Smartest Man in the World Espouses Virtues of Eugenics

What, so a little Eloi and Morlock type society then is the goal? Or maybe a 1984ish style US?

Suppose you lived a hundred years ago. How would you judge people? By their achievements? Or family origins? How well they wrote, or if they wrote?

Why does a concept made up to measure intelligence as a single factor matter to any of us? That is more a matter of history and sociology than a pursuit of our true nature. I recommend reading The Mismeasure of Man and some Howard Gardener as an antidote to this obsession.

True, but spouting off wedgeless profanity and personal attacks certainly go a long way in determining what goes on inside yours.

IQ tests are just that, tests. They’re not a tangible measurement, just a relative scale with no solid baseline. Just like any statistic, some people use it properly (in moderation), and others misinterpret its value and make rash judgements.

Actually one of the goals of eugenics is to eliminate the “Morlocks” entirely. Keeping them around is just asking for trouble, in addition to being inhumane.

i think to right word is LOGORREHEA
LOGO = WORD in greek language (if i remember well)

What I’ve learned is that IQ is a measure of a type of intelligence. I had a very similar early childhood as Mr Langan. Talking and reading early, father died at an early age, school was boring, picked on for my intelligence. I have a measured IQ of 160. Nowhere near that of Mr Langan, but above average. I’ve found that this type (notice I say type, not level or vastness) of intelligence makes me very interested in certain areas that are quite different than people of more average IQ.

There are some things I am very good at and many things that I am very poor at. I am very good at solving problems. I am very good at programming and math. I am very poor at understanding social situations. I am very poor at staying focused on anything that I don’t find interesting. These differences between someone of my IQ and someone of average IQ create a distinct social tension that has made it difficult to build and maintain strong friendships. When IQ type intelligence displayed itself in school, there was resentment. Not because I was trying to make myself look better or lord it over anyone, I was simply trying to do my best, and I aced tests without trying. But I couldn’t carry a football or bounce a basketball. I didn’t know how to talk to a pretty girl. These things created tension.

I don’t see myself as superior or better than other people. I am much better at some things, and much worse than others, and what I’ve found is that my high IQ is simply an indicator that I have been given a great set of mental tools that need to be used well. Other people have been given a tremendous set of physical tools that should be used well. Still others have a tremendous set of emotional tools. If we could stop resenting others for having gifts we don’t have and learn to seek out others who have skills that complement ours and then make the most of what we have, we’ll have a much happier world.

Hello, John P. I just noticed your blog, and surmise from your tasteless and disgusting thread title that I’ve unwittingly put your nose out of joint. Let me try to clarify what seem to be a few points of confusion here.

First, about freedom being a privilege rather than a right: human activities interfere in proportion to social density and connectivity. The more people with whom you interact, the more chances you have to damage them in the course of exercising what you suppose are your “rights”, thusly infringing their “rights” to not be damaged by you. Rights are therefore socially constrained, and free men need to be educated regarding these constraints, preferably starting at about the age of two. That’s why parents need to take care raising their kids, and why American schools (used to) teach civics and social studies. Moreover, where freedom is constrained by ignorance regarding possible action, to realize freedom is to dispel that ignorance. One thus “earns” one’s freedom through self-education, and it is in this sense that freedom is a “privilege”.

On to genetic screening. Natural selection once insured that human genetic lines contained a (nonzero) minimum of debilitating hereditary disease. The mechanism was harsh: those with such diseases tended to be weeded out of the gene pool before they could do much breeding. More often than not, the process was ugly and painful for all concerned.

That situation is changing. Having partially exempted ourselves from natural selection through the systematic application of advanced medical technology – many people with formerly lethal genetic diseases now survive well beyond the age of procreation – we can now use that technology to painlessly regain the benefits of natural selection at the most efficient and humane juncture, before saddling an infant with a debilitating disease that may destroy his/her quality of life, or life itself, the first time a hole opens up in his/her medical safety net (or before).

Medical and genetic technology are now sufficiently advanced to detect, and may soon be adequate to correct, many hereditary diseases before they can be propagated. Applying this technology for the universal benefit of unborn children is a no-brainer, morally and otherwise. One could only marvel at the ethical reasoning of someone who believes that available screening technology should be ignored so that unborn children can be sentenced to lifelong hereditary diseases in the very process of conception.

As for my willingness to oversee such a program: given my druthers, I’d simply help to educate people on the desirability of such measures and trust their moral sensibilities to get the job done. (Fortunately, such awareness is steadily growing on its own.) My point, of course, was that if everyone else were in denial regarding the growth of genetic disease that results from unconditionally suspending the law of natural selection, as mankind is well along the road to doing for itself, then in principle, I’d accept the responsibility of trying to wake them up. In my view, anyone else who understands the problem should be willing to do the same. That all recommended procedures should be exclusively based on well-established science, as opposed to speculative theorization or politics or ideology, goes without saying.

Incidentally, in the interview to which you link, Errol Morris was asking, and provocatively phrasing, all of the questions, and had complete control over the editing of my responses. Much of what I said, and much of the verbal context in which I said it, was omitted – the interview was shot over two full days and covers perhaps 15-20 hours of tape. Errol apparently wanted to create a hypothetical scenario in which I was making certain decisions for humanity. Perhaps this was because he had already prodded me to admit that many of those who run the world are morons and ignoramuses (relatively speaking). If so, then mea culpa. However, I’d still have to say that many of those who currently run the world are relative morons and ignoramuses…and self-serving and ruthless ones to boot, despite all of their money, degrees, affiliations, and titles. That many people strongly agree with this observation is easy to confirm. It is equally obvious that those now running the world, and not me, are using their money and power to play “Nazi” and frog-march the public toward social, political, and economic goals that the people would never have chosen for themselves.

Regarding the CTMU paper I wrote, may I suggest that you consider taking some of the responsibility for your own incomprehension? The paper contains my ideas and not yours, and I wasted no words in conveying my ideas. As nearly as I can tell, you don’t understand why some of the words were included because you don’t fully understand the ideas to which they refer. If you disagree, then it’s up to you to provide cogent counterexamples and thereby demonstrate your understanding of the message. I predict that if you attempt to do this, popular respect for your level of (technical) reading comprehension will suffer greatly … not necessarily overnight, but in the long run. The CTMU is quite a bit more than you seem to think it is, and you do the public a disservice by pretending to understand it when you plainly do not.

Now let’s have a brief look at one of your own peculiar turns of expression.

“One problem I’ve noticed with extremely smart people,” you write, “is that they begin thinking that their one brain is actually more powerful than all the other brains around them combined.”

With respect to the greatest intellectual advances, this belief is quite true, and it happens to be based on certain undeniable facts that you, as a programmer and member of society, should understand.

First, collaborations often generate copious opinionative and interpersonal noise that interferes with communication and sound reasoning.

Secondly, the hardest problems do not admit of efficient solution by distributed algorithms, where “distributed” in this case means “over many tasks, processors, or minds”. They do not break down into easier independent sub-problems that can be solved in mutual isolation; instead, they require some kind of grand synthesis or intellectual leap, and such leaps usually occur within single minds. Human brains contain myriad connections which are not mirrored by group structures, and these connections are the critical factors in certain key operations. Unless these neural connections are properly configured and activated, the operations can’t happen.

Sometimes advantages are afforded by bringing many minds together in collaborative groups, but these are usually insufficient to solve extremely difficult problems. Otherwise, groups like the RAND Corporation would actually have produced stable solutions for the major social and strategic problems that they were paid by the government to solve, instead of merely transforming them into new problems at which yet more tax revenue must be thrown.

To simplify, there exist problems which are more than the sum of their parts, and therefore, it is not always true that:

“Correct solution = nonsolution + nonsolution + nonsolution + …”

or even that

“Correct solution = partial solution + partial solution + partial solution + …”

As one likely example, what Isaac Newton accomplished – constructing a unified mathematical framework for classical mechanics – probably could not have been efficiently accomplished, and as a matter of historical fact was not accomplished, by the entire set of his peers. Perhaps his feat could have been duplicated by another genius like Leibniz, but probably not by any group of more pedestrian intellects. It’s true that in order to complete the set-up for any given stroke of genius, the efforts of many sharp intellects may be required. After all, Newton “stood on the shoulders of giants”. But more often than not, the culminating leaps occur within single, exceptional human minds.

Thirdly, the following equation clearly does not hold:

“IQ 200 = IQ 100 + IQ 100 (+ IQ 100 + …)”

Lest anyone mistakenly suppose that this linear relationship fails only with respect to IQ, equations like the following are also incorrect:

“Supercomputer = pocket calculator + pocket calculator + pocket calculator + …”

“Michelangelo = moderately talented guy with a paintbrush + moderately talented guy with a chisel + …”

and so on.

I could go on, but this has already taken more time than I wanted to spend. I hope that you get the picture, as some of your readers already appear to have done. I also hope that you can learn to exhibit a bit more taste and civility in your choice of headings, instead of labeling your thoughts in a way that has “lowbrow” written all over it. (If this seems like too much to ask, try reading your own rule 6 for comments posted to this blog, ostensibly including your own: “No harsh, foul, demeaning or overly critical language is allowed. Disagreement and debate are perfectly fine, but let’s keep things civil.” It’s a shame when you don’t practice what you preach.)

Chris Langan

Mr. Langan’s ideology is fascist, anti-freedom and elitist. The perfect roots for a villain. Thank goodness he is not in a position of power to inflict damage on people with small heads. Oh, and I kinda got a vibe that he was trying to sound intelligent, like how a child tries to act smart to impress the adults.

Bilco – I’m disappointed. Your post seems to carry with it an implicit claim to membership among the intellectual elite, yet your political opinions are about as facile as they could be.

Fascist views do not require “strength and resilience” to hold. In fact, in the REAL idiocracies of the world, fascism has usually been the political tenor of choice. Franco’s Spain, Lenin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany (sorry, Godwin), Mussolini’s Italy: these were populaces content to accept the choices given to them and the status quo. They were content to sacrifice their decision-making to those that they believed were “elite,” because they found it comforting to have their choices made by others that they believed wiser than they.

I find your discussion of your ideal world, where “a lot of [us] would not exist [or not be in power],” a little disturbing. Of course the problem of shortsighted decision-making is a serious one. The solution is not to switch to a system where decisions are made from the top down; I think our current system has enough of that already, and we’ve seen how well that works out, have we not? Anyone can say, “we ought to simply put the smart people in charge,” but it’s not even close to that simple. Who decides who the smart people are? Who keeps them in power? When you get any specific group and put them in power, whether it’s those with the highest IQs, or those of a certain religious sect, or whatever else, you will find that their goal very quickly departs from, “let’s do the best thing for everyone,” and becomes “let’s do what will keep me in power.”

Why would you associate a high intelligence quotient with moral superiority? Why would an extremely intelligent (that is, extremely rational) person, put into a position of power, not follow his self-interest like anyone else? As Mr. Langan correctly points out in his interview, many people don’t understand “utility maximization,” and it’s of course implied that he does. Well, if you’re in charge of the country, and you understand and are pursuing utility maximization, that does not by any means mean you’ll be acting in everyone’s best interest. You’ll be acting in your own.

The problems of our world are substantial to say the least. But the solution is not to restrict freedoms and put power in the hands of the few. I’m not sure what you’d like to use as a measure of national success, but per-capita GDP (advantaging more populous countries by using nominal GDP would skew our experiment) is probably the most simple. Of the top 25 per-capita GDPs, 22 are Democracies (two of the three that aren’t are Middle Eastern petroauthoritarian states). Freedom and democracy equal success, and I’m not even counting the quality of life here.

The solution is more openness, more education, more liberty, and more empowerment. Humanity is moving away from fascism for a reason; check out F.A. Hayek’s work on institutional evolution. Don’t take the easy way out, because it’s not a way out at all.

JC, I’ll be brief to point out my disagreement: by choosing the GDP as your example, you would be implying that money is a measure of success within society. Does money really matter that much that it extends above our innate traits ? Will the almighty buck make us better people ?

I feel it causes the very opposite. A high GDP nation just means there is more to be gained from its corruption. It is a fabrication of our minds, one that has been attributed far too much importance and illusory power in this world. Tyrannical leaders are driven by greed. Poverty creates tension, as the rich impose upon the poor.

We might as well measure a person’s worth by the length of their ring-finger; unfounded, but nowhere near as insignificant as a number written on a piece of paper. We need to take a step back from the game and look at the world as a whole.

GDP was an arbitrary example. My point is simply that Democracy and liberal society, despite their flaws, are by far the best thing we’ve come up with for governance, and any time you put a few people in charge – as Mr. Langan would like us to do – you have serious, serious problems.

So, if you don’t like GDP as a measure of societal success, and you really want to argue for nanny-state authoritarianism, feel free to use any measure you’d like to show how people in authoritarian states are better off than those of us in Democracies.

To Mr. Langan, I would say, even if you’re well-intentioned, but as Lord Acton reminds us – excuse the cliche – power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t care how smart you are, it’s dangerous to hand over the reins to anybody. Further, I’m not convinced there’s any correlation between intelligence and ethical integrity, and why would there be?

Democracy sucks, and it’s failing. Now if we went back to being a republic, I would be happy.

“Further, I’m not convinced there’s any correlation between intelligence and ethical integrity, and why would there be?”

As someone once said, there’s a thin line between genius and madman… don’t look at me that way, I didn’t cross it yet….