I commend you for an excellent write up that an EA truly interested in advancing human flourishing would whole-heartedly approach in good faith and value as a cause area, if not outright embrace as the single most powerful tool to improve human welfare.
I’ve always thought many EA interventions that don’t consider genetics are counterproductive from a long-term consequentialist standpoint; malarial bed nets or other mortality-reducing interventions have the result of continuing to exacerbate the negative correlation between IQ and fertility and result in greater dysgenic pressures. These short term improvements in human wellbeing are likely harmful in the long run.
EA jumped the shark on this issue, most clearly, in light of the Bostrom scandal, where it became clear that epistemology was not as important as social desirability bias. While EA is still the best extant venue to advance these arguments, as you’ve found, good arguments fall on deaf (or outright hostile) ears if they don’t align with certain ideological commitments, regardless of truth content. If you haven’t read Hanania’s “EA Must Become Anti-Woke or Die,” I think it best explores the tension between the fundamental principles of EA and the actual situation on the ground.
I, for one, await schism. EA is not anti-woke, and so its mission as applied consequentialism to the goal of human welfare is indeed dead among most “advocates.” I encourage you to keep up this work as it is truly valuable towards those stated aims, even if the current audience doesn’t recognize that value.
Oct 28, 2023·edited Oct 28, 2023Liked by Ives Parr
You've made a wonderfully cogent, comprehensive, and well-supported argument for the value and importance of genetic enhancement here, which I thank you for - I've bookmarked it so I can point other people to it.
One thing I would have liked to see is whether there are any concrete steps an individual can take to accelerate this process today. You have many "fund research" items in your closing, but funding research like this is typically a nation-state / grant committee level thing; are there any *specific* orgs that an EA ten-percenter can actually donate to / buy stock in / look for jobs in per 80k hours thinking?
Also, one thing I haven't seen you mention yet in any of these - there's a 1-3% incidence genetic variation that brings the need for sleep from 7-9 hours a day to 1-3 hours a day. Being able to pay to choose this for your kids would be an absolutely staggering life-long advantage, and if I were a billionaire today, I would be doing a crash program to try to make that possible vs polygenic intelligence editing, because I believe it would be easier (being non massively polygenic), correlated enough with g, and more powerful overall. Just something to ponder.
Thanks again for such a comprehensive and well argued article!
Kevin Bird is a biologist (natural scientist) with pretty impressive CV. I see that Richard Lynn, Bo Winegard, Emil Kirkegaard, Heinar Rindermann, Charles Murray, Edward Dutton and all these people seem to be social scientists (like psychology, anthropology, political science, etc.). It is interesting to see some papers by natural scientists getting into this race and IQ stuff.
Note that I still believe that genetic enhancement and all the stuff you said about IVG, IVF, and bioethics are all something that effective altruist should care about and in fact I was already into transhumanism and genetic enhancement and genetic engineering to reduce suffering and maximize wellbeing because of (negative) utilitarian philosopher David Pearce. I am, of course, a classical utilitarian and not a negative utilitarian. So, I still support genetic enhancement, genetic engineering, IVG, IVF tech to maximize wellbeing for human beings and animals.
I was also going to ask you like why do a lot of these race and IQ people like Lynn, Kirkegaard, Davide Piffer, Edward Dutton who are into these sorts of research are straight up foul-mouthed nationalists (or segregationists) and not effective altruists? Davide Piffer even calls black people Gorillas. https://twitter.com/rasmansa/status/1239245593471586305
You do know that when I see this stuff, it becomes hard for me to separate these race realists or race scientists from straight up Jim crow racists.
It makes me feel that these people are engaged in motivated reasoning than sincere, honest, charitable, careful science.
Oh.. and the Edward Dutton dude is straight up wild mad man. Just google that guy! God give that guy some peace in his life.
Credibility matters bro. I keep finding disturbing information about these people. And it does not require that much google search from me. It is like - I would have a hard time trusting a social scientist who is looking into or researching children's psychology and sexuality and that social scientist has made pro-child molestation comments elsewhere and has a history of pedophilia. So, similarly, I would have a hard time trusting a social scientist who is looking into or researching racial/ethnic differences with respect to intelligence, aggression, crime and that social scientist has made anti-immigration, pro-nationalist or pro-segregationist (even foul-mouthed nationalist) comments and has a history of racism. Does that make sense? You see how all this stuff looks to the outsider who is not a geneticist, biologist, psychologist?
Considering that you write about this stuff with respect to effective altruism, nationalists use this stuff to argue for nationalism - like White nationalism or IQ nationalism or stuff close to that.
What are your thoughts on nationalists using this race and IQ stuff to argue for all sorts of terrible stuff like segregation, closed borders, etc.? How would you suggest an effective altruist counter this?
It would be interesting to see you debate nationalists. I am going to do that too, i think. Maybe debating them and refuting their awful IQ nationalism would be fun for me too.
I respect you for this big effort post. I think your moral conclusions don't require that much research and stuff from bad people like Richard Lynn. Your conclusion and support for genetic enhancement are good.
I mean, Lynn, Kirkegaard, Noah Carl, Ed Dutton, and Kevin Macdonald don't seem like effective altruists, right? Didn't Lynn explicitly say some pretty awful stuff?
Found it. Here's Richard Lynn - “I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries.”
—Interview with neo-Nazi Alex Kurtagic, 2011
"I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.”
—Undated interview with fascist magazine Right NOW!
"Only one conclusion is possible… . [T]he broad picture is clear and inescapable: at some point in the foreseeable future the white British people will become a minority in these islands, and whites will likewise become minorities throughout the economically developed nations of European peoples. As the proportion of non-Europeans grows in Europe and in the United States (and also in Canada and Australia) and eventually become majorities, the intelligence of the populations will fall. The strength of the economies will equally inevitably decline to the level of developing nations. World leadership will pass to Russia and Eastern Europe, and to China and Japan, if these manage to resist the invasion of non- European peoples. We are living in an extraordinary time. Nothing like this has ever occurred in human history. Mass immigration of non-Europeans will inevitably result in the European peoples becoming minorities and then increasingly small minorities in their own countries, as they are in most of Latin America and the Caribbean islands. Throughout the Western world the European peoples are allowing themselves to be replaced in their own homelands by non-Europeans. What is even more remarkable is that the European peoples have become quite complacent about their own elimination. Some even welcome it. Hardly a week goes by without some intellectual or politician declaring that immigration has been good for the country, that "in our diversity is our strength" and "we must celebrate our differences.” Others announce that they look forward to the day when whites become a minority. This is the first time in the whole of human history that a people has voluntarily engineered in its own destruction.”
—“Race Differences, Immigration, and the Twilight of the European Peoples,” VDARE.com, 2009
“If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall… . What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
—Review of Raymond Cattell’s A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, 1974
The IQ point gains from embryo selection will only be possible if we start genotyping people that have at least 130 IQ. Today we have a very crude parameter like "educational attainment in years". Somebody getting a MA in English Literature is not the same as somebody with a MS in Computer Science.
Even the UK Biobank does not have good IQ data on its samples. It's a slow process to collect this data. And we need millions of samples with good IQ data in order to correctly select the embryo. It'll be easier in places like Singapore or China to get DNA data from top scientists than in the west.
"For example, Francis and Kirkegaard (2022) employ the use of instrumental variables"
I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven't opted to include this one, weird... So should I pay money to see this "Mankind Quarterly" publication?
When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics.
It's funded by the Pioneer Fund which according to wikipedia:
"The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been classified as a hate group and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature.[2][3][4][5] One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.[6]"
Something tells me it wouldn't be very EA to give money to these people.
So what about the second source?
"For example, if a high GDP caused higher IQ, we would expect oil-rich nations like Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait to score closer to nations like the USA, UK, and Japan in NIQ. However, they score more in line with their geographic neighbors, suggesting, but not proving, that NIQ causes prosperity rather than vice versa (Christainsen, 2013)."
I can check Christainsen's work since it's in a reputable journal and thus available through my university. He himself says in the paper:
"While differences in average scores worldwide can thus be plausibly viewed as being influenced
by genetic differences across world regions, it is also possible that score differences are influenced by regional differences in culture that are independent of genetic factors. "
Cultural factors are harder to measure and thus get neglected in research thanks to the streetlight effect. Still we might sample a subsection of more easily measurable cultural interventions like eduction and see which way they point. We can use the education index to compare the mentioned countries. Countries like the USA, UK and Japan score high on it (0.9, 0.948, 0.851 respectively) while countries like Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait score lower (0.659, 0.802, 0.638 respectively). That seems like a promising indication, but can education actually increase IQ?
You cited Ritchie in this post, but he and his colleagues also have a later meta-analysis showing that education can greatly increase intelligence https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29911926/ :
"Across 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the life span and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence."
Now you might worry that this is not "true intelligence/g-factor" and a "hollow" gain, but I fear that here we run into the issue that there's no consensus on what the "true intelligence" actually is. It may be hollow according to your definition but not mine. Even if there was consensus we might disagree about what IQ actually measures. The debate about what aspects of "true intelligence" IQ actually captured is summarized on wikipedia as:
"While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of human intelligence inclusive of, for example, creativity and social intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that their construct validity must be carefully qualified, and not be overstated.[84] According to Weiten, "IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable."[84]
Some scientists have disputed the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence altogether. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981, expanded edition 1996), evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould compared IQ testing with the now-discredited practice of determining intelligence via craniometry, arguing that both are based on the fallacy of reification, "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities".[90] Gould's argument sparked a great deal of debate,[91][92] and the book is listed as one of Discover Magazine's "25 Greatest Science Books of All Time".[93]
Along these same lines, critics such as Keith Stanovich do not dispute the capacity of IQ test scores to predict some kinds of achievement, but argue that basing a concept of intelligence on IQ test scores alone neglects other important aspects of mental ability.[15][94] Robert Sternberg, another significant critic of IQ as the main measure of human cognitive abilities, argued that reducing the concept of intelligence to the measure of g does not fully account for the different skills and knowledge types that produce success in human society.[95]"
_______
"In 2002, psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their seminal book in the field of national intelligence entitled IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Their starting assumption was that since IQ and earnings had a positive correlation, the relationship should persist when comparing nations, meaning that nations with higher average IQ should be more economically productive (Lynn & Vanhanen, p. 4)."
Yeah, I really wouldn't trust how that book picks it's data. As stated in "A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans":
''For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a, b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)'s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic.''
They're not the only one who find Lynn's choice of data selection suspect. Wikipedia describes him as:
''Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist"[1][2][3] who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.[4] He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal.[a] Lynn was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
Many scientists criticised Lynn's work for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda.[b] A number of scholars and intellectuals have said that Lynn is associated with a network of academics and organisations that promote scientific racism.[c] He has also advocated fringe positions regarding sexual differences in intelligence.[26]''
I commend you for an excellent write up that an EA truly interested in advancing human flourishing would whole-heartedly approach in good faith and value as a cause area, if not outright embrace as the single most powerful tool to improve human welfare.
I’ve always thought many EA interventions that don’t consider genetics are counterproductive from a long-term consequentialist standpoint; malarial bed nets or other mortality-reducing interventions have the result of continuing to exacerbate the negative correlation between IQ and fertility and result in greater dysgenic pressures. These short term improvements in human wellbeing are likely harmful in the long run.
EA jumped the shark on this issue, most clearly, in light of the Bostrom scandal, where it became clear that epistemology was not as important as social desirability bias. While EA is still the best extant venue to advance these arguments, as you’ve found, good arguments fall on deaf (or outright hostile) ears if they don’t align with certain ideological commitments, regardless of truth content. If you haven’t read Hanania’s “EA Must Become Anti-Woke or Die,” I think it best explores the tension between the fundamental principles of EA and the actual situation on the ground.
I, for one, await schism. EA is not anti-woke, and so its mission as applied consequentialism to the goal of human welfare is indeed dead among most “advocates.” I encourage you to keep up this work as it is truly valuable towards those stated aims, even if the current audience doesn’t recognize that value.
You've made a wonderfully cogent, comprehensive, and well-supported argument for the value and importance of genetic enhancement here, which I thank you for - I've bookmarked it so I can point other people to it.
One thing I would have liked to see is whether there are any concrete steps an individual can take to accelerate this process today. You have many "fund research" items in your closing, but funding research like this is typically a nation-state / grant committee level thing; are there any *specific* orgs that an EA ten-percenter can actually donate to / buy stock in / look for jobs in per 80k hours thinking?
Also, one thing I haven't seen you mention yet in any of these - there's a 1-3% incidence genetic variation that brings the need for sleep from 7-9 hours a day to 1-3 hours a day. Being able to pay to choose this for your kids would be an absolutely staggering life-long advantage, and if I were a billionaire today, I would be doing a crash program to try to make that possible vs polygenic intelligence editing, because I believe it would be easier (being non massively polygenic), correlated enough with g, and more powerful overall. Just something to ponder.
Thanks again for such a comprehensive and well argued article!
"Human Learning Outcomes" is supposed to be "Harmonized Learning Outcomes"
Hey Ives, here's my post that you will probably love, my friend! Enjoy reading! https://rajatsirkanungo.substack.com/p/a-post-to-my-friend-ives
You read this? - https://kevinabird.github.io/2023/12/30/No-Case-For-Race-Realism.html
That article seems pretty good.
Kevin Bird's CV - https://kevinabird.github.io/CV/Bird_CV_Sept_2023_website.pdf
Kevin Bird is a biologist (natural scientist) with pretty impressive CV. I see that Richard Lynn, Bo Winegard, Emil Kirkegaard, Heinar Rindermann, Charles Murray, Edward Dutton and all these people seem to be social scientists (like psychology, anthropology, political science, etc.). It is interesting to see some papers by natural scientists getting into this race and IQ stuff.
Note that I still believe that genetic enhancement and all the stuff you said about IVG, IVF, and bioethics are all something that effective altruist should care about and in fact I was already into transhumanism and genetic enhancement and genetic engineering to reduce suffering and maximize wellbeing because of (negative) utilitarian philosopher David Pearce. I am, of course, a classical utilitarian and not a negative utilitarian. So, I still support genetic enhancement, genetic engineering, IVG, IVF tech to maximize wellbeing for human beings and animals.
I was also going to ask you like why do a lot of these race and IQ people like Lynn, Kirkegaard, Davide Piffer, Edward Dutton who are into these sorts of research are straight up foul-mouthed nationalists (or segregationists) and not effective altruists? Davide Piffer even calls black people Gorillas. https://twitter.com/rasmansa/status/1239245593471586305
You do know that when I see this stuff, it becomes hard for me to separate these race realists or race scientists from straight up Jim crow racists.
I think I also remember reading that Charles Murray burned a cross when he was young (not a political scientist at that time). Oh yeah, it was here - https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/about-charles-murray-is-a-white-mans-cross-burning-as-disqualifying-as-blackface/
It makes me feel that these people are engaged in motivated reasoning than sincere, honest, charitable, careful science.
Oh.. and the Edward Dutton dude is straight up wild mad man. Just google that guy! God give that guy some peace in his life.
Credibility matters bro. I keep finding disturbing information about these people. And it does not require that much google search from me. It is like - I would have a hard time trusting a social scientist who is looking into or researching children's psychology and sexuality and that social scientist has made pro-child molestation comments elsewhere and has a history of pedophilia. So, similarly, I would have a hard time trusting a social scientist who is looking into or researching racial/ethnic differences with respect to intelligence, aggression, crime and that social scientist has made anti-immigration, pro-nationalist or pro-segregationist (even foul-mouthed nationalist) comments and has a history of racism. Does that make sense? You see how all this stuff looks to the outsider who is not a geneticist, biologist, psychologist?
Considering that you write about this stuff with respect to effective altruism, nationalists use this stuff to argue for nationalism - like White nationalism or IQ nationalism or stuff close to that.
What are your thoughts on nationalists using this race and IQ stuff to argue for all sorts of terrible stuff like segregation, closed borders, etc.? How would you suggest an effective altruist counter this?
It would be interesting to see you debate nationalists. I am going to do that too, i think. Maybe debating them and refuting their awful IQ nationalism would be fun for me too.
I respect you for this big effort post. I think your moral conclusions don't require that much research and stuff from bad people like Richard Lynn. Your conclusion and support for genetic enhancement are good.
I mean, Lynn, Kirkegaard, Noah Carl, Ed Dutton, and Kevin Macdonald don't seem like effective altruists, right? Didn't Lynn explicitly say some pretty awful stuff?
Found it. Here's Richard Lynn - “I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries.”
—Interview with neo-Nazi Alex Kurtagic, 2011
"I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.”
—Undated interview with fascist magazine Right NOW!
"Only one conclusion is possible… . [T]he broad picture is clear and inescapable: at some point in the foreseeable future the white British people will become a minority in these islands, and whites will likewise become minorities throughout the economically developed nations of European peoples. As the proportion of non-Europeans grows in Europe and in the United States (and also in Canada and Australia) and eventually become majorities, the intelligence of the populations will fall. The strength of the economies will equally inevitably decline to the level of developing nations. World leadership will pass to Russia and Eastern Europe, and to China and Japan, if these manage to resist the invasion of non- European peoples. We are living in an extraordinary time. Nothing like this has ever occurred in human history. Mass immigration of non-Europeans will inevitably result in the European peoples becoming minorities and then increasingly small minorities in their own countries, as they are in most of Latin America and the Caribbean islands. Throughout the Western world the European peoples are allowing themselves to be replaced in their own homelands by non-Europeans. What is even more remarkable is that the European peoples have become quite complacent about their own elimination. Some even welcome it. Hardly a week goes by without some intellectual or politician declaring that immigration has been good for the country, that "in our diversity is our strength" and "we must celebrate our differences.” Others announce that they look forward to the day when whites become a minority. This is the first time in the whole of human history that a people has voluntarily engineered in its own destruction.”
—“Race Differences, Immigration, and the Twilight of the European Peoples,” VDARE.com, 2009
“If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall… . What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
—Review of Raymond Cattell’s A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, 1974
The IQ point gains from embryo selection will only be possible if we start genotyping people that have at least 130 IQ. Today we have a very crude parameter like "educational attainment in years". Somebody getting a MA in English Literature is not the same as somebody with a MS in Computer Science.
Even the UK Biobank does not have good IQ data on its samples. It's a slow process to collect this data. And we need millions of samples with good IQ data in order to correctly select the embryo. It'll be easier in places like Singapore or China to get DNA data from top scientists than in the west.
[Comment cross-posted from the EA forum]
"For example, Francis and Kirkegaard (2022) employ the use of instrumental variables"
I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven't opted to include this one, weird... So should I pay money to see this "Mankind Quarterly" publication?
When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics.
It's funded by the Pioneer Fund which according to wikipedia:
"The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been classified as a hate group and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature.[2][3][4][5] One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.[6]"
Something tells me it wouldn't be very EA to give money to these people.
So what about the second source?
"For example, if a high GDP caused higher IQ, we would expect oil-rich nations like Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait to score closer to nations like the USA, UK, and Japan in NIQ. However, they score more in line with their geographic neighbors, suggesting, but not proving, that NIQ causes prosperity rather than vice versa (Christainsen, 2013)."
I can check Christainsen's work since it's in a reputable journal and thus available through my university. He himself says in the paper:
"While differences in average scores worldwide can thus be plausibly viewed as being influenced
by genetic differences across world regions, it is also possible that score differences are influenced by regional differences in culture that are independent of genetic factors. "
Cultural factors are harder to measure and thus get neglected in research thanks to the streetlight effect. Still we might sample a subsection of more easily measurable cultural interventions like eduction and see which way they point. We can use the education index to compare the mentioned countries. Countries like the USA, UK and Japan score high on it (0.9, 0.948, 0.851 respectively) while countries like Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait score lower (0.659, 0.802, 0.638 respectively). That seems like a promising indication, but can education actually increase IQ?
You cited Ritchie in this post, but he and his colleagues also have a later meta-analysis showing that education can greatly increase intelligence https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29911926/ :
"Across 142 effect sizes from 42 data sets involving over 600,000 participants, we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education. Moderator analyses indicated that the effects persisted across the life span and were present on all broad categories of cognitive ability studied. Education appears to be the most consistent, robust, and durable method yet to be identified for raising intelligence."
Now you might worry that this is not "true intelligence/g-factor" and a "hollow" gain, but I fear that here we run into the issue that there's no consensus on what the "true intelligence" actually is. It may be hollow according to your definition but not mine. Even if there was consensus we might disagree about what IQ actually measures. The debate about what aspects of "true intelligence" IQ actually captured is summarized on wikipedia as:
"While IQ tests are generally considered to measure some forms of intelligence, they may fail to serve as an accurate measure of broader definitions of human intelligence inclusive of, for example, creativity and social intelligence. For this reason, psychologist Wayne Weiten argues that their construct validity must be carefully qualified, and not be overstated.[84] According to Weiten, "IQ tests are valid measures of the kind of intelligence necessary to do well in academic work. But if the purpose is to assess intelligence in a broader sense, the validity of IQ tests is questionable."[84]
Some scientists have disputed the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence altogether. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981, expanded edition 1996), evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould compared IQ testing with the now-discredited practice of determining intelligence via craniometry, arguing that both are based on the fallacy of reification, "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities".[90] Gould's argument sparked a great deal of debate,[91][92] and the book is listed as one of Discover Magazine's "25 Greatest Science Books of All Time".[93]
Along these same lines, critics such as Keith Stanovich do not dispute the capacity of IQ test scores to predict some kinds of achievement, but argue that basing a concept of intelligence on IQ test scores alone neglects other important aspects of mental ability.[15][94] Robert Sternberg, another significant critic of IQ as the main measure of human cognitive abilities, argued that reducing the concept of intelligence to the measure of g does not fully account for the different skills and knowledge types that produce success in human society.[95]"
_______
"In 2002, psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their seminal book in the field of national intelligence entitled IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Their starting assumption was that since IQ and earnings had a positive correlation, the relationship should persist when comparing nations, meaning that nations with higher average IQ should be more economically productive (Lynn & Vanhanen, p. 4)."
Yeah, I really wouldn't trust how that book picks it's data. As stated in "A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans":
''For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a, b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)'s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic.''
They're not the only one who find Lynn's choice of data selection suspect. Wikipedia describes him as:
''Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist"[1][2][3] who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.[4] He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal.[a] Lynn was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
Many scientists criticised Lynn's work for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda.[b] A number of scholars and intellectuals have said that Lynn is associated with a network of academics and organisations that promote scientific racism.[c] He has also advocated fringe positions regarding sexual differences in intelligence.[26]''
The caplan quote is a bit misleading--he’s talking about us higher education rather than very minimal education in, for example, Uganda