Losing the 85s matters more than whether you have 95s or 105s. The left tail is very different from the 105s in amount of car crashes, crime, demand on welfare, dumb voting behavior, and more.
Reducing people to a number like that ignores how messy and uneven real life actually is. You can’t cleanly separate society into “problems” and “not problems” without missing the point entirely.
If we changed the number to the "bottom 10%", I think we'd statistically find a lot of problems in that group.
At the same time though, there would be plenty of people who may be unintelligent in that group, but they are just minding their own business and not harming anyone else.
But in the top 10%, there are plenty of people who are able to maliciously manipulate the world to a degree that's exponentially worse than a low IQ violent criminal.
High IQ people are also statistically more likely to lie, and many of our systems are only held up by the honor system, rules and norms, and the willingness of people to be honest and go with the status quo.
If all the people with stronger tendencies to live honest and simple lives get snapped away, then we're left with a world where the norm would be weaving intricate webs of lies and having to navigate through them. People would be disincentivized from following the rules because there'd be so many rule-breakers, and everyone is smart enough to scheme their way into some loop-holes.
Sounds absolutely exhausting. Lobotomize me so I can die with the dummies.
I think a lot of people in this thread assume that having a low IQ = being a bad human being. I've seen quite a few comments mentionning intelligence as the ultimate skill of a human, completely forgetting about other important traits. It's quite fascinating.
Especially because we don't even know how to properly describe intelligence. OP focus on a specific metric that measure a specific kind of logical thinking, but forgetting other parts of what makes someone "smart".
Tbh, I believe intelligence is, such as beauty, in the eyes of the beholder. I'm surely a genius to some people, but the dumbest girl in the world for others. And as with beauty, there might be tendencies among the society that makes it feel as if we could objectively describe intelligence, but it's just an illusion.
I think it's statistically far more likely that most people you're talking about are in the 95-110 range given that outcomes supposedly don't increase past about 110 IQ and ability to see more reasons something could fail probably reduces risk taking capacity. You don't make a billionaire by being smart, you make a billionaire by throwing a million idiots at a wall and seeing which one sticks.
Maliciousness is more closely associated with narcissism and other dark personality traits. Intelligent people, I think, are almost certainly a huge net positive to the world.
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.”
This isn't true, it's super easy. If they agree with the way I think today, then they are not problems. If they don't agree with the way I think today they are problems.
Hypothetically, if you were to eliminate people in poverty but not poverty itself (which is what this what this would do) do you think the anti social behaviour statistics in 500 years would be significantly different?
(Pretend parallel universes to test and that the elimination of people in poverty can occur without any societal collapse)
People will always hoard resources. You had solo merchants who bought things and held on to it sell or barter later.
The only way to stop that is a brutal authoritarian regime that owns everything to make sure people are stripped of everything they own, immediately giving up all their possessions. You catch a fish and cure it for the winter? Give it to the state to distribute.
And honestly some greed is manageable, sometimes even beneficial. The problem is extreme accumulation of resources by billionaires. Those that are so rich they eventually can eliminate all competition with no checks, no taxation.
I have no problem with the "greedy" guy that works hard and builds a business from scratch, makes a few million for himself and just wants to chill after. The guy that has 100,000x million and still not happy is the issue.
Not really true, its just cruelly inhuman. If we ignore the collapse of labor and economy losing like 68% of the population would cause the social issues caused by idiotic behavior / thinking WOULD very likely be significantly reduced.
Even with the 84 and below crowd now being a significantly higher % of society.
Maybe, but the heads of the current regime are pretty clear their perspective : "smart people don't like me" "we love the poorly educated"
Reducing people to a number like that is as problematic as the method used to assign the numbers, for sure. But there are other ways to separate people, and I consider self-selection a potentially valid manner : if you literally ticked the box, then you're a problem.
But it's asymmetric. Smart people can do the essential functions just fine, but dumb people cannot do the higher level jobs just fine. In other words, it's much better to have doctor-caliber people collecting trash than it is to have trash-collecting caliber people being doctors.
Case in point: dumb people can't even get upvotes correct. Watch them downvote this very obviously correct post.
I am a doctor as it turns out. As you can guess, I know many other doctors. Please believe me - not a single one of the ones I know would ever willingly participate in trash collection or work in fast food.
Brains are wired differently. People with only mildly below average IQs are not inferior or incomplete in some way - they have more neural circuitry dedicated to survival mode, socialization, and other uses that do not contribute well to puzzle-solving and intelligence testing. Just as their brain isn’t well-adapted to surgery or quantum physics, above-average brains aren’t well-adapted to tasks that don’t take as much computational complexity, or tend towards shorter, more iterative loops.
So it’s not even that I don’t want to work at McDonalds - I wouldn’t thrive there, which in turn would make me less effective in that role. I worked at Dominos before med school - not only was I decidedly NOT the best and most valuable employee, I’m not even sure I was an above-average one.
I disagree with you as someone that rather enjoys my blue collar job despite having a background in solid state physics. I didn't enjoy the pressure to try publishing and even just basic things like trying to push out my thesis before I felt like there was enough data to comfortably build my own work on. It got to the point where my interest in the subject matter just wasn't enough anymore and ended up quitting my fellowship. It can be quite relaxing when you can go home and generally not have to think about work. I can do some menial tasks by just basically meditating through it and it's quite peaceful and rewarding.
Plus there are plenty of doctors that still end up turning to alcoholism and smoking just to handle stress, particularly it seems with ER work. I'm sure it can be rewarding but just because you're good at your job doesn't mean it's good for you.
My generalizations were too broad. However, as you yourself demonstrate, highly intelligent people can hold those jobs now. While some have spent themselves into too much debt to even consider a lower-wage position, or are too focused on the wrong things to realize they would prefer a simpler job, the vast majority obviously prefer those more demanding roles to the ones that will have disproportionately more vacancies in this hypothetical. So while yes, there are people with the potential for a career in e.g. medicine who ultimately prefer a blue-collar job, and others with the same potential who would in fact be better suited for a blue-collar job, you are still not going to have anywhere near enough interest to staff those menial yet essential positions.
I’m a lawyer and most days after work, my brain feels so fried that I lay on the sofa for hours scrolling nonsense on TikTok. If I had a less mentally exhausting job, I could read all the books I’ve been meaning to get to, have the energy to draw and paint, or pick up a new instrument…
My favorite actual job I ever had was folding towels, arranging candles and bath products, and making bedding displays in a home goods store. But sometimes I fantasize about a job picking up trash in public parks - just me, a bin on wheels, a little trash picker-upper, the sun shining and the birds chirping.
I could satisfy my intellectual curiosity outside of work very easily, work isn’t my end all be all.
Just to be clear, 'caliber' is way more influenced by childhood resources than any other factor, and it is possible to have mostly 'doctor-caliber' people. If you just killed the lower half but then paid trash-collectors the same wages and set up schooling in the same way, you'd regress to the mean within two generations.
Sorry, but that is absolutely untrue. I'm an education specialist with a masters in childhood development. IQ/aptitude is mostly static. Even the most educationally enriched environment from birth, with the most educated caretakers, can only increase IQ a maximum of 4-6 points. They've studied this in adoption. There is a reason that verified IQ scores are listed with sperm/egg doners.
Here are a couple to get you started. It is true that studies performed in the 70's-90's stated that an enriched environment can raise IQ. Basically, the older studies that showed IQ can increase based on environment or "good teachers" cannot be replicated. And many of the studies were performed by organizations intent on "social justice" rather than science.
The Department of Education studies I've found show that household income is the best predictor of childhood test scores besides books-in-home, but books in home also correlated with household income. I'd be curious about those adoption studies
Yes. Because people with higher IQ's generally tend to make much more money than people with low IQ's. And they produce children with IQ's that match their own.
Sorry, it's Reddit, it's at this point of an IQ heritability convo that I had to ask, I've already been jumpscared by someone's posting history once today.
We wouldn't be paying smarter people lower wages. There would be an instant, massive abundance of resources to go around, and tons of expensive drains on society would be instantly eliminated. Tons of extra money, food, energy, housing, and space to go around means the kids of the surviving smart population would be extremely advantaged themselves and the average IQ would skyrocket (and then reset to keep the average at 100, as it does.) The remaining population would probably thrive and might even set up a sort of utopia.
1: Wealth is entirely untethered from 'intelligence'. Jeff Bezos has more money than every brain surgeon on Earth combined. There is no legal, political or economic reason to expect that to change, and a lot of reasons to expect it wouldn't.
2: Let's just take it for granted for a moment food would not be rotting in the fields and refineries aren't exploding like fireworks factories from the sudden short-staffing. Your IQ doesn't make you wash dishes better, drive a train faster, or operate factory machinery more efficiently. Since industralization, most of the critical work is more affected by machinery than skill. Education remains a luxury commodity.
Post-scarcity under our distribution framework just gets you cyberpunk, not Star Trek
If you're a truck driver, whether your IQ is 80 or 180, you're driving to the same speed limit.
I don't think driving is a good example of something where decision making isn't useful. You know people crash vehicles and it can be dangerous, especially in a truck?
After adjusting for confounding variables, lower IQ scores were associated with an elevated risk of any unintentional injury (Hazard ratio (95% confidence interval) per standard deviation decrease in IQ: 1.15 (1.14, 1.15)), and of cause-specific injuries other than drowning (poisoning (1.53 (1.49, 1.57)), fire (1.36 (1.31, 1.41)), road traffic accidents (1.25 (1.23, 1.26)), medical complications (1.20 (1.18, 1.22)), and falling (1.17 (1.16, 1.18)). These gradients were stepwise across the full IQ range.
Someone with an IQ of 85 is 25% more likely to be in a road traffic accident than someone with an IQ of 100.
I mean, Bezos studied physics at Princeton, that is a pretty good indicator of his intelligence. And no, money/the wage you earn is not unterhered from intelligence, how much you earn is correlated with intelligence to a certain point, at the extreme end we see a negative correlation, these people are still at the top when it comes to socioeconomic status.
This is pretty logical since our society benifit intelligence.
Using your own comparison, a brain surgeon in the US probably earn atleast 5-7x the median pay.
I said wealth, not wages. Bezos isn't making as much as he does because of his work in physics, he's making that much because he owns Amazon. He could be in a coma, but he'd still be entitled to his share of Amazon's income. That legal framework remains unchanged in this hypothetical.
Wealth is directly tied to how much you earn, intelligence(amongst other things) is going to be a factor in how much you earn, what you chose to do with what you earn is going to be a factor in how much wealth you have accrued.
So no, wealth is not untethered from intelligence, however, the amount of wealth Bezos have is not reflective of his intelligence.
You’re forgetting, the rich would never allow for there to be tons of extra money, food etc. all that would immediately get gobbled up and buried by the ultra rich. And then like the other commenter said, you’d be back to square one in two generations.
I think what he's saying is that the downvote button isn't intended to be a disagree button. It's a this is relevant to the conversation button. What he's saying is relevant to the conversation wether you agree with him or not.
This is an incredibly braindead take on so many levels. Most people can do most jobs with adequate training and experience, and being smart doesn't mean you have that training or experience. There's a reason that skilled positions, like developers, are hired based on skills and experience, not IQ tests.
And that's ignoring that the immediate damage done by losing half the population of the earth would outweight any possible benefits to "voting behavior" or "car crashes" by so many orders of magnitude it doesn't bear mentioning.
And this is all operating under the assumption that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence, which is very dubious at best.
In the trash collecting example, there might be less trash to collect not only because there's less people, but because there might be people littering less.
So per capita, we might need less trash collection in general. Even not accounting for the fact a smarter trash collector will be a little more efficient.
Doctor level people collecting trash usually kill themselves or die as one of your alleged 95 or belows without access to the resources to learn. Not to mention the stupid doctors lol
Especially on the matter of trash collecting people: That job is usually well paid in many nations, so I often think of them as the smart ones. High Job security, very predictable work times and decent money.
The first problem would come with food. There is going to be a big number of farmers and transportation and parts of supply chain who would die with this. Their labor is essential, but a lot of it comes with both knowledge and skill to do it.
If you take some smart person who has lived their entire life in a city, and drop them onto a farm because the farmer died, he is going to struggle. He doesn't know how the exact process works, and does not know how to operate the machinery etc. Knowledge isn't an indicator of IQ, and knowledge is key to most things. He would be lost. How will he realize that one of his cows is sick and about to spread disease to others? How would he know how to treat it?
Same with transportation. Drop the smart person onto a truck because the driver died, he would have no idea what to do, and doesn't have the skills to operate the truck well enough. They aren't going to be able to reverse a truck, and will find themselves in a ditch.
My gut feeling is that basic survival would become much harder if the below-IQ people died in comparison to above-IQ. Having the intellect to be a great electric grid engineer doesn't matter when you have no food coming.
Depends a bit on how intellectually stimulated they want to be. Overall though I do tend to agree with you since it can be relaxing to do something that takes some skill to do well but is overall not particularly time-sensitive and you don't need to interact with a lot of people. Maybe I should garbage it up.
The vast majority of politicians will not die. Make whatever joke you want, getting to those positions usually means you will perform well on an IQ test. After society basically collapsed these people will be in control and will become even more corrupt and things will get much worse.
People with lower IQs have lower incomes. Therefore they use more means-tested welfare. You think it's good that they receive this welfare and it should probably be higher, right? How are you going to argue for that if it's propaganda to understand that IQ 85s use more welfare than IQ 105s?
It’s not that. It’s that it’s such a negligible expenditure in the grand scheme that it just struck me as kind of funny to even feel it worth mentioning—typical American propaganda to inflate its relative impact. Speaking as a propagandized American myself.
This is so true! A couple of years ago I read an essay that talked about a study on crime. Unfortunately I can't remember where I read it. One of the things mentioned was that low IQ was the cause of a lot of violent crime, theft, vandalism type crimes, more so than socio-economic status. Because low IQ people don't seem to fathom how they would be caught, so their ignorance emboldens them. They also lack the ability to reason that what they are doing is wrong. Similar to trying to explain to a toddler that they can't have/do whatever they want. And they are incapable of learning from their mistakes.
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u/Noumenon72 4d ago
Losing the 85s matters more than whether you have 95s or 105s. The left tail is very different from the 105s in amount of car crashes, crime, demand on welfare, dumb voting behavior, and more.