aspect of their argument wrt open borders.
You seem to believe that all libertarians are ignorant, foolish people who fail to understand that welfare exists and makes open borders impractical. No doubt some libertarians are idiots, but most are not. I would agree that a libertarian who advocates for open borders in a welfare state is advocating for a dangerous policy. But the progressives who advocate for both open borders AND welfare are much worse.
The Libertarian Party in America is generally useless. I see you spell libertarian here with a capital "L", so perhaps you are referring to the Party, rather than libertarians in general?
The party has certain formal beliefs and organized think tanks. The common libertarian is much more reasonable/sensible. You think I don’t know? I was a card carrying libertarian for 20 years and in this State performed certain functions on behalf of the party, like audit election results with Rep’s and Dem’s.
If libertarians advocate importing voters that support the welfare state, they can be blamed for the welfare state.
Sure. But the vast majority of people advocating the import of foreigners are not libertarians. They are Democrats and other leftists.
You are absolutely correct that welfare is the problem, not immigration. It is fair to note, however, that until the welfare state is ended mass open immigration is a very bad idea. I do feel Caplan is a little slippery on this one, using data from a time when eg illegals getting benefits was much less common to make arguments about what will happen in the future. Not to mention what mass immigration from cultures where redistribution and welfare is normal and expected will do to the culture of their new country.
Yes, I agree. Large-scale immigration is very destructive in our foolish welfare state. It's bad enough paying our own people to be lazy and incompetent. Paying foreigners to be lazy and incompetent is even worse.
Wouldn’t assortative mating for education and social class maintain an intellectual elite? Moreover, with AGI and ASI in the near future(max 10-15 years), human cognition for tech progress and decision making will increasingly be irrelevant. Even excluding genetic interventions for higher IQ, the midwit PMC would be able to govern with AI giving instructions and being decision makers.
This is already how it works in Mexico. The elite gets more Euro the higher their level, and stays that way by the elite men of all races of Mexico preferring the most European-looking women.
I also don't see any reason to believe improved A.I. won't just do the same thing every technological breakthrough does and disproportionately reward smart people. Smart people come up with better questions and tasks to ask of A.I, are better at understanding and interpreting what A.I. gives them, and are more likely to spot when and how the A.I. goes wrong. That's not gonna change as the A.I.s get smarter.
Nothing will replace humans with high cognitive ability...except humans with higher cognitive ability, most likely through genetic enhancement.
"Moreover, with AGI and ASI in the near future(max 10-15 years), human cognition for tech progress and decision making will increasingly be irrelevant."
AI is vastly overrated. It will never replace high-cognitive human ability or critical thinking.
My greatest fear, and I use AI daily as a tool, is that it will elevate more and more incompetents into positions of authority/control. Look at the incompetents/mediocrities we have recently ferreted out that have made nationwide news by rising to high positions fraudulently “all on their own”. Now imagine they have AI access to create even a greater illusion of competence/knowledge.
Just other day I fed into AI (ChatGPT) symptoms (and some hypotheticals) of my current medical condition and out popped diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and prognosis—all without confirmation that the information fed to it was correct. Indeed, the output seemed even more considered and informative than my 5 minute chat with my physician the week before. To the extent that my “chat” with GPT expanded my discussion items scheduled in followup with physician tomorrow, it seems all for the best. To the extent I might decide to save a few dollars and cancel the appointment, seems very dangerous.
"My greatest fear, and I use AI daily as a tool, is that it will elevate more and more incompetents into positions of authority/control. Look at the incompetents/mediocrities we have recently ferreted out that have made nationwide news by rising to high positions fraudulently “all on their own”."
That is not a fear of mine. Those corrupt people of no integrity were allowed to do those things through the insouciance of the populace. The cure is vigilance.
By your logic, the incompetence of these individuals will be tempered by their ability to use AI. Therefore, they will be less likely to make very stupid decisions.
One rises to the level of their incompetency as the “Peter Principle” dictates. The rise stops when the incompetency is revealed through “error”. I maintain that such error will be magnified in ill effect at higher levels of authority, which AI may well help them to achieve.
So far AI—and I’m *no* expert—seems only as good as to the data that’s fed into it. As mentioned, folks on the far right side of the Bell curve are needed to expand and extent such knowledge. More can be learned of this potential problem in Dutton’s, “The Genius Famine”.
"So far AI—and I’m *no* expert—seems only as good as to the data that’s fed into it."
Exactly so. AI is a computer program with advanced, complex algorithms that do what humans tell it to do.
"As mentioned, folks on the far right side of the Bell curve are needed to expand and extent such knowledge."
Again, excellent point. AI is an excellent tool to help mankind gain knowledge. It can sort, analyze, and utilize vast amounts of data faster than humans.
So are we. But we can extrapolate out of range of our training data, or at least some of us can.
I think that human brains are sth like GPT++ 9, perhaps very smart humans are more like 11. I used ++ as crude shorthand to indicate that there is a lot of very sophisticated scaffolding around the "transformer" element of our brains.
LLMs are already capable of some originality. With sufficient increases in memory, the required tools for reference/authoritative memory and for depth of field, as well as various algorithmic improvements, they will catch up, and then they will overtake us.
What comes next will be wild, I am almost certain I will live to see it, I hope I survive it.
"LLMs are already capable of some originality. With sufficient increases in memory, the required tools for reference/authoritative memory and for depth of field, as well as various algorithmic improvements, they will catch up, and then they will overtake us."
I don't see that happening.
I hope you are right! There is some evidence that human brains, in addition to the chemical communication which is non-binary, use quantum effects. I am relatively confident that we can develop algorithms for whatever the chemistry is doing, but maybe human level (let alone human+) will require large-scale quantum computing.
OTOH maybe the chemistry and quantic parts are only relevant to decision-making/"free will". In the case we would absolutely get smarter than human (at some tasks) slaves... which only transfers the risk to their masters, which is almost worst 😭
"In the case we would absolutely get smarter than human (at some tasks) slaves... which only transfers the risk to their masters, which is almost worst."
I take it you mean 'smarter than current humans'. I place my belief in human genetic enhancement as a means of increasing human intelligence and other positive traits. I feel we are on the cusp of transitioning from natural selection as a means of human evolution to a self-induced human ascendance. In other words, we have evolved to the point where we can begin to control our evolutional destiny.