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Nov. 14, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
51:15
IQ and People Who Don't Think Good

Edward Dutton and Richard Spencer discuss IQ, intelligence, *g*, and the people who deny it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Ed, welcome back.
How are you?
Hello.
Yes, I'm okay.
Yes, I just went on a retke, they call it in Finland, a walk in the forest where we then had a fire with some family friends and cooked Finnish sausages in celebration of my godson's 10th birthday.
That is great.
And then went to a very gothic, kind of scary, wicker man-looking bird-watching tower.
I looked out over the sea as all the birds have migrated, although I did see some swans flying overhead on the way home.
Otherwise, yes, that was today.
I went swimming with my son.
What have you been doing today?
Well, you just got up, haven't you?
I just woke up.
Yes, I was working on some stuff.
I was drafting some kind of bigger stuff I want to work on, and I'm actually pretty pleased with what I drafted, so I don't want to tell anyone about it, though.
No, keep it close to your chest for now.
Yes, I would say that.
Yeah, no, you know, there's something magical about fires in the woods.
It reconnects us.
Yes, it reconnects us.
I was thinking when I was there...
There's just something about it.
Yeah, the people of Calaballa would have been doing that.
Yeah.
And then my Finnish friend was telling me that there were these Finns that migrated to America.
In the 19th century, they ended up living on Native American reservations, known as Findi.
I've heard of that, actually.
No, I haven't heard of it.
And these Native Americans, I think somewhere in Michigan, have maintained Finnish folk songs and sauna.
There's a tribe of Finnish-influenced Native Americans somewhere in Michigan.
So, connecting to the ancestors and also to the Native Americans.
That's what we were doing today.
By a circuitous method, yes.
All right.
So, I wanted to talk about IQ, and I thought we could accomplish a couple of things here.
First off, because I follow your work and Jolly Heretic and so on, and we're finishing up your book that includes a big chapter in IQ, that I thought we could...
Give an introduction to our viewers and listeners on this subject, on intelligence, GE, etc.
But also, again, because I follow your work, I've noticed that there seems to have been a little renaissance of IQ, charitably call it criticism or denial.
And I would say this, I think there actually are a lot of good critiques you could make of I think that's fine to criticize it.
But there seems to be a renaissance of what might be properly called denial.
I was reading some Nassim Tlaib recently.
He's a man who actually has said many things that I agree with.
Kind of an interesting...
Public intellectual on finance and culture and society.
But when I was reading his critique of intelligence, I could not make heads or tails of it, to be frank.
That's not surprising.
I mean, I did do a live stream a few weeks ago on the Jolly Heretic.
On his critique of IQ, and the thing is that he does seem to be, I think it's reasonably charitable to him, he does seem to have some intelligent things to say about other things.
So I was looking to an interview that he did about religion.
So my immediate reaction when I read, because people were telling me I should read his essay, IQ is largely a scientific swindle.
And my immediate reaction was to think to myself, good God, if he writes things like this, then how could you take him seriously on anything?
But perhaps it is the case that he is an intelligent and thoughtful scholar, but he just for some reason has a particular blind spot on this subject, and for his own personal emotional reasons he just doesn't like it.
Yes.
And so if you say you can't make head nor tail of it, well, that's kind of the point.
If a person doesn't like something for their own emotional reasons, then there's no logical way of persuading people that the concept is not credible.
And so the way you have to do so is through emotionally manipulative means.
Through all kinds of fallacious arguments, through verbiage, through appeal to sort of locatiousness and lots and lots of big words and whatever, obscurism, and basically trying to bash the reader down to persuade them that they're in the presence of a profound mind and that they should accept what that profound mind has to say.
Lots of jargon.
And so it follows that it shouldn't make any sense, and it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, if you look at the way he expresses himself in the language he uses, it's very, very...
IQ is a stale test, so that's appealed to insult, meant to measure mental capacity, but in fact measures mostly extreme unintelligence, in bold, learning difficulties, as well as, to a certain extent, with a lot of noise.
A form of intelligence.
You've got these very long sentences, these meandering sentences in which you're meant to get lost so that you feel confused and feel stupid and all this kind of thing.
You then associate racists and eugenicists, he goes on about.
And it's not meant to make sense.
That's not the point of it.
It's meant to be obscure.
It's meant to be an appeal to verbosity and all of these techniques in order to emotionally persuade you that the profound thing to do is to think that IQ is nonsense.
And if you distill it down to its actual truth claims, then there is a researcher, a young fellow from Denmark, called Jonathan Pallison, who I've met, and he's a geneticist, and he's gone through every single claim that has been made in that article by Taleb, one by one, showing them all to be bogus.
So I think it is understandable that it's not meant to make sense.
Right.
Yes, if I were to write something on jazz music or something, I might do the same, you know, utilize the same tricks and lots of verbosity and basically appeal to moral shaming and so on in order to convince people that jazz music is not good.
let's uh uh Let's go back to that issue, because this is the issue that really bothers everyone.
And when the bell curve was released, I guess it's 30 years ago now, or it was really 1994, I believe, or thereabouts.
And the argument is that this is a justification for eugenics and colonialism, maybe also classism.
Although I guess that has a certain bit of truth when we're talking about Murray and Herrnstein.
But what I have discovered by looking at just the history of psychometrics is that actually the opposite is the case in just as many incidents as it is a tool of capitalist or a tool of eugenicist or so on.
So it was basically Binet in France who developed the first IQ test.
Am I correct on that?
Yeah, I suppose the first commonly recognized one.
Right.
Let's talk about the history of the IQ test, and then we'll kind of let that lead us into intelligence.
So the challenge at the turn of the 20th century was that we were moving to a...
So-called meritocratic, classless society.
And that there had to be, at some level, some kind of standard for assessing national populations in order to bring them into universities.
Or I guess in the case of the IQ test in the United States, it was used tremendously by the army during the First World War.
We have a huge...
Pile of data that emerged from that.
But what I also looked at, researching this, is that the SAT, too, had an egalitarian...
Of course it does, because if you think about how it used to be that you in England, for example, how it used to be that you would become an officer in the army.
You became an officer in the army for much of the 19th century by having the right connections, or literally by purchasing a commission.
That's how you became an officer in the army.
And therefore you'd get all kinds of upper-class incompetence, the second sons or whatever that weren't going to inherit the land.
Their fathers would purchase them a commission in the army and they would do stupid things.
So it was clearly from an egalitarian perspective.
If you accept that intelligence is a real thing and has real consequences, which it clearly does, I mean...
We can look at that if you want.
And if you accept that IQ measures intelligence, which it clearly does, then the unegalitarian thing to do is just to say, OK, well, we're going to assess how clever you are by how well you do at school.
And there's all kinds of variation in the nature of the school you go to and all this sort of thing.
In World War I, if you had been to a public school, that is to say a very prestigious private school like Eden or Harrow, then they would automatically make you an officer.
And the IQ test gets around that by obviating that problem to a certain extent and assessing your intelligence, your raw intelligence, independent of these cultural factors.
And it's true that, yes, the early IQ tests were culturally biased.
Because they would ask questions which working class people wouldn't be expected to know, or because people that were working class would have less exposure to vocabulary in books, and they'd have a lower vocabulary, so they'd do less well in the vocabulary component of the IQ test.
And so the way they got round that was by gradually honing the IQ test so that it was more and more and more G-loaded, more and more tapping in to the essence of intelligence and was less and less and less culturally biased.
And interestingly, what you find is then the prediction becomes, oh, well...
Certain races are going to do badly on these tests because they're culturally biased, or certain classes will do badly because they're culturally biased.
In fact, the opposite is true.
These people do the best on the most culturally biased components of the test, and the worst on the least.
Right.
Because there is a relationship between, for example, socioeconomic status of origin, of origin, and how intelligent you are.
But still, it's egalitarian in the sense that it allows, for example, for children who are born to working class families in England, sit an IQ test at the age of 11. Now, OK, you can debate whether 11 is the right age, because the older you get, then the more heritability of your intelligence comes through.
And also you get late.
So 11 might be too young, maybe they should sit at 14. But they sit at this desk at 11, and it's an IQ test, and on that basis, the cleverer ones would go to grammar school, and then you would find all of these people that were the products of grammar school, but were from modest backgrounds, like Margaret Thatcher, and Enoch Powell, and Jim Callaghan, and Howard Wilson, all these prime ministers, and people like that, in the 20th century.
And now they got rid of the grammar schools, and now that's gone.
That method of social mobility is gone, and we have a situation now in Britain where all three of the party leaders have been to private schools.
They were all photographed together at some stupid party.
A couple of them were photographed together when they were at Oxford.
So the IQ test is...
Much maligned.
People don't like it for their own personal and emotional reasons.
They don't like it because they don't like the idea that people are unequal, that people are unequal.
They don't like it because if people weren't unequal, then if you were in an aeroplane and that aeroplane was crashing and both the pilots were dead and there was no trained pilot on board, then you would just pick someone at random and say, OK, go and pilot the plane.
If that wasn't the case, then you would want someone that was more intelligent to go and pilot the plane.
Of course you would.
Of course we wouldn't expect a person who is a qualified engineer or doctor or something to be able to work out more quickly what they have to do.
And so it's just pretentious nonsense to say there's no such thing as intelligence.
Intelligence is composed for people of our viewers that aren't familiar with it.
You have these, you can think of it as a kind of pyramid.
At the bottom of the pyramid you have all these little abilities.
We call them intelligence abilities, tying your shoelaces.
Learning to drive a car and whatever.
Which very weakly are associated with intelligence, but are also predicted by other things.
Above that, you have the three main kinds that we're familiar with.
Verbal intelligence, spatial intelligence, mathematical intelligence.
And they all intercorrelate, although you get some that are higher in one than the other or whatever.
And above that, you have the thing that underpins them all, which is G, general intelligence.
The heritability of this is very high.
It's about point...
Basically about 80% to do with genes.
So it's overwhelmingly inherited.
Though there's a 20% environmental component.
Which is to do with how intellectually stimulating your environment is, mainly things like that.
Which is why the heritability of intelligence is quite low in childhood, it's about 0.2, because the environment is created by your parents, and they might be cleverer or stupider than you.
But as you grow older, you create your own environment, which is reflective of your own innate IQ.
And therefore, the genes come through.
And we have, by adulthood, 0.8 heritability, though there is a variation.
And it predicts how well you how intelligent you are and how well you do an IQ test as a measure of this predicts.
So first of all, IQ tests, are they measuring intelligence?
Well, they coronate strongly with other intuitive measures of intelligence, such as how well you do in school exams or how quickly you catch on to things.
Or what we mean by intelligence is the ability to solve problems and solve them quickly.
So yes, they are measuring it because they correlate strongly with other measures of the same thing.
And then they also, the IQ test scores, correlate significantly and robustly with a This is a book I did at our wit's end.
I mean, this is the same table that I'm consulting here is in the book that Washington Summit is about to publish on race.
It correlates with achievement motivation, with altruism, with analytic style, with how artistic you are, with how creative you are, with being healthy, educational attainment, emotional sensitivity, height, sense of humour.
Linguistic abilities, motor skills, and also it correlates negatively with criminality, and so it's clearly important in all cultures, and it correlates with objective things, such as reaction times, how fast your reaction time correlates with this objective thing, correlates with brain size.
This is an objective thing.
And then people say, well, there's other kinds of intelligence, like emotional intelligence and things like that.
But that actually correlates at point that's like solving social problems or empathizing with other people.
But that actually correlates at point three with G. So it's basically just a manifestation of the same thing.
So I can see no...
Good arguments whatsoever against intelligence.
I go through them all in this book, and I go through them all in the book that we're about to publish.
And what it ultimately seems to come down to, the argument, there's different kinds of intelligence.
Well, that can be dealt with.
Intelligence means different things in different cultures.
No, it doesn't.
We're talking about the...
Solving cognitive problems.
That's the same everywhere.
We don't know the genes behind intelligence.
We're just speculating.
Well, that's no argument.
We didn't know what genes were until sort of the, you know, 150, 70 years ago.
So that's really no argument at all.
That intelligence is a very Western concept, is one that I've heard.
Well, A, no it isn't.
There are similar terms in all kinds of societies.
B, we only started using the word intelligence in the way we now use it in about 1912.
Does that mean we can't talk about people before 1912 being intelligent or not intelligent?
And C, do we have to use the concepts of the society?
If that's the case, should we not be able to talk about things happening in France in English?
I mean, it's insane.
And the final argument is that intelligence makes you feel uncomfortable.
It's very dangerous.
The counter-argument to that is whether you feel uncomfortable, so what, basically.
And as it's very dangerous, you could similarly argue that denying it is very dangerous, because if you deny that the intelligence differences exist, then you're going to just appoint people to jobs at random.
And we know from the past when, well, they weren't appointed at random, but they were appointed according to their social class, that that can have bad consequences.
So there's no argument.
The thing that Taleb presented was a series of different arguments, as I say, and we can look at them if you want, but they're all wrong.
We don't have to.
I want to talk more about the subject a little bit.
You just put forth a very, very good...
I kind of want to go into all of those points.
In the American context, there was a similar class system with basically East Coast prep schools being feeders to the Ivy Leagues.
I'm forgetting his name.
I believe it starts with a B. One of the presidents of Harvard was enthusiastic about the SAT as a pure intelligence test.
It had the motive of finding very smart people in Nebraska, say, or Texas or Wyoming who would otherwise not be going to Harvard or Princeton or Yale.
If there is...
A form of affirmative action that still exists and that kind of supports white people.
It is that you are more likely to get into a top-tier school coming out of Montana than you are coming out of New York or New Jersey.
So there actually is a little bit of that legacy.
But again, it was part of I think that's kind of where the controversy comes in.
Because we have all of these people, the IQ deniers, are credentialist kind of meritocratic snobs in a way.
You don't get a lot of IQ denial from people who work at the lumberyard.
Or the gas station, they kind of say, oh yeah, he's really smart.
He's good at this kind of stuff.
That's a pretty clear concept for them.
Where you get the IQ denial is kind of ironically among these credentialist people who have degrees from fancy places and who have basically lived their whole life on the basis of the triumph of the resume.
Fairly ironic.
And you have to ask them, like, is there, you know, there must be some...
Do you believe in something like intelligence?
Do you believe that you are smarter than...
Some other person who is not in your position, whether as a public intellectual or academic or so on.
And I think they would ultimately say yes.
They don't want to see themselves as just the beneficiaries of class privilege or something like this.
So the question is, if there is this intelligence out there, gee, and however multivariate it might be, There must be a way in which intelligence is expressed in some way.
Whether it's a test, whether it's painting a painting, whether it's organizing your sock drawer, or whether it's coaching a football team or whatever.
There has to be a means of intelligence being expressed in the world.
And it's kind of curious that they accept that in all other fields.
However, when it comes to one test, they want to deny it.
It's interesting that that's the case.
It kind of makes sense that it's the case, because, of course, it's the fact that the IQ tests very clearly are...
Rank orders people in terms of sort of a number.
So do school exams, though.
School exams also do this.
But with school exams, they kind of say, oh, well, the difference is the person's intelligent, really, but it's just because they didn't have the opportunity or whatever, you know.
But the thing is with IQ tests is that they take away these excuses.
What they are, okay, there's differences.
You do get some people that can be intelligent but can be bad at IQ tests.
It's just rare.
But what they have basically imbibed is this, as the people that are the most intelligent, this correlates with being conformist, basically, with being socially conformist, with wanting to manipulate, having the ability and the self-control and the effortful control to force yourself to think in a way that...
That is the most conducive to rising up and staying at the top of the social hierarchy.
That's why people that are intelligent, not necessarily highly intelligent, but people that intelligence predicts conforming to the dominant worldview and being able to...
To see what the dominant worldview is, understanding the benefits of conforming to it, having the self-control to basically lie to yourself and force yourself to conform to it, and then also competing in a status hierarchy within that conformity by pushing it a little bit more.
you know, in the socially appropriate direction.
And that's how you get these slippery slopes whereby things get pushed in never more sort of left wing, anti intelligence, anti IQ direction, whereas people People that are less intelligent, either people you refer to working in the lumberyard, they're not like this at all.
And so I think this helps to explain why it is that it's the one thing that lower IQ people get right empirically more than higher IQ people.
Is the issue of intelligence.
Because the issue of intelligence is wrapped up in this current equalitarianism ideology, which the less intelligent people are less perceptive of, less able to understand, less willing to embrace.
And so, therefore, that's the one thing that intelligence is negatively associated with.
It's one truth.
That intelligence is negatively associated with accepting.
So that's why I think people that are more intelligent tend to ironically reject intelligence.
I suppose another reason, as you say, the triumph of the resume, that could be relevant in so much as the way they've got where they are is through working hard at school and all this kind of thing.
And so the way they see it is that they deserve it because they say they're credentialists.
They're not just often these people that are of that social class, not just intelligent.
They're high in conscientiousness.
They're high in agreeableness.
Everything to do with them.
The way you get somewhere in life, they can't think in an original way because they're rule-bound, they're rule-following, they're uncreative, they're conformist.
That kind of way of being allows you to get on in a world that is technocratic, that is, as you say, the triumph of the resume, that is credentialist.
And so what's scary for people like that is the idea that somebody could be completely the opposite kind of personality, that basically high in psychopathic traits.
And mega-intelligent.
And that person, you know, that non-midwit type person, that genius type person, they are like the head girl, these kinds of people.
These are the kind of male geniuses that are the opposite, can kind of get round their whole system of diligence and all this stuff and come up with some kind of brilliant idea.
And they can't comprehend people like that because they can't think creatively as far as they're concerned.
Do you know about science?
If you know about science, you must have a degree in science and a master's in science or a doctorate in science.
It's impossible for somebody who has no qualifications in science, who left school at 15 and got a job working in a lumberyard and just reads about science on the internet in their spare time.
It's impossible for them to make any contribution of originality to science.
Why?
Because they don't have any qualifications in it.
I remember a debate, and I'm not saying this to defend Sam Harris, who's the famous atheist, but I am not a defender of his ideas.
But he was in this debate with this man named Reza Aslan about basic, I think it was about Muslims and genital mutilation and terrorism or something.
And he was just kind of laying out some facts.
And although I'm not a Sam Harris fan, I'm not going to dispute his facts.
And Reza, basically, his counter-argument was, I have a degree in Muslim studies, so I understand the context of what you're talking about.
And then he just stopped talking and went off into another subject.
So it's just this, like, waving a degree in front of someone's face.
It's an appeal.
It's an appeal.
A people's authority, yeah.
It's an obvious policy appeal to authority, and so maybe his degree should be withdrawn because he obviously shouldn't have got it because he doesn't understand basic logic.
I think, ironically, he doesn't have a degree.
He has a degree in creative writing or some weird thing.
That's regardless.
I heard a case of a friend of mine who was a chef, and that friend is very well-read.
He's quite well-read and interested in things, open-minded, and he was arguing with somebody, and some friend of his turned around and said, how do you know about this?
You're only a chef.
And I'm like, shut up.
So what?
So what?
But that's how they see the world.
They see the world in terms of the...
The Finns might seem a bit like this compared to the English.
It's credentials.
And so this is worrying.
They can't understand these people.
And also it's worrying.
It kind of almost undermines what gives them what they have.
You could just cut away all that, and you could, and just say, well, I don't care what qualifications you've got.
I don't give a damn.
Sit in an IQ test, and I'll assess you accordingly.
I'll deal with you accordingly.
Well, you get it as well, because you actually have a degree in religious studies, although you talk about religion quite a bit, and I'm sure your background in that helps you.
I mean, I don't know about me, but that's what, in general, as a rule, that's what people that are reasonably creative do.
They see...
What do you have a degree in?
English literature or something?
Yeah, I've studied English literature and philosophy and so on, but yes.
Right, so you talk about other things.
Oh, I talked about physics last night.
That would be a bit above my head.
I certainly couldn't talk about computer science, but certainly...
I don't do that either.
You see the connection.
If you're creative, what original ideas manifest?
Any level of originality at all, is that you see the connections between different things.
Exactly.
And that's how you come up with something new.
And these people that are highly, these credentialists, they are incrementalists.
They can't really see the connection between different things.
They don't come up with new, they don't think like that.
It's not like boom, boom, boom, boom in this kind of intuitive way where you see connections.
I'll do this and I'll add a little bit on the end.
Yeah.
And they find these people, and therefore, in that sense, intelligence could be seen as threatening.
And also, I suppose you could argue that, yeah, they are a manifestation, often, these kinds of people of class privilege.
They've got where they've got, not through doing well in intelligence tests, because that means of getting into a high social status situation has gradually declined now in England, for example, past 11 plus or whatever.
That's gone.
They've got there, often, Through just privilege.
But I think the main thing is it's just ideological.
You're more intelligent.
You want to signal your intelligence.
How do you signal your intelligence?
By seeming profound.
How do you seem profound?
You don't hold things which are considered old-fashioned.
What is considered old-fashioned intelligence testing?
It's not just old-fashioned, it's considered immoral in some way and not very nice, and you want to signal that you're left-wing and kind and equalitarium, and so you can signal all those things.
And also, the obscuritism of it, what do we mean by intelligence?
How do you define intelligence?
Where do you draw the line?
And so it's sort of pseudo-profundity which you can signal by doubting intelligence.
Yeah, intelligence is, at some basic level, problem-solving.
Our ancestors, 10,000 years ago, they were caught.
They fell down in the forest and they broke their leg and they had to figure out how to get out.
And that is a problem solving that's literally life or death.
And the smart ones figured out a way to get out of there, maybe through medical advances, maybe through somehow signaling someone to come help them, maybe somehow hunting in a clever way that they could do even though they were injured so they could eat and survive another day.
That is the intelligence test.
Precisely.
But they also evolved other traits, such as the desire to conform socially, and it's the conflict between these which is why you get this.
So the people that are up for intelligence are the ones that are just people that believe it, are into it, in my experience of doing research with these kinds of people, are basically highly intelligent autistics.
And what they're interested in is the truth, and that's it, and systematizing, and that's it.
Whereas the people that are going to deny it are more of the kind of humanities types.
They're less intelligent, firstly, but secondly, they're less kind of autistic.
They're higher in sort of social skill and education.
Let's go into this.
So, intelligence...
Let's say it co-evolves with other mental traits that are valuable, like empathy, which is kind of like the way you described it, which I found insightful, was the theory of mind, where you can kind of understand what someone else is thinking.
You can put yourself in their shoes.
Cooperation.
Rule following.
And so on.
That these are things that kind of are related to intelligence.
They're not quite intelligence.
But that they co-evolve together to create a more cooperative and group-oriented society.
And so what we're talking about with the midwet, and maybe we shouldn't even say midwet as someone with 100 IQ, like Joe Average.
Those people are sometimes more maybe redeemable.
They're watching football.
The midman is almost the guy with 115.
Yeah, that's worse.
Yeah, he's not as smart as he thinks he is.
But they also have a lot of those generally positive social traits.
I mean, you cannot have a functioning society with a bunch of geniuses.
I mean, this is...
This is the kind of limit of IQ, you could say.
If everyone had a 140 IQ, who would clean the roads?
Who would build the houses?
Who would make the food?
Who would pick the crops?
We would all be sitting around.
You know, contemplating the heavenly spheres, and nothing would get done.
And so it actually is a bit of a problem.
I'm not 100% sure about that, because you could have an IQ of 104.
Yeah, kind of, you're right.
I mean, as the IQ gets higher, there's some evidence that autistic treats become higher.
As IQ gets higher, there is some evidence that openness becomes higher.
That's true.
Yeah, you're an ambition for something else.
Right, exactly.
And as IQ gets higher, there is some evidence that the positive manifold between the different components of IQ becomes weaker, and so at the extreme you get more of these kind of Sheldon Cooper type weirdos that are obsessive but are useless at everyday things.
So yeah, you are right.
I think it does bring in an inbuilt limit on IQ.
That said, I would suspect that the average IQ by modern standards, the average intelligence 150 years ago was probably about 130, I think.
Oh, wow.
That high?
It was definitely 20 points higher.
If we take the 100 of now, or the 100 in the year 2000, so the average in the year 2000, it was 20 points higher than that in about 1870.
When you think about it, it's funny when you think about these things, because I've often used this comparison, but if you go back to, say, the Globe Theatre, you had a situation where...
What we know, Milton apparently attended the premiere of Hamlet.
I mean, at least this is a speculation anecdote.
But so life was much harsher and crueler.
I mean, in the Globe Theater, they would often engage in bear baiting before or after the plays.
That is sick dogs on bears, and you could wager at how many dogs it would take to kill the bear.
Macbeth actually references this at one point in his speech on, you know, I'm at the stake surrounded by...
By dogs and so on.
So life was crueler and harsher.
Death was more present.
It was part of life than it is today.
But at the same time, the...
The level of intellect.
We're kind of distanced from Shakespeare's English.
Doing a doctoral thesis now, let's say, you've got the internet, you've got access to all the literature you could possibly want.
Think how much harder it was to write a doctoral thesis in 1990.
Oh, my gosh.
And the standard has probably gone down anyway because of the growth of the industry.
But even so, even if it hadn't, think it much harder and how much, therefore, to get to the same standard, how much more work and more intelligence would be required in 1990 before the Internet, before even having a PC, and you have to write it out than now.
And so then if you think about the building of huge cathedrals...
Without the engineering capacities that we have now, how intelligent you'd have to be to ensure that they didn't fall down.
Right.
And so I think that they were very, very significantly cleverer than us, but they were living in this different environment as well, so that it would militate against these autistic tendencies because they would all be so under stress and fearing death that they would all be religious.
And so it would bring in those kinds of instincts which perhaps do not hit in.
So a person with 140 IQ living now would not be the same person as a person with 140 IQ living in an environment with 50% child mortality.
That person would be more religious.
That person would be more pro-social because of the nature of his environment.
So I don't think it's that bizarre, but I think you are right that there's probably an inbuilt...
Sealing all intelligence, because if we get too intelligent and we create a society that is too luxurious, then eventually we all stop believing in God and we stop wanting to have children.
We don't have children and we die out.
And the other inbuilt thing is that as you become, the society is reliant on a certain resource, whether it's iron or whether it is bronze or whether it's oil.
And the ability to extract it.
And as you become more intelligent, you extract it more efficiently and whatever, and you realise there could be problems extracting it, and so you diversify.
But eventually, inevitably, you weaken the Darwinian conditions, you become less intelligent, you stop planning for the future, and you kind of run out of the resource, or you run out of the ability to efficiently attain the resource, because you're not thinking about the future enough to do something about it.
Right.
That's when, I think, Betty Megas, her name is.
Betty, she's an archaeologist, American archaeologist, and she referred to how basically civilizations grow because of an increase in energy resources, the ability to extract energy more efficiently.
And then eventually, as that ability decreases, civilizations shrink.
Well, I think we're still, I mean, you put a lot of emphasis in your work on the Industrial Revolution, and I don't disagree with that, but I think that big energy resource that civilization is running on, or actually twofold, it's fossil fuels and then debt.
The creation of debt on the levels that we have it today is absolutely incredible.
And what we're actually seeing as well is we're getting less and less GDP growth from more and more debt.
So I heard the other day that 80% of the dollars that have ever existed were actually created in the past year.
The United States, again, it's fiat currency.
You can create credit.
You're basically inflating the money supply.
You're creating debt.
You're not necessarily inflating the prices, which hasn't happened.
But basically, we are getting less and less bang for our buck.
We're creating debt at outrageous levels.
Yet, the actual increase in standard of living...
And an increase in just measurable GDP growth, which is a flawed statistic, is going down and down.
We seem to be kind of hitting the end of this resource.
And I think we're also kind of getting limited returns, diminishing returns, from fossil fuel growth.
Sorry, excuse my ignorance, because I don't really understand much about this.
But isn't debt, it's basically just a confidence issue, isn't it?
It is a confidence.
The fact that we can use fiat currency is a confidence game.
No question.
If the confidence ever goes, the kind of Weimar disaster that would occur would be spectacular.
I'm not sure I want to live through that.
Also, there's a kind of political element to it in the sense that the United States has military bases around the world.
Do you really want to fuck with Uncle Sam?
Maybe you should continue to use the currency and stay in the system.
There's all of these incentives to stay in the system because there's a human desire not to lose what we have.
What I am saying is that this mega debt financial system that we've created is hitting diminishing returns.
We're creating trillions and getting almost...
Maybe millions in growth.
What you would prognosticate on that basis is as we become less intelligent, you can conceive of the Industrial Revolution, as I've written about this before, as my colleague Bruce Charlton's metaphor, as rather like capital.
So you have the person who, I don't know, the genius, whatever, and he comes up with this brilliant idea and he makes loads of money.
And in order to...
For that to make interest, all you have to do is tinkering, is minor, minor innovation.
And so the son of his, who's not particularly intelligent, you know, he has this money, he just tinkers with it.
He's not as intelligent, but he just tinkers with it, and he continues to make money.
And eventually, as the grandson is less intelligent, he's not tinkering with it at all.
And eventually it stops making money, and then you start eating into the capital.
And that would be the equivalent of us.
That's what we're doing right now, I think.
We used to be able to do.
So it's like innovation stops and then innovation goes backwards.
Because where we are at now is we're not doing many major per capita innovations anymore.
We've gone down to the same level of per capita innovation that we had in about 1600.
But we are doing these minor innovations which kind of keep it ticking over for a while.
Eventually the minor innovations will dry up.
And so then you'll have stagnation.
And then you find, you predict that you will cease to be able to do the things you used to be able to do.
Because as intelligence goes down, every generation, the top level boils off, every generation.
So you get the genius who invents the car, and then you get the sort of semi-genius who can make major innovations for the car, and then so on all the way down to the person that can drive the car only, and then the person that can't even drive the car.
I think we're in the Hunter-Biden stage of world civilization, in fact.
The Hunter-Biden stage, all of the capital was created by our fathers, and we're now basically using drugs and banging prostitutes.
Yeah, I think that's a good analogy.
I like that.
The Industrial Revolution was the Joe Biden phase of civilization.
We are now at the Hunter Biden stage.
I did a godless one stage after the Hunter Biden stage.
Right.
We'll long for the civilized tendencies of Hunter Biden once we reach the next stage.
The Hunter Biden's laptop stage.
And that's when you really are, you know...
Going backwards.
So, yeah, what we would expect, it always happens.
I mean, the idea, the hubris thing that's not going to happen, it always happens.
And the thing is that you could argue as well, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
So what you have in Rome, what percentage of people in the Roman Empire were farming?
It was probably about half.
I don't know exactly, but it was at least half.
Oh, yeah.
Easily.
Right, whereas in modern Western societies, it's about 4% of people that farm.
Exactly, yeah.
So that means that when the massive mega-collapse happens, 4% of the population have immediately useful skills.
Yeah.
And everybody else is going to be left in this chaos, which will hit in, which did when the Roman Empire collapsed.
Suddenly people are fleeing the cities, the cities are being capitalised for the useful materials.
The people that are highly intelligent, they don't want to have children anyway, but they've got very little offer in terms of surviving, so they die off.
You saw this in North Korea, in the famine.
People that were doctors and whatever just die.
They had no ability to survive.
People that were reasonably intelligent and had some sort of skill that they could use, they were the ones that thrive, as capitalism reasserted itself.
And also those that had access to the immediate sources of food.
And so it would be something like that that you would predict that would happen.
I think we've got to, as I said, based on the current direction of things from that paper by who is called Hubner.
We will be back 100 years from now, same level of per capita innovation that we ran at 1,100.
I read this paper as well while I was working on your book, and I found it quite interesting.
What he's doing is per capita innovation.
Of course, it's imperfect.
How you quantify major innovations and inventions and so on.
But I think it is reasonably well done.
And what he's looking at is per capita innovation.
So beginning, you know, post-dark ages, let's say beginning around the 16th century or something, we start to have this parabolic rise in the tremendous innovations that are occurring.
Per the world population.
And this basically peaks in the 19th century, where we're, you know, making major innovations in medicine, we're inventing the bicycle and then the automobile.
There's even, like, the kind of basics of computer science that are going, you know, just this tremendous renaissance of thought.
Obviously, I think, you know, Newtonian mechanics was, you know, perhaps the greatest Explosion of intellect that led to all sorts of things.
That's here.
So if you look at this, this is for capital innovation.
And look at this outlier here.
That's Newton.
That's Newton.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so, but we're now going down, and there was a little bit of an uptick, I think, around the age of computer science, basically in the mid-20th century.
But world population is increasing tremendously.
We're at 7.5 billion or whatever.
But the actual inventions are going down.
And so I think this also belies this kind of happy talk.
There was a study which found how quickly you can double the speed of technology with the same number of people involved.
You need more people to do it.
That's what you said about the mid-20th century rise.
So look at this.
It goes down, down, down, down, down, down, up.
Right.
And so, remember all this.
I remember when I was in college during the late 90s, and there was all of this happy talk about the new economy, technology, the internet is going to change everything.
And it has, to a certain degree.
But so much of that happy talk derived from, again, debt financing of...
Purchasing stocks and debt finance lifestyle.
We were increasing debt, but the technology really wasn't increasing to that level.
And so, yeah, a new iPhone comes out every year, but in terms of groundbreaking inventions that are really going to change the status quo, improve lifestyle styles for all, create new paradigms, it's simply not happening.
Was arguing for kind of a technological limit in that paper, where it's...
I mean, and again, I agree with him to a certain degree.
I think there are other factors.
But there's kind of a limit to technology.
We haven't had that great genius who's opened up a new world for us.
He doesn't look at it.
Why did we come so far this time?
And I think one of the reasons for that is that the conditions were so harsh.
The more and the minimum.
It was so cold.
Creating such enormous group conflict, creating such enormous selection for genius, on the one hand, and groups with high levels per capita of genius, and also with selecting for very high levels of religiousness.
And I think that's the key factor.
So it's once they reach a certain level of luxury, and they don't feel very stressed, and so they stop being religious, and then they stop the people like that, who tend to be more intelligent, stop having children, and they stop believing in the gods, and they become decadent, and society...
It goes backwards in very predictable ways.
Less patriarchal, more immigration, blah, blah.
It's always the same.
But in our case, we were so high in religiousness that we had to be at a very, relatively speaking, very, very low level of stress to stop this instinct of believing in religion to hit in because we were genetically so high in it.
So that's why we got part of the Industrial Revolution.
That's why we didn't stop becoming strongly irreligious until really about...
1900, if not later, we got past industrial revolution, and the correlation, the negative correlation between religion and intelligence happened after, rather than just on the cusp of, as had always previously been the case, an industrial revolution.
So I think that's why, but then it leads to the nature of the collapse, and so the nature of the, I don't know, the late Bronze Age collapse, which occurred at about 1,000...
300 BC or something.
In places like Canaan, let's say, was that you go from being an agriculturalist to being a pastoralist.
Well, that's not much of a hit.
People are going to die because the land can sustain fewer people.
But that's not much of a hit.
And once you've gone to a situation where you collapse on the cusp of an industrial revolution, well, then you're going to collapse from, let's say, an English population of 8 million down to an English population of 4 million, something like that, or 5 million, something like that might happen, which did happen, those kind of things did happen.
What we're talking about is a collapse of about 90% of the population.
Because that's what would be alive.
It would be 10% of the population would be around who were industrial conditions.
And so if those conditions go, and then think what happens then is there's a period of chaos where there's basically selection of absolute chaos, where there is selection for intelligence to some extent, because intelligence helps you survive chaos.
But it's only weak selection.
Weak.
Because intelligence also correlates with being conscientious and with moral following and conformism.
And it's actually going to be this violent, impulsive...
Brutal type, yeah.
...psychos that are going to be more likely to survive in absolute...
are a strategist in absolute chaos.
Or at the very least, they'll get all the girls, right?
Well, yeah.
They get all the girls in the future.
Yeah.
So then you're going to have a period where you just get this collapse.
I hope I'm not around them, although I'm increasingly believing that I might be around them.
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