House of Eratosthenes

Outside in writes on IQ shredders, Singapore being the classic example. It takes in very intelligent people from all over Asia, and even the world, and then lowers their fertility drastically to below replacement level. It is engaged in the process of shredding the world’s average IQ.

We have IQ shredders in this country. One of the main themes of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve was the vacuuming up of highly talented, i.e. smart, people, from all over the country, into the megalopolises, where they assortatively mate and form their own “new class”, alienated from their origins, and leaving the towns and rural areas without their talent. They assortatively mate, but then have few children. Then we leave the border open for demonstrably lower IQ invaders who further the decline in average IQ.

Other IQ shredders include the universities, though there’s a lot of overlap between them and the big cities. It doesn’t even seem to matter whether the students are in STEM or ethnic grievance studies, the results for fertility are the same – although the results for IQ are better or worse depending on field of study, since the STEM kids are much smarter than those in the humanities. But I’d even bet that Brigham Young grads have lower fertility rates than the population from which they are drawn.

However, the factor that overrides others is that high IQ is much more strongly related to low fertility, about twice as strong, in women. Going to university undoubtedly increases the negative relation even further, since with higher income and status there are fewer men for them to mate with, given the rigors of hypergamy.

Reading this any time after watching Idiocracy, it’s impossible — for me, anyway — not to think of those excellent first four or so minutes, in which it is explained how mankind’s competency level enters into a downward plunge with imbeciles outbreeding geniuses. It’s funny because it’s credible, and it’s credible because it involves no conspiracy.

This, however, enters the territory of conspiracy. I find that unattractive; I try to avoid concluding anything is a conspiracy. People, based on my observations, simply don’t have what it takes. You have to marry up actions with objectives, which is no easy task by itself; then, you have to coordinate. Then you have to keep it all secret, and coordinate the secret-keeping.

Is there any sort of conspiracy to make humankind incompetent and stupid? If I must entertain the possibility, I’ll consider the conscious conspiracy last out of all of them, for the reasons listed above. But, there certainly can be passive conspiracies; conspiracies mobilized by base impulses shared among large numbers, who then contribute to the inertia.

From the linked Outside In article:

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong neoreactionary bias.
(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.
In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.

Hmmmm…this conjures up memories. Unpleasant for me not quite so much because of the content of the memories, but because of the implications. Places I’ve worked — more than one — with the job interviews most demanding, in which I emerged most victorious. It is, now, a familiar motif: Once it’s established I know how many bits are in a byte, and such, I’m welcomed into the fold and informed something like “Ours is not just a company, it’s a way of life.” There follows a very slowly developing conflict, as the realization gradually seeps in that I lack any desire to live in some floating city above the clouds…unless I built it myself. I just want to use my brain to make money, big piles of money. Then there follows a culture clash of sorts, usually harmless. Last time, it was disastrous. Started out innocent enough, the way they always do: “Why do you buy your own comp sci books? Use the portal!”

Seems doing things has been losing its cachet, at a horrific rate, lately. So many people who work at those places talk of working at those places, but don’t talk of what they’ve actually been building lately. Granted that they often can’t; but, I perceive, they wouldn’t. Being the-guy-who-wrote-X is out of fashion, in other words. The hot new trend is to be the-guy-who-works-at-X. I’m one of them. Inside the moat, above the clouds.

Interestingly, the vision seems to be to avoid having superior human stock wasted on some existence in which it would not make a difference, wouldn’t be appreciated. But if the mechanism really does function as an IQ Shredder, intentionally or otherwise, then that’s the ultimate outcome anyway, is it not?

The hot new trend is to be the-guy-who-works-at-X. I’m one of them. Inside the moat, above the clouds.

I think it’s an interesting consequence of technology — nerds, dorks, and various other assorted poindexters now have their very own clubs.

This is a very special class of people I’m talking about here: the smart-but-not-super-smart. I imagine that the truly brilliant (and the truly autistic, which are often correlated) are still off doing their own thing in moms’ basements and university computer labs across the country — they’re too stunted and awkward to care. But there are lots of folks who are far smarter than the herd, but not nearly smart enough to be on the cutting edge. These, I suspect, are the Silicon Valley Pod People. I don’t think it’s an accident that Microsoft, Apple, etc. call their home offices “campuses” and deliver Diet Cokes and Cheetos to their employees’ desks. They’ve managed to create high schools with no jocks or cheerleaders, which I assume is heaven to these folks.

I say assume, because I’m not in that class (I don’t have a math brain). But I’m around a very similar psychological profile — university profs and grad students. I call ’em “the herd of independent minds.” The pressure to conform conform conform is just brutal. There are entire fields — English, History — where no truly original work has been done in decades. Not because there aren’t smart and talented people there, but because The Narrative is set, and if you go outside it, you risk being banished from the club forever. It becomes their whole world. Every “hobby” or “interest” they might pursue gets filtered through their club membership — “would I, Hubert J. Marxoid, Visiting Adjunct Assistant Professor of Protest Studies, ever be seen watching a baseball game? Maybe, but only if I can justify it with some scathing commentary about the subaltern position of Cubano defectors….”

Whether or not that’s an “IQ Shredder” in the sense described, I don’t know… but it sure does make smart people stupid. And then they mate with each other, and raise their 1.2 kid that way.
- Severian | 08/25/2014 @ 07:57
Given the increasing effiencieny of technological replacements for tedious labor, we can expect that it will continue to take fewer and fewer people to meet the world’s needs.

Thus, larger and larger proportions of the population will be, and will continue to be, dead weight. Simply consumers.

There are all kinds of ugly, dystopian ends that can be hypoethesized from that fact. I can’t see it ending well for the prosperous, unless they are willing to get in touch with their inner barbarian and defend what they have with great ruthlessness.

Ironically, the ideals set up by the Brights contribute to this problem. Two-earner families. We’re in an era where that is hopelessly redundant. We need some sort of rebellion against traditional feminism to encourage fewer women in the workplace. Not because women are inferior, but because two earner households are simply unnecessary from an economic standpoint.

For most of my life I have been effectively the sole breadwinner in the family, supporting a wife and up to four children at one time. Now the wife, because she has the free time, is manager of the holdings that my income made possible and is earning for us the equivalent of another income that will be our replacement income when I finally get too tired of “working for the man.” But our situation is almost classic in its structure: she manages the “plantation” and “land holdings” while I go off and bring home the bulk of the outside income. I have enough children that there should be at least one interested in taking over the ancestral estates and having it continue to generate income far into the future, eliminating the need for some of my descendants to ever “work for the man.” There’s still plenty of work to be done. They’ll be by no means trust fund babies, but they will be their own bosses.

Every rich urban professional wife who holds down a lucrative job is doing her part to keep some other family breadwinner from climbing higher on the earnings ladder, probably encouraging the lower income husband and wife to both compete for lower-paid work, thus feeding a cycle of poor compensation for over-abundant lower paid workers. Unfortunately, even if that changes, it would only be a delaying tactic.

We’re getting so efficient that we’ve already reached the point where there simply isn’t enough work for low-skill workers, and not everyone is cut out for a professional or even skilled trade career. That’s only going to get worse, as I say above.

Lots of people are going to die, unless enough of the world simply gets prosperous enough to drop birth below replacement level for a few generations: it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But, instead of the anti-human population control types, I have the opposite prescription. They always seem to want us to go back to a state of nature. I, on the other hand, say let’s go with what appears to be natural to human behavior: make humans prosperous and they stop breeding. Can we make enough humans prosperous fast enough to avoid being destroyed by the low-IQ masses? I don’t know.

Population control types assume that the problem is that we’ll run out of resources and ravage the earth. I think that the far more urgent and likely problem is that we’ll run out of meaning. People need meaningful work. When you have billions of people who aren’t even essential to produce enough for all their needs and wants to be met, you’re courting disaster.

Right now we seem to be taking every wrong step possible.
- cloudbuster | 08/25/2014 @ 09:15

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IQ ShreddersMonday, August 25th, 2014

IQ Shredders
Monday, August 25th, 2014