Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Exactly. But there it’s about strength or courage or religiosity. Those are the values. If you read Homer or the texts of other religions, it’s not intelligence. It’s beauty and other things. This value system which has a hyper-focus on smarts is not obviously a trait value that’s been common in the past. You might think that in certain communities there might be valuation of things that are more proximate to years of schooling. But really broadly, it’s not been a high value in the population. Obviously, the thing we care about is not direct performance on an IQ test, especially in the past. The thing I’m trying to understand better is intelligence more broadly. Maybe IQ-test intelligence is just not that correlated with, “Here is a new-world environment, go figure out how to process food there and make shelter and everything else.” Your colleagues like Joseph Henrich have talked about how modern people underestimate the difficulty of doing this kind of thing with a small band of people. Maybe that’s not IQ-test intelligence, and that’s why we don’t see that strong a selection effect on this thing. But intuitively, regardless of the value system, it just seems very valuable to have this trait maxed out. I’m being very speculative. Let me give you two examples of how I’m thinking about this, not that I’m a particularly good authority on these things. As I mentioned, a lot of these traits, which are quite disparate, are highly correlated to each other. Obesity, years of schooling, walking pace, performance on IQ tests, household wealth, all these crazy traits seem to be governed to a substantial extent by a shared combination of genetic variants. Let’s think about what this might mean. In Iceland in the last hundred years, there’s been selection against this combination of variants. One possible interpretation is that it’s basically selection for two ways of investing in your children: having many kids and not investing a lot in them, or having few kids and investing more in them. If you invest in deferring having kids, having more wealth, having more resources, and putting more into each kid, you’re going to have lower fertility and fewer kids. That’s going to result in lower fertility, but those kids might survive more and do better in society. Alternatively, you can just have as many kids as you can and invest less in them. They might individually have less good outcomes, but in a time of plenty—which is potentially Iceland in the 20th century—it might make sense to have more kids and invest less in them. There’s a toggle between having more kids and investing less in them, and having fewer kids and investing more in excelling in various ways. You can imagine that at different times and in different places… In ecology, there are different ways. Mammals often invest a lot with a pregnancy and a small number of children, whereas fish will spawn huge numbers of offspring into the river, the great majority of whom will be eaten. But that is an effective way to produce offspring in certain conditions. So there will be a toggle depending on the environmental conditions back and forth between investing in large numbers of offspring with less investment, or smaller numbers of offspring with more investment. Maybe we’re just seeing that move back and forth over different places and times. Similarly, for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, how could this ever be advantageous? Maybe what we’re seeing with these diseases is a readout of some spectrum of traits that in some contexts might be advantageous. Maybe being anxious, imaginative, or neurotic might be helpful in a shamanistic tradition or a religious tradition which values people who can have visions or be creative. Maybe these are subclinical versions of schizophrenia or bipolar disease that in certain times may be advantageous and in other times may be disadvantageous. You might just be seeing selection for different types of creativity or other thinking that can be valuable in different contexts.…

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