A good one is the Minnesota Trans-racial Adoption Study. Bit it's not hard to find more. It was a very popular research topic a few decades ago.
> honestly, just think about it a little longer
It's arrogant of you to assume that more thinking will lead to your thinking. It's possible that I did think of your idea and dismissed it as wrong, or that you and cogman10 have different ideas without realizing it. So you should say what you mean if you want to communicate that.
I did think about it enough to realize that all non-human life collectively has more genetic diversity than humans, yet every single other species has less intelligence. So more diversity doesn't necessarily mean equal intelligence.
After reading the abstract I'm not sure what they are trying to prove. None of their examples are relevant to "spontaneous" emergence of hierarchy, they are all somehow tied to environmental or economic factors.
Hierarchy is definitely useful in some cases but has interesting tradeoffs. In emergency conditions it's very useful to have a strong hierarchy (especially if the leader has experience with that type of emergency), but during 'good times' strong top-down regulation represses creativity and adaptability.
Alternating between phases of hierarchy to consolidate good ideas from phases with high generation of ideas/diversity is probably ideal, and is probably what I would have looked into if I was studying hierarchy.
I'm going to read more of the thesis to be sure, but part about VDJ recombination seems tenuous - the fact that some aspects of VDJ recombination are regulated or vary between individuals shouldn't surprise anyone since environments and diseases vary all over the world. It's also not a new finding.
Here's some better reading about the origins of antigen receptor diversity, or as some people call it, the Generation of Diversity (GOD):
Evolutionarily conserved TCR binding sites, identification of T cells in primary lymphoid tissues, and surprising trans-rearrangements in nurse shark (2010)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20488795/
Makes sense that his thesis was in biophysics, not in biology itself. in a biology department someone would probably have disillusioned him of his top-down control tendencies
"he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series."
Maybe they are, maybe they are not, but that was not the point of my comment.
The point of my comment was that the current Western Civilization is so afraid of this hypothesis and its possible ramifications if it turned out to be even semi-correct, that it will try to destroy anyone who even dares to say it aloud, instead of approaching it without prejudice and studying it.
That is a political taboo, on the same level as saying "Allah probably does not exist" in Iran, "Ukraine is a separate nation which deserves sovereignty and our war against them is unjust" in Russia, or "Our government is neither very benevolent nor very capable and makes stupid mistakes" in China. And this taboo is mostly caused by US history of slavery and Western European history of colonialism and/or eugenics, but also by the current structure of politics. Much like the abovementioned taboos from Iran, Russia and China, its breach would undermine some political foundations.
It also has some consequences. We invest crazy amounts of money into artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence (and stupidity) is relatively underinvested, with the most interesting results coming from studies of corvids or octopuses. IMHO this is low-hanging fruit that we choose not to pluck, thus probably shooting ourselves in the foot when developing our own human potential.
I think the reason western civilization is afraid of the idea of inherent genetic limitations to intelligence is because the logical next step would not be focusing on education, but probably restarting some form of eugenics or genetic engineering of our progeny, and the last time that happened it didn't go very well. Also, much of 'western civilization' is founded on treating people as if they are equal, so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another obviously rubs us the wrong way.
I can't even tell what your suggestion is, what is the low-hanging fruit you are talking about? If you come out and say what your stance is (maybe you think we should genetically engineer babies to score higher on IQ tests?) then we could have a debate about the merits of those ideas. As it stands I have no idea what you're suggesting, which has the side effect of making you irrefutable I guess.
Your general analysis seems way off. Secular skepticism goes back a long time in Iran (way before the European Enlightenment), and few Iranians would be shocked to hear "Allah probably does not exist".
Here are some quatrains by Omar Khayyam (1048 CE) which are well known by everyone in Iran:
They say that in paradise there will be maidens with beautiful eyes,
There will be wine, milk, and honey.
If we have chosen wine and a beloved here, what’s the harm?
Since in the end, the outcome is the same.
The secrets of eternity neither you know nor I;
The solution to the riddle neither you find nor I.
There are inscriptions on the Tablet of Fate;
But when it comes to reading them, neither you can nor I.
Same goes for Russia and China, I'm very skeptical that the general population has a taboo about those ideas. A social taboo is not <whatever the government has banned you from talking about>.
In my previous comment, I was talking quite explicitly about political taboos, not societal taboos.
When I was a kid, the general population of Czechoslovakia would not be shocked by a joke about stupid drunken Soviet Communists, but if someone snitched on you, that joke would still land you in prison.
As with Iran (and I noticed your Persian handle), I absolutely understand that there is a lot of agnostic and skeptical Iranians, but saying that Allah does not exist in front of some henchmen of the Islamic Republic will likely lead to trouble, am I correct?
the logical next step
Well, would it be? We're 100 years downstream from those times. It is a bit like saying that if a modern American city wants to reintroduce streetcars, it will logically resurrect the wooden boxes of the 1920s that will shake your bones whenever they accelerate.
As of now, we know preciously little about natural intelligence, and I personally don't believe that "ignorance is strength", neither am I a fan of fear masquerading as wisdom. We have likely missed some low hanging fruit because of our deliberate ignorance.
If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
It is well possible that 100 years from now, something like "glasses for the brain" will exist, something that sharpens your thought process much like glasses sharpen your vision. Of course that the road to this will be full of potholes, but we should try anyway.
so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another
Why should higher intelligence be considered a basis for "superiority"? We don't consider richer, more beautiful or more eloquent people to be "superior" to the poorer or uglier ones, and we should treat differences in intelligence the same.
I don't see what your definition of 'political taboo', which seems to be related to top-down restrictions on speech or behavior, has to do James Watson's remarks.
There are few explicit or implicit rules about making racist claims that don't incite violence/hatred in most western countries (unlike the example you gave in Iran), or if they are, Watson didn't seem to suffer much for 'breaching the taboo'. Watson was shunned by the public and lost some scientific prestige/status because he didn't provide any evidence for his huge claims.
An editorial in Nature said that his remarks were "beyond the pale" but expressed a wish that the tour had not been canceled so that Watson would have had to face his critics in person, encouraging scientific discussion on the matter.
I think there's a big taboo against making huge claims that aren't supported by anything other than your own authority (such as Linus Pauling claiming that Vitamin C can cure cancer), and an even bigger taboo when those claims are explicitly ranking groups of humans on the basis of their genetics or even vaguely defined features like intelligence.
I find it interesting that you're spending so much time talking about the presence of this taboo but no time at all analyzing or evaluating the actual claims. Because if the claims are false, who cares if they're taboo? Are all taboos bad? Is it a good outcome if we get to a point where all countries have the same taboos?
> If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
First we need to have good definitions for intelligence or stupidity. I don't particularly like IQ as a proxy for overall intelligence but if you are defining it using IQ, scores are slowly improving at the population level with hispanics and blacks gaining on whites.
Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it.
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
The West is no longer a dominant civilization on this planet. The US seems to be very afraid of the possibility that Chinese AI research will overtake the American one. I find it very short-sighted that a similar concern is absolutely absent when it comes to natural intelligence research. There is a shitton of underdeveloped natural intelligence around as, and if our political adversaries manage to actually develop it first, the AI race may not matter at all.
Of course, that is a big "if", much like with railguns etc. Some technologies never bear fruit. But historically, we have seen extreme concentrations of brain power in some time-and-space limited regions (Hungarian "Martians"?), which indicates that there is a lot more underdeveloped talent than we think and that it could be, given the right methods, developed to overwhelming dimensions.
For Pete's sake, we cannot even recreate Bell Labs as they once were. No one precisely knows what was the actual magic that had them going, even though everyone has their favorite theory. It reminds me of alchemists doing experiments in the early 1600s. Aren't you a bit nervous about the fact that phenomena such as Bell Labs emerge on their own and disappear without us being able to create them on purpose? We must have wasted a lot of human potential by not knowing how to harness and develop top talents.
"analyzing or evaluating ..."
This is quite obviously a vicious circle. The topic of natural intelligence is taboo, scientists who try to attack it earnestly face a lot of hurdles in funding (see also [0], an interesting article), thus the amount of actual data is remarkably small, and, as you yourself say, even the definitions aren't really good. Which, in turn, leads a lot of people to cloak their disgust over the entire topic in a plausibly sounding word bubble like "there is not enough data, it is all so nebulous and murky, there is no sense in studying such a weird topic, don't spend any money on it and don't play with any dangerous hypotheses".
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?
That’s actually a correct belief. That’s what the testing says.
Note that I’m not saying the cause, merely that’s simply what the testing indicates and is a statement with a pure basis in fact.
There are different group averages in intelligence measurement and people have many feelings about why that is, but nobody credible disputes the mere existence of those data.
Anyways, that’s not in quotes so doesn’t answer the question.
I think this is certainly the root of the misunderstandings in this (and other) spaces.
At the very-local level of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking US food is terrible compared to European food. The US optimizes for volume and cost, Europe leans more towards quality.
Yes, there's a lot of cheap rubbish food in Europe, but those consuming it know it's cheap rubbish.
By contrast, and to your point, most Americans have never experienced really good food, and so it's harder to grasp that their "regular" quality is so low. We don't miss what we've never had.
My local, nothing special, supermarket stocks over 100 species of cheese. I remember going to the US and being confronted either 3 (American, whatever that is, Swiss and Cheddar. Um, which is unlike any cheddar I've ever had. Frankly the biggest difference seemed to be the color (which is artificial).
Think is, you can't describe sailing to someone who has never seen the ocean.
Increased travel, the growth of "American in Europe" YouTube videos, have slowly started permeating though and quality food is starting to appear here and there. But (naturally) its more expensive, so most Americans will be slow to adapt.
> My local, nothing special, supermarket stocks over 100 species of cheese. I remember going to the US and being confronted either 3 (American, whatever that is, Swiss and Cheddar. Um, which is unlike any cheddar I've ever had. Frankly the biggest difference seemed to be the color (which is artificial).
When was this comparison done?
In the last decade or so American grocery stores have dramatically improved their cheese selections. I don't know if it is 100 different cheeses, but it is pretty darn close. And unusual regional cheeses come in all the time.
> In the last decade or so American grocery stores have dramatically improved their cheese selections. I don't know if it is 100 different cheeses, but it is pretty darn close. And unusual regional cheeses come in all the time.
Eh, I mean, sure, if you go to a Whole Foods or Trader Joe, you’ll find cheese that might rival a discount chain in France at premium prices. If you go to Safeway, Target or Walmart, the cheese will not be anywhere near what a French (or I assume, a Swiss) person would find acceptable.
It is increasingly trendy for grocery stores in America to have a "fancy cheese" section because the unit cost (eg dollar-per-ounce) of cheese makes it profitable. I'm guessing Europeans are paying high unit cost too, but don't mind because it's more socially engrained to seek out "quality" foods like fancy cheese.
In the USA, cheese is either a salad topping, a sandwich/burger topping, or a pizza topping, and not much else. I once bought some pecorino romano to make cacio-e-pepe and regret doing that, it's an overhyped dish.
The big assumption is that the US can be fully independent from China's rare earth metals in 3 years. Is there any evidence this is possible? A quick search/promt suggests no way, 10-15 years needed for full chain autonomy.
