IQ Recursion

I just finished Charles Murray’s recent social science treatise, Coming Apart. It’s become something of a political lightning rod, which is unsurprising given that it deals with class, IQ, values, happiness, economics, and just about any other topic that incites political blood to boil. (Actually, after pissing off the entire liberal blogosphere, maybe he’ll just announce that he’s the biggest troll of all time.) 

I don’t want to talk, here, about declining American values in the white underclass and how this presents challenges for the US as a country. What I do want to talk about is this: Murray got me thinking some really fucked-up sci-fi brave-new-world shit.

Specifically, I learned two things that, when combined together, seem to have recursive effects. Murray focused on their effects as a 2nd-generation problem, but it made me wonder what happens if you iterate this simulation 15 more generations.

Thing #1: IQ is heritable.

Specifically, there is a 40% reversion to the mean when determining the average IQ of children from the average of the two parents. So, a 130 IQ mother and a 120 IQ father will, on average, produce children with IQs normally distributed around 115: (30+20)/2 * (1-.4). Yes, this means that the children of intelligent parents will be less intelligent than themselves, on average. But it also means that the mean around which their childrens’ normal distribution is based is a full 15 points higher than the average population. These parents are, essentially, passing on a full 1 standard deviation gift to their children.

There is quite a lot of debate over this point, as anyone glancing through the wikipedia page devoted to the heritability of IQ can quickly determine. But let’s just say, for the moment, that we accept this.

Thing #2: IQ-pairing is real (and new).

The first part of this is going to seem obvious. Top colleges select based on intelligence. The average IQs of students at top colleges is well above the population norm. I don’t feel like paging back through my Kindle version, but it’s somewhere in the low 120’s I believe. 

The second part is also obvious. College graduates form their primary social connections through college networks, and then their career networks (the high-skill jobs that the college prepared them to get). So social connections—and therefore potential mates—of graduates of top-tier colleges are largely of other IQ-outliers.

Anyway, that’s all obvious for anyone who has lived through it. What I was surprised at was that this process is new. Apparently, top-tier colleges have only been filtering admission based on IQ for the past fifty or so years. Prior to that, admission was more based on money and connections than intelligence, and the intelligence of the student body was only slightly higher than the population as a whole.

What if we are Darwin’s pigeons?

So, for the first time in human history, there is a mechanism to connect high IQ individuals and influence their procreative choices. And, with IQ heritability, their children have IQ benefits over the population as a whole. What happens when the smartest of these children go to college and find each other? Will we even recognize the 1,000 180-IQ children that will be produced three-generations in?

I know this sounds very Bene Gesseritt—and I honestly don’t believe the effects will be as strong as I describe above. There are just too many confounding factors in the short term. But…it definitely made me stop and think. The IQ sexual selection / IQ heritability social phenomenon is new, and we’re just starting to see its effects.

Push vs Pull Publishing

Everyone’s already written their thoughts on Quora. I’m a little late. Oh well.

Having casually blogged for more than seven years now, my first thought was that Quora was a new model for content generation—pull. Traditional media is push—they tell you what they think you probably want to hear. Blogs are also push. Quora, however, is pull—people ask questions and wait for someone to tell them the answer. I as a publisher don’t have to sit around and wonder what people want to hear.

This could be a huge boon from a blogging perspective. Most small bloggers don’t have the time/resources/know-how to select topics that will get them the most traffic. Does that mean that Quora, or other services utilizing pull models, could potentially challenge push-based blogging?

I really don’t think so. At least not in the form we see currently.

• Blogs are personal identity tools as much as anything else, and your ability to depict your own personal identity is significantly limited in a world of strongly typed content. 
• Bloggers that really care about traffic also care about advertising revenue. And revenue is always maximized when you control the entire experience.
• Bloggers that don’t care that much about traffic (trust me, there are plenty of us) write primarily for ourselves. Do I hope that some people see what I’m writing? Sure, but I primarily select topics based on what I want to write about.

The entire question seems like somewhat of a straw man in retrospect, but I really did wonder at the outset we were observing an disruption of the blogging publishing model. What’s more interesting than the “no” answer above is what this thought exercise tells us about where the Q&A model could go in the future. 

Giving authors tools to manage their own identities and generate revenue will shift this equation. I’d love to see a Q&A service that allowed you to write questions and answers on your own property and provided aggregation.