Wednesday, July 13, 2022

The Lowborn Highborn & Succession

Apparently my hobbit metaphor from 2014 is now all over the place because Moldbug signal-boosted it, and damn if that isn't funny. 

On a practical level, note that if I'd continued to use it regularly myself, this event would have been blocked. If you want to do this sort of thing on purpose, neglect is part of the strategy. Anyway, let's talk about the blood.


If you know how many aristocrats there are, how many children they have, and the proportion of aristocrat children who end up being hobbits, you can work out what percentage of hobbit-born children would result in more than half of all aristocrats being hobbit-born. 

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that aristocracy is the top 1%. To make the math easy, let's pretend everyone has the same family size, and all 100%, every aristocrat baby, is themselves an aristocrat. A bunch of things cancel, meaning the threshold is a simple 1/99 => if more than 1.01% of hobbit children are aristocrats, at any given time, more nobles are lowborn than highborn. 

Note that this is all linear or close enough, so modifying the number is trivial. If only 80% of aristocrat births are also aristocrat, then multiply the final number by 0.8. If aristocrat generations are half the size of hobbit generations, then divide the number by 2. Etc. 

 

Note that the 1%, if we're talking IQ, is 135. I consider that midwit. You need ~130 to have what I consider basic literacy; these folk might see a reference and actually read it. If you tell them to google a book, the book might actually get read. "This is the only group that can identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable." However, that's their limit. These folk don't do nested references - if a citation itself has a citation, it's not going to be read.  They can produce original thoughts only through tremendous luck; their ideology is scavenged, not constructed. If it's not in a book already, they can't think it. The innovation-class IQ is distinctly higher than 135.


Although aristocracy is not merely IQ, from IQ you can calculate the actual percentages and how they vary by innate social status. (I estimate the real percentage is something like 30%, not 50+.) Regression to the mean is more aggressive the further from the mean you are. If you're curious, get your lab rats to crunch the numbers. Someone will have to find out how many children aristocrats have, though. Nobody has gathered that information yet, because they won't admit that noble/peasant is a real distinction. 

Note that while it is very plausible that most nobles are lowborn, you don't get lowborn dukes and princes. You get lowborn squires and barons. The Gaussian has exponential decay.
Even if a duke or prince were born to a hobbit family, their distinctly mismatched environment is apt to do tremendous damage to them; you will get a ruined bastard prince, not a healthy prince. Especially in a tremendously envy-positive Fascist country. 


P.S. Since the odds of a duke giving birth to another duke - even if married to a duchess - significantly differs from 100%, primogeniture is a terrible idea. Basically Moldbug is right about stockholding. 

I would do something like distribute stocks of the estate evenly between the children, and they can work out succession amongst themselves via the buyout dynamic. Those who want it more can bid higher. If the non-inheriting children get something out of the deal (aside from their innate blue blood), it dramatically reduces the pressure they feel to commit fratricide. It no longer codes as, "Daddy loves one son 100% and all other children 0%." Bonus: they can buy out the father and have him step down before he goes senile and ruins the place. Anyone who deserves to rule can get the money without having to first inherit. Dukes especially should do it for free, but why not provide a healthy encouragement?

It also helps if you have them read Son Also Rises. If you strip a billionaire of every cent they own, after a decade they will be a billionaire again. If you grant a millionaire a billion-dollar business, it won't be a billion-dollar business for long. The world is fundamentally a just place; men of quality are rewarded, and men of lesser quality receive lesser rewards, even if someone tries to thumb the scale. Whether they inherit or not largely doesn't matter to their final fortunes, especially if the country isn't in the Malthusian trap. Remind them that mortal law can be bent. If their ambition is illegal, that's nothing but an inconvenience. 

Goes double if you can buy out the estates of other people's children.

 

P.P.S. Given that innovation-class IQ is distinctly higher than 135, estimate how high Greece's average IQ must have been to produce Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle close enough in time to have all met in a single pub, using a an effective source population of well under one million.


P.P.P.S. By far my favourite race in Master of Magic has always been the dark elf. If you're too boring to appreciate this, my condolences.

4 comments:

barabba said...

See for yourself how hard it is to reach IQ 135: https://mensa.dk/iqtest/

I don't think high IQ correlates with worldly success.
Usually this kind of people get shunned.
Golden mediocrity, being perfectly average is what is loved and admired by everyone.
Add ruthlessness and ambition to that, and you have got the recipe for success.

Also, this whole focus on IQ, and how it correlates positively with members of the privileged class, is nothing but an ex-post justification of the status quo. These people are sanctimonious douchebags who can smell each other by their habits and ways of doing things. If you are identified as one of the club, you are in. If you were born plebeian you are out.

Obviously once you are in, you are provided with the privileged education, stability and peace of mind you need to perform well on the IQ test. So it's the other way around, really: intelligence is the result of privilege. I am afraid the socialists have it right on this one. Further, the test is structured in a way that clearly favours people with a STEM background.

Alrenous said...

IQ correlates more tightly with worldly success than anything else psychologists can measure.

Point 1: you can't succeed with only IQ. Mensa members generally have only high IQ. That or they all have crippling illnesses.

Point 2: emphasis on "worldly." Distinction between happy janitor and unhappy CEO. (Neverthless it is true that most janitors are less happy than most CEOs.)

Above 135 there's strong arguments that IQ is anti-correlated with worldly success, because a) you learn it's not worth it even on purely material accounting and b) you figure out how to get satisfaction more cheaply, so you need fewer material goods. Oh and c) jealous Americoids actively try to exclude you. They will succeed, if you don't go full Machiavellian, because their mob is bigger and they're backed by the law.

E.g. if I value my leisure time highly enough, then not-working makes me richer than working. The higher your IQ, the more your free time is worth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Except, of course, leisure time can't be taxed, so the government thinks I'm poor.

Further, if I use my leisure time to improve myself, then the value of my leisure time goes up...

barabba said...

I don't know why dissident people cling so much to this ridiculous notion of IQ.
Richard Feynman scored 125 which is very solid but not exceptional.

In fact, the actual contents of the test, finding patterns in figures, come natural to people trained in Mathematics, Engineering or Physics: we think in terms of 3D vectors rotating in space all the time.
I know that one kind of IQ test measures verbal reasoning as well.
But come on, a successful completion of the school and university curricula that takes nearly 20 years to complete, already accounts as proof of cognitive skills, plus it certifies work ethics. [It also measures your will to submit to authority, i.e. your lack of personal pride, your sheepishness].
Qualities requested to get a good corporate job are 50% competence and 50% compliance, so my last point in brackets up there is crucial, and is not valued in IQ tests.

In this sense, I can see why dissidents love to wrap the IQ test in a shroud of objectivity, implicitly in so doing claiming they are high IQ, without ever taking the test. I am not talking about you specifically because you don't do it here, but there is a general trend in this direction.
Works like this: since they are dissidents, they obviously lack the compliance. So they cannot occupy high level positions in society.
They feel devalued and come back with this IQ revenge concept, which, in comparison to school curricula, boils down to measuring the mere potential of competence, leaving out work ethic and compliance.
Problem is, any bugman working in electronics or mechanics will easily outperform them in the test. Most Mensa members are a bunch of NPCs that don't have a soul.

What the dissidents have is moral superiority: they have got a spine and are not contemptible, conformist toadies the way the masses are.
They are not gullible, they have the courage to go against the grain, and can think independently. No IQ test measures independence of thought, as logical patterns are already set in the questions and you only have to find them, not come up with anything creative.

Dissidents should take pride in that they are fully human, spiritually and morally, and they have a soul, differing from the NPCs who are heterodirected.

Alrenous said...

There's a short real word for NPC: hylic. From the Greek for matter, explicitly the opposite of psychic.

--

In case anyone is curious, my Official score is 129.

However, domain experts know that Asperger's throws off the test norming. In my case, I can't focus on the test since the test questions are so obviously irrelevant plastic fakes.

Option 1: I actually have an IQ of 129, but I perform better than folk with an IQ of 214. In other words, do you even intellectually lift, bro.

Option 2: the test is not accurate for 'spergs. I'm actually north of 160 somewhere. Feynman really was dumber than me - but, in agreement with the test, only by a few points. (Also he was spatial-skewed and I'm highly verbal-skewed.) My genuine estimate is that doing your reps gets you about ~25 points of performance. It may even improve your IQ test scores, though it's also very possible it doesn't.

I'm fine with either interpretation, of course...