Are We Smart Enough for Eugenics?

The dysgenic feedback loop: can't do eugenics because we don't have eugenics

Why can’t we all be 120+ IQ, with low amount of cognitive bias (for example, against hereditarianism) and great health? All the way back in the 19th century, Galton and others asked this question. They tried to educate the public, and for a time something got moving, until it moved no more. Often the Nazis are blamed for this, but that makes little sense. German warmongers have nothing to do with public health and science intrinsically. Many Nazis were against smoking because they thought it was unhealthy, I guess the Nazi legacy of anti smoking means our modern anti smoking measures have to go? Clearly not. And so too does Hitler have nothing to do with any idea Francis Galton had.

I propose we can’t have eugenics because people are biased against it and aren’t smart enough to overcome that bias using evidence, because the evidence is too sophisticated. They aren’t smart enough, ironically, because the lack of eugenics means their average IQ is too low to get it. To see why I think this, let’s first step back and consider a smaller example: the epistemics surrounding mutational load.

I personally am 96% on ML theory being true as I’ve laid it out — I have a few reservations, maybe the actual effects are just a little too small and really it’s .5 or .25 IQ points per generation. Hard to rule that out right now. Here’s a chart summing up my Bayesian posterior for the effect of mutations on IQ per generation:

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But just because I have this posterior doesn’t mean everyone can honestly have this posterior too. Why would everyone be able to have this posterior, when mutational load theory looks like this?

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Not only does this kind of math ask for a certain IQ to understand, it’s also just unsustainably difficult to learn at any realistic IQ level. Plenty of people in my audience can do it — maybe some can’t, but a lot can. Of those who can, who has the time? This kind of math is extremely intrinsically rewarding if you care about truth and logic, but it comes with a cost.

It would be naive to think that the posterior accessible to a verbalist is the same as the one accessible to someone who can follow this math. For one we can intuit that the verbal posterior should have more variance — math is precise and therefore should increase logical certainty over words, which are vague and often confusing when used in technical subjects. But the mean should also be lower because less positive evidence is available at all — some evidence is locked off from actual grokking. If we start the prior at 0, then the verbal posterior should have greater spread and a mean closer to 0.

There is a pattern I have noticed in discourses. A great deal of scientific work is just to make the understanding of a topic easier, at least in policy relevant sciences. Take for instance the black-white IQ gap. The case was quite certain to Arthur Jensen in the 1970s, but check out the sophistication of his book. He asks the reader to follow variance component mathematics, the ACE model and so on. Compare that to the sophistication of The Bell Curve, written 20 years later. Herrnstein and Murray ask the reader to follow numerous scatterplots but not much else. The argumentation is data driven but largely verbal and intuitive, although it relies on a great deal of evidence. And finally 30 years after The Bell Curve — the holy grail is the Piffer 2019 chart with group IQ on the y axis and group gene score on the x axis. One can imagine the New York Times best seller on the airport bookshelf written about the story of how Scientists measured the Genes and found the Group IQ Genes that Shape Our Society. The information density of these things is usually something like 250 pages of words centered around literally a single academic article that itself is some basic social science data.

But is it not the case that in the pure sense the black white IQ gap question was settled 50 years ago by Jensen? Just because 99% of people couldn’t follow his book doesn’t mean the posterior for the amount of the gap caused by genes of those who could follow it wasn’t properly something like N(15,1). The research continued then only for the unlearned. It had to for anyone making policy to understand it.

And maybe this is why most social science methods are so simple. Why is there almost no math in anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology? If these disciplines are going to be in any way applied, they need to be kept simple for the laymen that rule us.

It is possible to do a physics-like science of people. There’s a lot of probability and statistics and genetics involved. But the fruit of this is nothing applied, because the possible applications (let’s do eugenics) still require social coordination, and no one can understand the writings.

Meanwhile, The Anxious Generation is epistemically exactly that airport book I described, and it’s massive and popular and has a lot of people talking about “banning phones”, even though there are serious flaws in its methodology. There have to be! The people can’t handle good methodology! Because of the weakness of verbal persuasion, the standard social science formula has to rely on cognitive bias as a basis, then throw on as much simple methodology as you can muster, and hopefully by the end a lot of people have a big fat posterior that’s just far enough from 0 to get them to agree to some policy that they’re biased in favor of to begin with.

It would clearly be better if everyone was a scientific expert, but this would require making everyone genius enough to achieve this in their spare time, in other words they would have to be naturally smarter than even current experts, who do their expertise full time. What is the way to do this? There is only one obvious solution. But it may not be possible because advocating for it demands people be smarter and less biased than they currently are — a paradox of sorts. We would like to make people more rational, but they will only agree if they are rational enough. And they aren’t. So therefore we may be doomed to this state of affairs forever.

The relative rise and fall of the eugenics movement then is related to dysgenics and not Hitler. People over time because dumber and more biased, and so eugenics fell out of favor before it every really began. That leaves us today with eugenics being broadly impossible. This idea stands in stark contrast to how most people think about the discourse: everyone is smart, unbiased, any good idea is possible, all knowledge eventually disseminates.

On the contrary, we are strongly limited by our mean IQ and its interaction with instinctive biases. Thus, many good ideas are impossible to implement, and a lot of knowledge never disseminates because the IQ threshold of it is too high.

Does this not make the whole discourse a farce? It is clearly a farce, a circus mocking truth. Just go on X and take a look. Even if your favorite based influencer is a genius, I promise you their audience isn’t. The ideas of the day are limited by nature’s regime of dysgenics. Consider DOGE. Okay, we cut all this science funding because there are libtards in academia. Great, what about the credentialing system in general? What about social security? What about eugenics payments to couples with good traits? DOGE, Trump, Republicans, everything, it might be an improvement on 5 years ago but it’s still a performance constrained by the forces of biology, which we are in no way free from and which are presently aimed against flourishing and happiness.