2995 Impacting Intelligence (IQ) | Stefan Molyneux and Hank Pellissier
Stefan Molyneux and Hank Pellissier discuss Intelligence including ways in which human intelligence can be decreased by chosen behavior. Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high compared to the general population? What religious tradition has had a fascinating dysgenic impact on intelligence? Should college education be free? Hank Pellissier is a humanitarian writer, editor, speaker and producer, especially on futurist and transhumanist topics. He’s the author of several books including "Brighter Brains: 225 Ways to Elevate or Injure IQ" and "Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so High?"
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
We are going to talk about brain power, and we're going to have you come out of this looking like an extra in Megamind.
There's a giant light bulb shake, cling on forehead of intense intelligence.
I have Hank Pellissier.
He's a humanitarian writer, editor, speaker, and producer.
He writes on futurist and transhumanist topics.
He's the author of several books, including Brighter Brains, 225 Ways...
To elevate or injure IQ, which is great because, Hank, I've got three minutes per topic, so we should have a tasty nine-hour show.
I'm very excited about that.
And also, why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high?
So thanks so much, Hank, for taking the time today.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
So, just to begin with, I always want to be sensitive to where audiences are coming from, and there has been a fair amount of discussions, both in the academic and laypeople circles, that IQ is...
Nonsense.
It only measures test-taking ability.
It's wildly culturally biased and so on.
Before we talk about how to improve something, let's talk about what it is and what it measures.
Let's just have a brief chat about IQ as a whole and whether it is relevant and what it claims to measure.
Sure.
I mean, the IQ test is just a test.
It correlates really closely to, say, a GRE test or a SAT test and various other tests.
It's simply a test that measures your problem-solving ability.
And I do understand that people get really upset that people are categorized and given a number on their IQ, but it is...
I mean, I think it's a very valid sort of test.
And everybody has...
Our children go to school and they're tested and they get into college based on SAT scores and they get into private schools based on their scores and so the IQ is basically a test like other tests.
Well, and I also wanted to mention that people think, maybe because they're still in school, maybe they think that testing ends after you leave school.
But every time you're employed by someone, it's a daily test of are you producing more value than you're consuming?
Every time you try to make a sale, you're tested to find out whether you make the sale or not.
Every time you ask a woman out on a date, you're tested to see whether she'll say yes.
Like the tests or comparative ability exams don't just end because there's not somebody standing over you with a clipboard.
And I think this is one of the reasons why IQ tests seem to correlate so strongly with life success as a whole.
Right.
I should also explain that IQ tests test a wide variety of different skills.
There's a very interesting one called the Ravens, which simply measures your ability to look at patterns.
Like, say, you'll look at four different shapes or figures, and you have to determine which one doesn't belong there.
So that's like a completely nonverbal, you don't have to have any kind of It's like a visual, spatial kind of test.
So that's one where you can't say there's any kind of cultural bias, for example.
And then people are tested on their mathematical ability and their verbal ability.
And I actually find it very interesting that some cultures score extremely high in verbal IQ and not in visual-spatial, and others score really high in visual-spatial and not in verbal.
In terms of that...
Well, and this does go to some degree, and nobody knows for sure the degree to which what is commonly called G, which is the measure of general intelligence rather than specific learned application, The degree to which it's genetic or cultural, nobody knows.
But as far as I understand it, East Asians tend to score very high on visual spatial, which, of course, you know, the sort of oriental engineer is kind of the cliche, whereas Ashkenazi Jews tend to score extraordinarily high on verbal, which is why they're not as highly represented in places like engineering or architecture or things like that.
Right, that's exactly right.
Ashkenazi Jews score only slightly above the average in visual-spatial, as I remember.
And I think that East Asians only score slightly above average in verbal as well.
So, it does measure something real.
It's not necessarily culturally biased.
I remember my first introduction to the IQ test was, one of the questions was, you know, what is a regatta is like, you know, and of course, for a lot of inner city kids, when I was growing up, regatta, which is, of course, an upper middle class boat race run by wasps as a whole, they'd be like, regatta, I don't know, is that part of the name of a police album?
That's as far as...
Most people would get.
But I think a lot of work has been done since then to try to really make it as accessible as possible.
And in some of the IQ tests that I've reviewed, yeah, it's just like looking at Mandela patterns of Jung's or something.
They're just looking for ways in which, you know, guess the next image or the next glyph in this kind of sequence.
It doesn't require any particular reading ability.
You're just looking for pattern.
And some of the math stuff is...
Find the number patterns.
Like, what's the next number in this sequence according to the previous ones?
And that, again, is trying to measure raw processing power independent of preparation for a particular test.
Right, right.
I actually think that people's ability in the IQ test can be very fluid.
Although I took it three times when I was in my teens, I scored about the same each time.
Around 125, 126.
Then when I took the GRE, which they actually translated into an IQ score, I scored a little bit higher.
But since then, I took it about six months ago just to see how well I would do.
I originally did as well as I did in the IQ test because my math ability was pretty good.
But when I took it over again, since I haven't done any math in about 40 years, my math ability was terrible.
But I decided upon writing as a profession, so now my verbal ability has made up for my math ability, which has declined.
So I think it's pretty fluid.
Well, and I certainly think that there are those famous studies of the London cabbies.
They did these MRIs of the London cabbies and found that their spatial and inner sort of GPS map representational areas were huge.
Now, of course, it's really tough to figure out the cause and effect of that, right?
So, I mean, in your example, clearly being a writer helped with your language abilities, but we don't know if the cab drivers had these great geospatial abilities in their brains, which is why they continued to be cab drivers, whereas other people didn't.
Maybe it enhanced it slightly.
But the degree to which the brain is a muscle that can be enhanced by work, or the degree to which you're drawn towards that which your brain is already good at, is something I think that's still being teased at.
Right.
There's actually a recent study from UC Davis that I just wrote an article on.
It's about what curiosity does to the brain.
When you're curious, you release dopamine, which It sort of infuses the hippocampus with dopamine and it allows the hippocampus to memorize facts easier.
I think that's what happened with these London cab drivers.
They were just simply impelled to learn what they had to learn.
They actually did retain a lot more information.
I think we're all doing that all the time.
Oh, and certainly for what I do, Hank, the rush of a new connection or a new idea or a new understanding is like, I mean, I might as well be a Wall Street broker in a bathroom with a rolled-up $100 bill and a hooker's butt with cocaine on it because it's really quite a high and that's what I'm in pursuit of.
And my particular kind of mentality is, I always want to do something new, find some new information.
That's where I get my greatest dopamine hit.
I can't claim any credit for that.
It's just I'm a dopamine sniffing hound, I guess, like most of us.
So I think we can sort of say it does measure something in the brain.
I've read, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about before we get into sort of how to raise or lower it, Lowering it, I get.
I mean, we've talked a lot in this show about things like corporal punishment, a lack of breastfeeding, and so on.
Those seem to shave off significant IQ points.
I mean, estimates of 4 to 5 IQ points down for corporal punishment, another 3 to 4 to 5 down for not breastfeeding for the recommended 12 to 18 months and so on.
But so I get that you can lower it.
But my question is the degree to which it can be raised is something that's because some of the research that I've read says it's sort of like height, you know, like if you don't give a kid enough food, he'll grow up stunted, but if you give him extra food, he won't get taller than he would have been according to the genetics.
And so That sort of my question is the degree to which, you know, giant programs like Head Start in the U.S. where billions and billions of dollars were spent trying to raise IQ and Charles Molley arguments basically that you can't do much to raise it or we don't know ways in which we can generally raise it.
We know ways we can harm it.
That's where I'm sort of really fascinated by your approach about raising it.
So...
Some people say, well, the female brain matures sort of 22, 23, male brain 29, 30, and so on.
And so until that point, there's going to be a lot of variation, both between the genders and even within the genders, because people's brains are just maturing at different rates.
But I've seen a lot of studies that show that their IQ seems to be pretty stable after brain maturation.
Is that not something you found to be the case?
Well, I have to agree with you.
There's a lot more research on how to harm the brain than there is on how to actually improve the brain.
There are smart drugs.
Those just give you sort of temporary clarity and things.
There is an Austrian, I don't know if you're familiar with Heiner Rinderman, he's an Austrian guy who writes a lot about IQ, and I really believe him.
He actually thinks that education is kind of a boring topic, but he actually believes education is the best way to raise your IQ. And in my own experience, I have two daughters.
I have one daughter who was, her IQ was tested.
And it was very average, which actually, you know, wasn't actually good enough for my wife and I. So you got battery cables and some jolt colas, right?
We put her in a school that had a smaller amount of students per classroom.
And she had excellent teachers.
And she has transformed from being a...
5th grade B student to being a 9th grade A student, getting into extremely good, exclusive high school And I think what Heiner Rinderman says, he actually thinks that good education can elevate your IQ by up to five points a year, which seems absolutely incredible.
I mean, you can't do that every year.
But, you know, I get a lot of email from people because of the books I've written.
I got an interesting one from Appalachia, from somebody who grew up in Appalachia, and he said...
Wait, wait, I'm just sorry.
The moment you say Appalachia, I've got to get out of my cliche brain, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, was it written with his mouth in crayon, in big letters?
Was there any punctuation?
Were things spelt phonetically?
That's completely bigoted, and I just wanted to get that out of my head before we continue.
Okay, Appalachia, Appalachia.
I think that's an important introduction.
I think he was actually told me that he was from Appalachia, so that I would...
Have that understanding of his background.
But he said that he was tested for his IQ in high school and it was like 110.
And he said it was good enough for him to get into a college and he was retested and it was like 125.
And then he went on to grad school and he was like tested again and now it's like 138.
So I think he has exercised his brain really well with good education and he has elevated his IQ because of it.
Can I just add one other thing, too?
And this is sort of a pitch for, I think, the approach.
Certainly the approach that I take.
I don't want to sort of say without your permission.
It's the approach that you take.
But I think that raw IQ is obviously very important.
But to me, if you have a good methodology for understanding the world, that's going to give you massively charged IQ. And I sort of think of before the...
in the 16th century, science really hadn't advanced much since the days of Aristotle.
Once you get a good methodology, then you get this unbelievable leap forward.
You know, like 200 years ago, they still thought that the body was a bag of blood, that nothing, the blood didn't even move around the body.
And now you can take a pig's spleen and put it up in your eyeball or like crazy stuff that's going on.
I think if you have a good methodology, you get incredible traction with your brain power.
And the degree to which we can help people think rationally and critically and philosophically is the degree to which IQ becomes a little less relevant.
Because a scientist today whose average is infinitely superior in many ways to a complete genius scientist in, say, St.
Augustine's time, who didn't have the kind of methodology that we have now.
Right, right.
I agree with all of that.
I don't really have anything to add to that.
Sorry, having derailed your train of thought.
We'll get back on it.
So let's start talking about, we'll start with the bad news first.
You know, I'm the kind of guy, someone comes up and says, I got good news, I got bad news.
They're like, tell me the good news first so I can surf out of here on a happy joy juice of dopamine.
Were you breastfed or not?
That sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
So let's start talking about the ways in which we can break the brains before we talk about how we can mold them to our own nefarious purposes.
Breastfeeding, it seems to be something that's very good for the developing brain.
It's great to have a mother in a womb that isn't full of alcohol and cigarette smoke.
Those are You know, that would be really great.
You know, I write for transhumanist blogs and there's always a lot of talk about artificial wombs, which are decades away probably, but I think it's interesting that this notion of coming up with a completely safe environment.
So that's really great.
It's great to stay away from pollutants, you know, pesticides and smoking again.
Most drugs, although marijuana is still kind of...
I don't know.
A lot of scientific reports are coming in about marijuana, so I'm really not...
I have a good friend who thinks that marijuana is terrible for the developing brain, and then there's other studies that indicate that Maybe it's not so I'm not quite sure about that It's the peyote question with regards to self-knowledge, right?
I mean some people swear by it and other people say I was never My brain never worked again afterwards.
So yeah, I think that remains an up-in-the-air question I'm sort of in between on that one.
It didn't hurt my brain, but I don't know that much either So yeah, I've you know, I have a charity that works in Africa so I've done a lot of research on what hurts the brains.
And also, you know, disease actually hurts the brain.
If kids have like a You know, like a long fever or high fever or they miss like 20 days of school every semester.
This isn't good.
Or there are those, I think in particular, you know, the grim statistics in IQ around sub-Saharan Africa, I've also heard could be related not just to the obvious sort of lack of nutrition, political instability, chronic stress, but also parasites that take nutrients away from the developing brain.
Right, that's true.
And malaria and tuberculosis.
Yeah, these sorts of things.
There are a couple of things you could do, at least for kids.
I think taking probiotics is great.
I take probiotics.
If they keep you from getting sick, that will lead to brain health.
Taking a vitamin B complex is probably a good idea as well.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Bulletproof Diet, David Asprey or any of this.
It's like a pro-fat diet.
I don't know what percentage, but a huge percentage of the brain is fat, and the brain needs fat.
There's the fact that things like butter and coconut oil and things like this are also good for the brain.
Fish oil, those are all excellent.
Exercise is great for the brain.
I actually do weight training and I find weightlifting to be great.
I've read that it's actually very good for the brain, especially in older adults.
Oh, I agree.
I do weight training as well.
I've actually done some during shows when I haven't had a time to, not this one, of course, but no, it is great.
I do it because, I mean, it's good for me, but also I get great ideas while I'm doing it.
I think because my body thinks, like it panics and thinks I'm lifting a log off my broken leg or something, and it's like, okay, we'll give you some great ideas.
So I think it is great.
And of course, you know, it keeps your circulation going, keeps your blood pumping, which is obviously great.
That's the basic food of the brain.
Yeah.
I know you were interested in my book or my essay on why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jew so high.
And that's a topic that I've spent quite a bit of time on.
And I think perhaps the reason that, the main reason, you know, I came up with 20 possible reasons why the Ashkenazi Jew would be higher.
And I think perhaps the main one would just be that Literacy was stressed in Jewish culture from, you know, more than 2,000 years ago, that it's required, it's mandatory, and that education is simply stressed, and education is also highly stressed in East Asia.
I think it's very interesting that That the longtime hero of East Asia is Confucius, who is mainly regarded as simply as a teacher.
We don't have any...
How many USA teachers can we name?
But he's revered as a teacher.
And so I think...
And even with Confucius, The notion of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
And the Jewish culture has the same thing.
Studying the Torah and the Talmud for seven years, simply because educating yourself is an excellent thing to do.
So I think having a culture like that, instead of perhaps worshiping Superheroes and military heroes.
And sports heroes.
Sports heroes, of course.
LeBron James had a great game last night, though.
Yeah.
But not while reading.
That's the key.
He was not listening to an audio book or anything.
No, and I think one of the things that you mentioned that I come from a Christian background, and one of the things I found really frustrating when reading, but very illuminating, was, and this does touch on IQ and genetics, and again, we don't know any particular answers.
I've heard estimates from 30% up to 70% of IQ is genetic and origin, That seems like too wide a spread to be particularly helpful, but there's definitely some component of it, for sure.
And twin studies have shown that for the last 100 years.
So I found it fascinating when you were talking, Hank, about the degree to which marrying The rabbi was, like, the best!
You know, if you can beg a rabbi, that's fantastic.
And of course, becoming a rabbi is not pretty much the purview of people with an IQ of 85, right?
I mean, it's really hard, brain-straining kind of work.
And the idea that you would attempt to get the best women to mate with the smartest men For a long period of time is fascinating.
And then comparing that to the Catholic approach, which is like, let's take all the men who can learn Latin and Greek and really understand what the hell the Trinity actually means.
Let's take all of those, put them in a tower and make sure they don't breed in any way, shape or form.
It's like, could you dysgenically engineer things better for a thousand years than to dumb down the general population?
Sorry, my ancestor is just kind of annoying sometimes.
I think that's a, it is a really interesting point, that all the rabbis were having 12 to 16 children.
The smartest person was breeding, you know, having 16 kids.
Well, we don't know if these Catholics were actually having kids or not, but they weren't supposed to be having kids.
16 of them, I don't think.
But, you know, another sort of in-between is where it's simply like the biggest brute, the head of the Cossacks or something, is having 20 children.
And he might just be, you know, he's strong and he's a killer and he has, you know, warrior instinct.
But he's not the most, perhaps not, probably not the most intellectual person in the group.
It's something which we haven't seen for so long.
I was reading the other day that up until the 20th century, the rich vastly outbred the poor.
Yes.
Now, quite the reverse is occurring now where, you know, it's the opening to idiocracy where the smart people are all like, ooh, I don't know if the stock market is quite right for us to have a baby.
Whereas, of course, basically in this Monty Python Catholic scenario, there's all of these less intelligent people squirting babies out of their armpits whenever they scratch their heads.
And that kind of stuff, again, is one of these things that...
You know, what's going to happen in the long term with all of this?
With that all having been said, you know, recently we had James Flynn on the show to talk about the Flynn effect where, you know, you could make the case that 30 IQ points have been gained in over a hundred, little over a hundred years in the West.
And that, again, boy, if it can do that with the dysgenics of less intelligent people generally having more and more kids, boy, imagine if we had a different kind of focus on things.
Yeah, I read a very controversial essay It's called Ban Baby Making Unless Parents Are Licensed, which is, you know, I got all kinds of hate on that one, but it's what you're talking about.
It's just like sort of questioning the notion that absolutely anybody is allowed to have as many children as they want, particularly if you have something like a reoccurring fetal alcohol syndrome birth, this sort of thing.
I know that Singapore has enacted eugenic Eugenic laws.
We just have to call them eugenic.
You know, which is encouraging people with more wealth and more education to have children.
And giving incentives to people who are not well educated and don't have a lot of money to not have kids.
Like, say, to give them a housing situation saying, you can live here, but you can't have any more children.
But people get very upset by that idea.
Well, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think rightly so.
I mean, the capacity to create life is really one of the most personal and powerful capacities that we have as human beings.
It's the only reason we're here is because somebody decided to do that.
And I'm not a big fan of eugenics in any form, but people look at the current system that we have and don't want to wander off into wildly political territory, but I feel I must do it.
But people look at the current system that we have now and they say, well, we wouldn't want to introduce eugenics into this system.
But the system itself is based upon eugenics in that we take money from people who have more resources and we give it to people who have fewer resources and we pay people to have children if they're poor and we tax people on having children if they're rich.
That is eugenics.
You know, politics aside, that is all eugenics.
I'd actually love to see a society with no eugenics, but that's A very different, and I think arguably much more free society than what we have right now.
I don't think adding more eugenics to deal with existing eugenics is the solution.
Yeah.
Well, since you've wandered into politics, I spent a lot of this morning reading about Bernie Sanders, who has the notion of providing free education.
And if education is the very best thing for IQ, and there's that whole book, Wealth of a Nation and How It's Tied to IQ, if If IQ is tied to a wealth of a nation and education is tied to IQ, providing free education might be an extremely good political move.
Now, he means college, right?
I mean, free college education.
He's also into universal preschool, which I also think is a good idea.
You don't like that?
No, go ahead.
You make your case, then I'll go ahead.
I think there's been an awful lot of studies that show that universal preschool and giving four-year-olds a free education is...
You know what?
The cost of preschool in the Bay Area now is $2,000 a month.
That's a frightening amount of money.
I used to actually be a preschool director.
$2,000 a month?
$2,000 a month.
Does that include a full golden cost of your child?
I assume that you get that at the end of the month, because that is like a staggering amount of money.
I don't even know if you get lunch with that.
I really don't.
What, do you get a spear and access to the woods?
Go get those squirrels, Bobby!
Yeah, you find it on your own.
So anyway, I think since you've wandered into politics, I think providing access to good education would be wonderful.
If you don't want to do free education, you could at least do something like, say, in Africa, providing internet access and online education.
Yeah, I mean, of course, as you know, since you read economics, free is one of these words that people use to make things sound free.
It's not free.
It has to be paid for somehow, and there's going to be taxes.
And those taxes are going to be put on the people who are the most intelligent.
So since intelligence is linked to IQ and taxes tend to be progressive, you are going to tax the smartest to pay for the children of those who are less smart.
And the degree to which There's genetics involved in IQ. You're gonna have regressive eugenics, disgenics going on.
And that's sort of inescapable.
What I'd love to see is, I'd love to see a significant reduction in tax to the point where people could afford to pay for these things.
And also, I think one of the reasons why, I was not a daycare director.
I worked in a daycare as a teenager for a couple of years.
I mean, it's tough.
You know, we had like 25 kids aged five to 10.
It was myself and one other.
I wasn't a teacher.
I was a teacher's aide.
But we had, it's hard.
You know, why are people going to work so quickly after giving birth?
Well, because they're worried about money and their taxes are so high and so on.
So rather than this platonic idea of let's give the government more control over the children, I'd love to see it where people could have the choice to stay home if they wanted because I don't think that there's any practical substitute for an engaged and involved mom no matter how well funded the institution.
Right.
Or dad.
I'm a stay-at-home dad, so I gotta put that in there, too.
I know.
I guess you could look at providing, say, free preschool and free college as an investment, because I guess you've seen these statistics for every point of IQ that you have gained.
You make a significant amount of money more per year, which could be taxed.
So, yeah.
So you could look at it that way, that it's really just an investment and educating the population so to improve the tax revenue.
You could do that.
You could.
You could, but I guess aside, I have sort of the moral, fundamental moral issue with shoveling money around using laws and threats of jail and stuff like that.
It's a fundamental moral issue, but that sort of that being aside, just from a sort of pragmatic standpoint, the question is always to me, well, tall people play basketball, so if we put people in a basketball team, do they get taller?
Like, what's the cause and what's the effect?
And so there are, you know, does putting someone into college make that person Smarter.
And it certainly isn't going to affect the genetic aspect of things.
The degree to which it's not genetic, there probably could be some improvement.
But I think there needs to be a tipping point with people where they're smart enough to know that working at college is a good idea.
Like when I was at college, I remember the first two weeks, some woman asked me out on a date and I said, oh, I can't because I've got an essay in six weeks and I'm starting to work at it.
And she...
She completely thought I was blowing her off because she's like, who on earth comes to college and is working on a six weeks away essay within two weeks of coming to college?
It's like, me, that's who, me, me.
Now, other people were, you know, how many brain cells not can I grow and flourish but can I drown in a sea of alcoholic decadence?
So, you know, the idea that we simply get more people into college and therefore we get a raise in IQ was I don't know.
I don't know whether that's established enough.
And again, if there's data to the contrary, I'm real happy to.
And again, in sub-Saharan Africa, there's massive amounts that can be done with regards to IQ. But beyond that, beyond I'm not stunted by malnutrition, how tall can I get?
I wonder the degree to which that's genetic.
And we may not know in our lifetimes.
I'd love to know.
But of course, it's such a controversial area for people to study that you'd have to be kind of masochistic to go into that field anyway.
Yeah.
I know this is not a libertarian role model, but I do think Cuba is also interesting, which is it provides free education.
And so what it's got is it has a surplus of doctors who go all over the world, all over South America and all over the world.
Yeah.
I think that's great, too.
It wouldn't have happened unless it was free.
The interesting thing is, I thought about this just before we started to talk.
It really is fascinating because I am, you know, big property rights and I'm like, no government would be ideal.
Very, very utopian, like multi-generational change in the future.
I think a state and a society would be the ideal.
But the funny thing is that I argue for property rights, but I give away all my intellectual capital rights.
For free, you know, donations if people can afford it.
All my books are free.
So it's funny how I'm arguing for non-free education, but I give my stuff away for free.
But when I went to buy your books, I had to pay for them.
I mean, this is kind of bad.
I'm so sorry.
I could have just sent you the HTML. No, no, I don't mean that.
I don't mind that at all.
I just, I wonder if, if you think education, let me just sort of put that personal challenge to you.
If education should be free, what about giving your books away?
Yeah.
I know people who say anybody's crazy nowadays to actually buy a book.
They just know how to get them for free.
Oh, no.
If people charge, I'll pay.
I mean, that's what you want, right?
Since we did politics, there are interesting studies about religion as well, which indicate that...
People who are non-religious have generally higher IQs than people who are religious.
They've even taken all the religions and talked about which religion has the highest IQ and this sort of thing.
I think Unitarians do well.
Jews do well.
Maybe Episcopalians.
It could be Mormons, I think, do fairly well.
A lot of it could just be related to IQ. Wasps do really well, but don't tell anyone about it because false modesty.
No, I'm just kidding.
But I actually think the religious question is really quite interesting because I'm an atheist myself, a semi-militant atheist.
I just actually started with three friends.
We started the first atheist orphanage in Uganda.
But I think that when you're educated and you're given false answers, especially to like scientific questions, I think that that isn't particularly good for your brain development and it's much better to have an education where you're taught to inquire.
You're taught that there are no easy answers and that all the answers aren't in yet and then you can help find the answers.
Well, you say militant, I say overly helpful, because I'm a strong atheist myself, and the challenge that I find so, and the fact that you are somewhat on the left, you could say, as well as being an atheist, is not wildly outside the continuum of thought.
But the problem for me with religion in particular is that it actually makes active, rational, empirical curiosity a sin.
Right?
And so my concern is like, there's nothing more dangerous to human knowledge than the illusion of an answer, particularly when that illusion of an answer is invested in deep moral significance.
Because, you know, if I think I know where I'm going and I'm not going in the right direction, I'm going to get a lot more lost.
You know, if you've ever had this, I'm terrible with, like, driving.
I grew up without a car, so I'm, even with a car now, I don't know where the hell I am most of the time.
Would you ever have this where you're driving?
I used to do a lot of driving for business.
And you're driving and you're like, you got to get to a meeting or something and you get this like weird uneasy feeling like, hmm, I'm pretty sure I should have hit this road by now.
Maybe the next one.
And every road that you miss, you get ratchets up a little bit more uneasiness, a little more uneasiness.
That's a very healthy feeling, right?
And my concern with religion is that by saying, oh, we've got these answers.
And if you question these answers, that's immoral.
You could not design, you know, a deeper set of spears to sort of launch against the charging horses of rational passions or whatever.
And not only is it Wrong, like, a waste of time and effort to question these absolutes, but it's actually immoral.
And that, to me, would cause the brain to bounce back from the curiosity, which, as you say, is a very important building block for the brain.
Right.
And it's also a lot of time spent doing religious things is an utter waste of time.
Like, my charity works in Uganda.
I work with atheists in Uganda.
There's a handful of them, and they have an elementary school, and now they have an orphanage.
But they talk all the time about how they have friends, and when their friends have problems, instead of using their brain to resolve the problem, they simply go to church, or they go and kill a goat, or they sit in a room and pray all day long.
And as we know, this is completely not constructive.
And instead of educating themselves or maybe reading something and figuring out how to resolve the problem, it's just such a waste of time.
And it's a critical waste of time.
People will starve and the children will be, whatever, given away to an orphanage and this sort of thing.
Problems are much greater there than they are here, if you're going to worship them.
I think it's probably fair to say, I won't say this is empirically true, it feels true, which is always dangerous, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Religion, by distracting people, the opportunity costs of time you spend praying versus actively investigating and solving a problem rationally, scientifically, and empirically, It causes so many problems that you feel you need to go to church because your problems are so overwhelming, but because you're going to church, your problems continue to be overwhelming, so you get this cycle.
Bad society can't fix it, go to church.
The only way to interrupt that, I think, is with a healthy dose of skepticism, but that's a very tough cycle for people to break out of.
I mean, 200 years of religious warfare in the 16th and 17th century in Europe killed off in places a third of the population.
In places in Germany, up to 80% of the population got killed for religious warfare.
And the amount of suffering sometimes it takes for people to recognize that thinking clearly is better than superstition is one of the most appalling things that moralists see when they look at the world.
Like, why do we have to suffer so much just to put two and two make four in our brains?
Yes, yes, yes.
You know, I'm a transhumanist as well.
So my transition went from being an atheist to being a transhumanist.
And the transhumanists are the people that are...
I always say that they're the people who want to live forever and are willing to become a robot to do it.
But I do think also, because I'm involved in advancing...
Radical life extension research.
I think as long as people believe in a life, you know, heaven and a life after death, I think it keeps people from actually taking care of, perhaps taking care of their health as well as they could or actually like working to guarantee that we can all have greatly extended lifespans, which I think would be really wonderful.
Well, and people often speed to get someplace fun, which is sort of suicidal terrorist bombing in a nutshell.
But there is also, of course, the problem, which is a huge problem in particular in the United States, in that, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 percent of the population believe that the world is going to end in the next couple of decades.
And the degree to which that is going to have an effect on On things like national debt, foreign policy, militarization, food consumption, use of resources.
I mean, if the whole planet's going to burn in a couple of decades, what do we care about sustainability?
These beliefs...
And for people who are...
Not religious.
I grew up religious and then became an atheist.
And so I get how seriously people take religion who are religious.
A lot of people who grew up secular, they don't get it.
You know, they say, oh, well, you know, the Middle East is all about oil.
It's like, no, it's not.
They really believe this stuff 150%.
It is the most important, most foundational metaphysical essence of where they plant their thinking.
And the fact that people believe these apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios that are imminent...
It has them change their perspective and thinking on things enormously.
And if you're not in those communities or sympathize the degree to which it shapes their thinking, it's really hard to get just how much it changes the way people view the world and their place in it and their value of the future and the sustainability of the economy and the environment and so on.
Yeah, if you're just waiting for the rapture and for the end times, I don't think you actually...
I don't care about resolving Middle East conflict or anything, I suppose.
Watching the world fall apart is troublesome, I suppose, if you believe that you're just going to be lifted up to heaven no matter what happens.
Well, before I forget, Hank, if you can just let my listeners and watchers know if you have a website for the orphanage that you're putting up.
I mean, I do a lot of...
I sort of help out a lot of people overseas, but I've always found it tough to find people who want to help the less advantaged, who aren't also going to give them, you know, five Bibles and a two-step towards superstition.
So if you could give that contact information, I'd certainly like to visit it, and we could get some of our listeners to go there as well.
Oh, yeah, that would be great.
Well...
It's all at brighterbrains.org, which is the website of the Brighter Brains Institute.
If you go to brighterbrains.org, you'll see a variety of little channels, but the one called Bozoha Orphanage is the one you want to go to.
We're constantly fundraising.
Right now, we raise enough money for the The roadside stall, where we're going to sell garden food, and we raised enough money to buy two solar panels so we can be off the grid, which is really important.
And we have a doctor who has put in enough money for a classroom, and we raised enough money to have a place for the orphans to stay with the staff.
So yes, if you want to have some orphans that aren't forced to just pray all day long, this is the place for you.
As long as you're not handing out Descapital, I'm certainly interested in helping out.
Now, the last thing I'd like to talk about, which is, well, not the last thing, but I sort of, given the constraints of the interview format, what I also found, and I've read this elsewhere, but you went into it in more detail, and this is one of these things that When you see it, it blows my mind with regards to world history and intelligence, and that's the question of cousins and marriage.
I wonder if you could explain that a little bit, because I think that is one of these things that clicks things into focus in a way that is rare.
I don't have all the statistics in front of me, but it seems absolutely horrible.
I think I've read that 70% of marriages in Pakistan are to first cousins, It's actually worse than that sounds because when you do that for generation after generation after generation, it becomes just incredibly inbred.
Are you British yourself?
I was born in Ireland, but I grew up in England.
Okay.
I think the rate of birth defects in the UK right now is overwhelmingly Middle Eastern.
Although there are only a small percentage of the population, the number of birth defects that are Middle Eastern is just really huge.
Now, I know there are reasons for cousin marriage.
It's been explained to me by angry commenters.
It usually has to do with keeping the money in the clan, keeping the money in the family.
Obviously, these are arranged marriages anyway.
But yeah, the cousin marriage thing is absolutely awful.
And I think you point out in your book, if I remember this rightly, that it can be up to a seven point in the IQ scale.
Yeah, that's an average.
Of course, you run the risk of a physical defect as well.
I think there's two studies, and there's one study out of India, which I think is like ten and a half IQ points, and another one is about seven.
So, yeah.
So the fact that Christians and, of course, Jews, I think even before Christians, were banned cousin marriages.
And this, again, I think has something to do with long term.
Again, you can't use any of this information to evaluate any individual because we're talking about significant aggregates over time.
But if you look at Judaism and Christianity, the ban on cousin marriage, as opposed to other belief systems, could explain some of the divergence.
I don't know anything about a Jewish or Christian ban on cousin marriages.
I think, actually, in the United States, you can still marry your first cousin in about half the states.
I think...
No, but I think that the Christianity discouraged it fairly early on.
And this is sort of off.
We'll put some sources in this if we can verify it or denials if we can't.
But my memory is that the Christians discouraged cousin marriages fairly early on.
Right, right.
But yeah, it's definitely a problem if you marry your first cousin for hundreds of years, just generations of doing that.
That sounds just absolutely awful.
Not to mention that it becomes tougher to have a peaceful society if everything's clan-based.
That's just sort of another.
Yeah.
So if you're harming intelligence and it's clan-based, you're not going to get a very peaceful society in the long run, to say the least.
You end up with Somalia and these places where everybody is tied in with their warrior.
Now, Hank, don't you understand that Somalia is a libertarian?
I saw that.
Another question, another topic.
Isn't that fun?
Now, what have you got coming up on your project schedule that people should keep an eye out for?
Well, I'm now working for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology as the managing director over there, so I'm very busy fundraising over there.
In terms of brighter brains, the main thing I'm working on now is setting up clinics.
I don't know if you've read Peter Singer.
Peter Singer writes a lot about effective altruism.
Sorry, the only thing I know about Peter Singer is when I get people calling up but demanding to know if I'm a vegetarian, so I can't really talk much about his other philosophical books.
Right.
He's the animal liberation guy.
I don't actually read his material on that, and I eat meat, so I'm not a follower of Peter Singer on that.
But he writes a lot on poverty and how to alleviate world poverty.
Anyway, he thinks the most effective thing you can do is try to keep people from dying of malaria.
So I'm setting up clinics there.
It's a way to feel really good at a really low price.
I can set up a clinic for about $1,200 that can take care of about 150 kids and probably save about one life per year.
Because the salary in Uganda, what I pay the medics there is $500 a year.
And then the rest, the facility is free because everybody wants this, you know, this clinic.
And then the medicine is probably the biggest expense, $600 or $700 a year.
So that's the main thing we're doing is we're setting up a couple of clinics.
I want to name one after Jocelyn Elders, although nobody seems to remember her.
Do you remember Jocelyn Elders?
Jocelyn Elders was the Surgeon General appointed by Bill Clinton who was fired For suggesting as a way to prevent teen pregnancy that children masturbate.
Do you remember this at all?
I would think that that would be something that would stick in my memory.
Well, it's been a while.
I don't remember her wanting to slap any labels on teenage Penises and vaginas saying lack of use may cause pregnancy, or lack of abuse may cause pregnancy.
I see her as a great role model for Africans, being a doctor herself, and also her specialty is AIDS prevention.
I think the amount of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is huge as well.
And it's not exactly helped by a lack of commitment to empirical rationality in that, you know, rape a virgin and you're cured and all this kind of stuff that is just horrendous.
Oh, yeah.
No, absolutely.
Absolutely horrible.
Yeah.
Well, on rape, AIDS, and masturbation, I feel that we should wind up with the big three hot topics that we've had a chance to discuss.
So yeah, I really want to recommend certainly the book on raising your IQ. It jolted me out of some growing complacency about IQ and reminded me, of course, that we can really help reshape things.
IQ is not destiny.
I mean, it's important for people to remember that.
Some people have achieved extraordinarily great things with not really above much average IQs.
Muhammad Ali, I think, had an IQ of 78 and did some fantastic things and continues to do great things with his life.
So IQ is not destiny.
It can be a great way of looking at very large population sets and figuring out some big trends.
But the fact that you've got a strong case to make that we can work to prevent its degradation and work to improve its expansion is great because Yeah, I mean, high IQ people, as you say in the book, they report being happier, they're healthier, they live longer, they're more economically productive, and they tend to make better decisions as a whole.
And we'd love to live in a world where people would vote more with their brains than their wallets or hearts.
And so, yeah, it's brightbrain.org, is that right?
And we'll put links to your books on Amazon.
Sorry, go ahead.
A long time ago I wrote another controversial essay in which I suggested that people who had higher IQ got more votes.
I think that your vote correlated with your IQ as an incentive.
Of course I got a lot of hate for that.
But yes, I'm very supportive of people.
I'm interested in older people retaining their IQ as well.
And I really recommend curiosity because a lot of times people, you know, you can't just sit around and watch whatever is on the telly all day long.
Oh, to stop learning is to start dying, I think, both mentally and spiritually.
Thanks very much for your time.
I hope we get a chance to chat again.
Again, we'll put links to your books and I recommend that people check them out.
And, you know, thanks so much for the work that you're doing in Africa.
I mean, those people need some, I think, more rational help than some of the avenues that are helping them out.
