critique<\/a> of the idea of IQ by a statistician named Nassim Taleb. He points out that IQ tests can potentially be useful for identifying individuals who would score very low on IQ tests, but when it comes to people who are above average, it\u2019s basically meaningless, because there are a million different ways to be \u201cintelligent.\u201d There are some people who are great at math, some people who have amazing common sense and wisdom, and some who are brilliant scientists but have no common sense and no wisdom to share.<\/p>\nI would liken the idea of intelligence to that of skill. If somebody says, \u201cYou should meet my friend Joe, he\u2019s really skilled,\u201d I\u2019m wondering, \u201cIn what sense? In what way?\u201d I need more information. Can he write a string quartet? Can he cook a really nice dinner? Can he build a good cabinet?<\/p>\n
Historically, IQ was intimately bound up with eugenics. The tests were developed by leading eugenicists, many of whom had deeply racist and sexist views. They believed that the \u201cwhite race\u201d had superior intelligence relative to other racial categories, and they developed the test to confirm exactly what they wanted to show.<\/p>\n
There is a very clear continuity between the eugenics movement of the twentieth century and the emergence of the TESCREAL movement. Leading figures within the TESCREAL movement have sounded the alarm about the possibility of dysgenic pressures, \u201cdysgenic\u201d meaning the opposite of eugenic, where eugenic means literally \u201cgood birth.\u201d The idea is that intelligence is heritable, which is highly questionable from a scientific perspective. Dysgenics would occur if, for example, individuals who are \u201cless intelligent\u201d outbreed their \u201cmore intelligent\u201d peers, with the result that the prevalence of low IQ people within the population will increase across generations.<\/p>\n
People in the TESCREAL movement have explicitly worried about this. And this is an idea that the eugenicists of the twentieth century were completely freaked out about too. What if the non-white population of the United States grows in size and outbreeds the white population? Well, that could be really bad according to this view. It could cause dysgenic pressures, because according to these racist IQ realists, non-white populations have lower IQs. This led to an old-school eugenics program that involved banning interracial marriages or preventing immigration.<\/p>\n
The old-school eugenicists just wanted to improve the human species. Transhumanism says: Why stop at perfecting humanity? Why not create an entirely new and \u2018superior\u2019 post-human species?<\/p>\n
Transhumanism is uncontroversially a form of eugenics. In fact, transhumanism was initially introduced by some leading eugenicists of the twentieth century, such as Julian Huxley, a biologist who published several books on this topic. Transhumanism is eugenics on steroids. The old-school eugenicists just wanted to improve the human species. Transhumanism says: Why stop at perfecting humanity? Why not create an entirely new and \u201csuperior\u201d post-human species?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00c9mile Torres IQ is very important to a lot of people in the TESCREAL movement. Many of them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-294409","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}