From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 22:23:10 MDT
Damien writes
> If you were convinced that elevating IQ would make people
> (ahem) `happier'--which need not mean contented with their
> lot--then a kindly human would probably push the button.
Yes, sort of by definition. But most of us who would choose
to double everyone's IQ but our own wouldn't be thinking
of happiness in any way. My friend who thought up this
IQ doubling button thought experiment (not the same friend)
had decided that he'd do it much more quickly than I would
have. He thought mainly of how many interesting conversations
he'd be able to have, and how rich he'd soon be (not relative
to everyone else, of course).
> In Lee's thought experiment, which luckily has no real
> salience to any expected future, you'd be the *only*
> person to experience both trickle-down benefits and
> uprooted loneliness.
I had not thought of the loneliness angle. But wait! it's
mistaken. Since the world's average IQ would suddenly be
200, then unless your IQ is below 133, you would actually
have *more* people at your own level, not fewer. (This
follows from the equation 2x - 100 = 100 - x.) For example,
if your IQ is 140, then you're out at two and a half
standard deviations, while if yours was halved (same thing
mathematically), then at 70 you'd only be out at 1.88
standard deviations (though this time behind the curve
instead of ahead of it).
But I can already hear the complaints: Lee has diabolically
and oh-so-cleverly created a dialog in which the reality of
IQ is *presumed*, thereby unconsciously undermining people's
correct realization that IQ is a chimera, and thus perpetrating
a yet even more fiendish and unbelievably insidious ploy
advancing his noxious agenda. ;-)
> `Sometimes I feel incredibly stupid,' says Lee's very smart
> friend...
Correction, there was no "sometimes". He meant that
noticing how long it took him to realize even simple
things (that a truly high intelligence would have
realized instantly), he actually *is* stupid on some
sort of absolute scale. This can happen, as you
know, from reading SF like Vinge's or yours which
discuss the spike---or can happen when you just
contemplate the nature of intelligence and how
smart a cubic foot of matter could be.
Lee
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