From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Sep 15 2002 - 20:27:33 MDT
At 10:19 AM 9/15/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>Here is a question for you: suppose that you could press
>a button and everyone's IQ in the world would double,
>*except yours*. How would you feel about that? Would
>you do it?
It's a poignant question when posed generationally, which is after all what
actually *does* happen, at least for most parents who scrimp and save to
educate their kids to higher standard than their own. For decades they
deprive themselves of pleasures and treats so their offspringen can gain
advantages in life, and then the little swine turn on them, even the nice
ones, and treat them with the contempt due to ignorant, ill-spoken,
slow-thinking, fashion-blind, Lloyd-Webber-admiring hicks.
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. We'll face this issue soon,
presumably, with the possibility of selecting embryos for desirable
genotypes and adding auxiliary enhancers in vitro. And the world you'll
live in 15 or 30 years later will presumably have many advantages even for
yourself--if you can put up with the crushing sense of exclusion and
irrelevance. (Poul Anderson's early novel BRAIN WAVE deals rather
interestingly with a version of this idea.)
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. A pretty poor tradeoff, I think. Perhaps
many of us on this list already know what it feels like from the other end
of the scale. `Sometimes I feel incredibly stupid,' says Lee's very smart
friend, but surely he's confident enough in his smarts that this humble
admission does him no harm. Quite often I feel as if almost everyone else
is incredibly stupid (trying to get some simple transaction completed at a
bank, for example), and that's no fun either. But I digress.
Damien Broderick
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