Computers as IQ shredders

Instead of furthering human knowledge, many of our brightest are addicted to intellectual computer games

I have just spent the last few days programming. This took one of the days:

This is a screenshot of a working wallhack for classic Star Wars Battlefront II. I created it yesterday after getting carried away with reversing the game. It was a fun puzzle, an intellectual challenge, made more interesting by the fact that I couldn’t find any information about the internals of the game online due to its old age. It turns out that everything is stored in huge global arrays, instead of there being a pointer to a to a dynamically allocated address which points to a dynamically allocated list of pointers that each point to one dynamically allocated game entity.

Because of my search history from these last few days, I am getting what I can only describe as computersoy videos popping up on my Youtube feed. These videos feature totally obedient high IQ people doing complicated wholesome chungus 6,000,000 codesoy projects that make them feel very smart. And it’s clear that this is the kind of thing they do; and recently it’s what I’ve been doing.

This is very bad for humanity because instead of high IQ people collecting data about the natural world, or, if smart enough, modeling said data, many high IQ people are coding block games “from scratch” numerous times to prove how awesome their heckin computer skillz are. The programming matrix is a simulated world full of stimulating puzzles smart people capable of furthering human knowledge can easily get addicted to. Computers are a type II IQ shredder.

A type I IQ shredder was defined by Spandrell:

How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don't go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.

Type I IQ shredders shred intelligence genes. They are very dangerous for the long term because they decrease the overall intelligence of the next generation. Type II IQ shredders destroy intellectual output now by distracting high IQ people from real pursuits, or via other means. Tlon is a good example of a type II IQ shredder. If Tlon worship doesn’t effect high IQ reproduction, then it is only a type II IQ shredder, because it grinds actual intellectual output to a halt by distracting everyone intelligent. Likewise, if everyone went to San Francisco or Singapore to improve human knowledge, but they didn’t reproduce due to housing prices, density, liberal culture, etc, then San Francisco and Singapore would only be type I IQ shredders, because they adequately use the intelligence they are given, but deprive it from the next generation.

In reality, Singapore, San Francisco, et al. are both type I and type II IQ shredders, because not only do the people who go there suffer from reduced fertility — they also spend all day interacting with the intellectual Matrix, the Tlon that are computers.

We know intellectual pursuits by their fruits. Some computer pursuits are not IQ shredders. The whole process of getting computer tech to where it is now was not fruitless. It was an amazing feat of intellectual output. Most webshit, “hacking” the C++ compiler so you can save you game, and most programs and codesoy projects in general now are just distractions. We know this because their fruit is worthless distraction. A video game? How long did you spend making it? Video games are virtual drugs. You’re a drug dealer. Congratulations. A new webshit framework? Do we need that? A new memelang like Go or Rust or Kotlin? Do we need that? A new shitcoin? How long did you spend on that? How smart do you feel? You feel very smart and 1337 despite doing nothing of value? You’ve been had by the type II IQ shredder.