IQ 210 (!) and goes full Dilbert: https://t.co/3j51DWospX …
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) November 29, 2015
Twitter obviously not sufficient.
From what I can tell, the Landian timeline: 210 IQ is born, there's no social reward for going Musk, nobody enslaves him to force him to go Musk, and so he's now a middle manager or some equivalent.
What actually happened is a smart sheep is still a sheep. Majority of Asians use their high IQ to conform ever more brilliantly. His original blind conformation didn't work, so he modified it slightly. That worked, so he stopped thinking. If he is born with no thymos, no amount of IQ will cause him to develop thymos.
If you tried to bind him, he would ju-jitsu the bindings against you, and then go back to middle management. Indeed this is more or less what happened: society tried to push him into a preconceived 'prodigy' lifestyle (that wouldn't work for anyone, because society is stupid) and he simply decided to prevent them from succeeding, and then the issue was decided.
The whole point of innovation-class IQs is society can't know what they should be doing. Incentives, the carrot version of bindings, can't work either. Nobody rewards Musk but Musk.
1. Genius wants to play by the rules. Playing by the rules is not innovation. Fail.
2. Genius doesn't want to play by the rules. Genius hacks your incentive system to serve him instead of you. How are you going to stop him? Fail.
A 210 IQ European is typically dominated by curiosity and boredom. They are difficult to satisfy, even if they use their gifts solely to try to work it out. It's clear even from this short article these two things are absent from Kim Ung-Yong. He's not a European.
China's long-term order has bred out the ability to innovate. Every improvement is a change, and to the powers that be, every change is a challenge.
Regarding the 'bad parenting' angle, while true, it is not explanatory. Put simply: does a content middle manager sound like a rebel to you? But wait, what if it's his secret identity...nope, he's bitter about his newspaper coverage. He still accepts the society as valid. He doesn't even recognize the fundamentally criminal nature of journalism. It would be impossible for a European of that intelligence to be that ignorant. But, Kim Ung-Yong isn't curious about anything he's not told to be curious about, so he doesn't know anything.
I suppose, alternatively, he does know but considers upholding the noble lie to be unambiguously better. Again, making it impossible for him to be anything but an exceptionally efficient drone.
Raise a smart European like that and best case scenario they'll turn their endless energy into self-destruction. Else it will be used for other-destruction. Apparently Asians are, at least sometimes, so docile that it doesn't matter.
The problem in the West is the fact that America has spread a system for ruthlessly suppressing the smart. Destruction is much easier than creation. The pitchfork mob can't make the genius create, but it sure can give him head trauma. By trial and error, they have achieved ridiculous rates of converting geniuses to self-destruction to contain them. Industrially efficient. There's even a failsafe: a school specifically for 160+, for the purposes of properly socializing the growing minds, would be basically 100% male. It would be shut down by 'sexism' maybe a two weeks after the first time it appeared in a mass medium.
Kim Ung-Yong is the empirical proof that the orthogonality thesis is true. Though, with caveats. The goals need to be sufficiently unchallenging that higher IQ gives only marginal returns. If Ung-Yong's IQ was 420, he would be happier, but still a middle manager, so only slightly happier. As a result, no selection pressure in favour of IQ and there's still social pressure against it due to the greater difficulty of making friends. The thesis is only true of isolated intelligences - not of populations of high intelligence, as the ambitious intelligence will dominate the rest and hand out Darwin awards.
So, in a sense, Land's disgust with the incentive structures is true, but it was far too late to do anything about it by the time Ung-Yong was born. China's geniuses are suppressed at the genetic level - they don't need social suppression like they do in America.
Well, consider you were the ruler. Would you want to encourage and nurture people who could be a threat to you and change the order in which you're the supreme winner?
ReplyDeleteI notice that only when many kingdoms must compete do kings ever care to innovate. A capitalism of capitalisms so to speak.
Most of China's best culture came from the period of warring states. Since then, they've stagnated.
River valley civilizations tend to especially successful at breeding out innovation. One king can easily dominate the one fertile zone and prune the garden to his liking. Also, the population density makes for harsh competition. No one has time to think of anything unrelated to immediate survival. The curious get weeded out because they waste their energy on dead ends while their competitors get ahead.
Finally, Europe's civilization is young. Pretty much every civilization has had a burst of creativity before its genetic capital is spent and it descends into permanent state of stratified decadence.
Remember, evolution care nothing for the advancement of conscious awareness. It only cares what breeds.
Specifically, evolution cares what breeds in the short term, even if that short term repeatedly leads to a hard dead end.
ReplyDeleteRiver valley civilizations, such as Egypt?
China is unique though as a river valley civilization, unlike the nile which had reliable, nutrient rich floods. The Yangze river had periodic flooding, this flooding occurred every 30 years or so. This enabled those who lived there to PREVENT the flooding, by maintaining levees and runoffs and so on. Those communities that failed to perform this river maintenance, by squandering their energy on short term gains were destroyed, or sufficiently weakened to be easily invaded.
ReplyDeleteThis is why china is the longest surviving civilization, but perhaps not for very long given the damning of the yangzte and engineering the prevention of any future floods. This has eliminated the evolutionary pressure for long range planning. Probably the mandate of heaven (based on rains flooding the rivers) originates here, if the rulers didn't maintain the flood prevention, then they were not fit to be rulers. This became extended to any calamity. This seems quite unique among cultures, , except perhaps for the jews with their periodic pogroms.
Being tied to river floods seems far more rational than the fundamentally magical "Winning kings are winners, and losing kinds are losers." Of course in a modern polity the subjects have no way of telling whether the king is responsible or not, and thus whether they profit or lose by blaming him. Which would be fine, except they're totally sure they can tell.
ReplyDeleteLets Stick With Occam's Razor
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, the central problems affecting the Chinese people are (a) lack of verbal intelligence (b) a written and spoken language that does not assist in improving verbal intelligence, (c) hierarchy to compensate for lack of verbal intelligence (d) the perpetuation of Sun Tzu's central argument for 'deceive and delay' in which dishonesty, face, and conflict avoidance are considered good social mores.
But if we look at the inability for Chinese to speak the truth, it is in no small part because IT IS EXPENSIVE and VERBALLY DIFFICULT to tell the truth.
Now, I generally prefer institutional and normative causes to genetic, just as europeans developed truth telling, individualism, the jury, and polycentrism because of their verbal acumen, it appears that the Chinese developed lying, hierarchy, authority, centralism to compensate for their inability to articulate ideas.
We have Chinese Engineers on one side of the spectrum, Jewish lawyers and propagandists on the other, and europeans in the middle - and europeans differ in that they weaponized 'truth' rather than either delay and deceive, or cunning verbal deception. Asians can't drive and have verbal limitations. Africans can drive, but have a problem with verbal and abstract limitations. East asians appear to have larger average cranial capacity and hence better memories and modeling capability. It appears that ashkenazim have more white matter (I am trying to make sure this is correct, but it appears so) as a result of higher exposure to malaria. So my working hypothesis is that we Sapiens vary largely in growth pattern and hormonal distribution, and that much of this hormonal distribution is in sexual maturity (most african, least east asian), and sexual bias (solipsistic female-verbal, autistic male-spatial)
Small things in large numbers have vast consequences. And hormonal variation can create the entire spectrum of homo sapien behavior.
I suspect that science will eventually eliminate all other possibilities and that this will be the final analysis.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine
BTW: I'm not disagreeing with the thesis on the MISALLOCATION OF GENETIC (intellectual) CAPITAL. I agree. But the problem is creativity requires NEGOTIATION in order to ORGANIZE resources to produce innovation. Innovation does occur in chinese history - it is the longest continuous history, so even though they developed political order early, they developed all other changes slowly. This contrasts with western development which in every era free of plague they developed rapidly.
ReplyDeleteI suggest reading "Point Deer Make Horse" and "The Emperor's New Clothes". Same basic story, but with very different endings. In the Chinese version, everyone who insists that the deer is actually a deer and not a horse is put to death for disloyalty, while in the European version, the Emperor says "Wow, you guys are right, I really am naked!"
ReplyDeleteOne culture values truth; the other values loyalty. That might explain how, in spite of a 1000-year head start, China became a playground for European imperialism instead of the other way around.
Emperor's New Clothes is a fairy tale. Point Deer Make Horse is supposed to refer to a historical event. While European elites would never be so gauche as to act out a story the hobbits could understand and pass around, they pull that crap all the time. Europeans also tend to kill two birds - "I have the legal right to seize monastery lands, right?"
ReplyDelete--
Telling the truth is easy. It's verbally difficult to hear the truth. Much easier to misunderstand and let liars lead you around by the nose.
The Sun Tzu deception thing doesn't account for the high rate of cheating among second and third generation Asian immigrants. Trying to cheat social indicators comes naturally to Orientals.
That said, the lower verbal IQ should indeed weaken innovation/communication nets. There's a critical mass of innovation-class IQs that have to find each other to get proper innovation. It doesn't matter how many geniuses you have if they're isolated sparks. Similarly, the lower density of peer-to-peer networks leaves more space for top-down networks, that is, authoritarianism.