I can’t see any problems here. It’s not like there’s a famous novel about why this is a terrible idea or a movie about it with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
The idea of intelligence being a static property of a person is already known to be wrong. And IQ is not the same as intelligence. The idea that there’s one number to put to how smart a person is needs to die.
Also there are multiple types of intelligence, im good at tracking and navigation but woefully braindead when confronted with a social situation where I cant just poker face and pretend I am above it all.
Among all the moral problems, there is also a technical problem: we don’t know that much about the relationship between IQ and genetics. Not even close to enough. We can’t even reliably predict something as straightforward as eye color outside of very simple situations and that is far clearer than the genetics of building and operating brains.
Not only is the genetics that underlie human intelligence complicated, so too is understanding intelligence itself. It’s not even clear that human intelligence can sensibly be reduced to a single number, or even a set of numbers, let alone ones that can be used to ordinaly rank people.
The situation isn’t much, if at all, better for any of the other traits they list. There may be some useful screens for specific mutautions that result in particular diseases that are well understood, but when it comes to the full understanding and subtlety of more complex traits, human genomics just isn’t there yet.
Oh I think there was a book about this… Brave New… something
Never mind that genetics can’t reliably predict IQ. The important thing is that IQ can’t reliably predict intelligence.
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IQIntelligence is colloquial and subjective. It can’t be objectively measured anymore than beauty or since of humor. -
IQ depends on their only being one kind of underlying intelligence.
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IQ hews to cultural categories in defiance of biology and genetics.
IQ is your performance on an IQ test. It’s not subjective at all, for the same reason that SAT math scores are not subjective.
The real question is whether SAT scores and/or IQ scores have anything to do with what we consider “intelligence”.
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Okay, say this was true. I’m not saying it is, but let’s carry this argument to the next step.
IQ is a score that shows how well someone can solve problems and think compared to other people their age. It doesn’t measure how smart you are in every way, but it can help show how strong your brain is in certain kinds of thinking. So let’s say, okay, they aren’t born smart, but we’ll train them to BE smart, and this screening will make it easier because we won’t be working upstream against “the dumbness,” or whatever. Kid has the capacity to be smart, now all we have to do is train them, right?
Next, you have to assume that their parents and environment allows for this. These services will be available for rich parents only, which historically have been a better environment for teaching. But it also will give these “high IQ kids” access to parents of conservative, “Christian values” as well as liberal rich kids. So now we have a problem. What if having a high IQ also leads to insanity? We haven’t even defined what “smart” is, really, and so a lot of conservatives, “smart” means “stronger than your enemy.” Intelligence without compassion breeds psychosis, and leadership qualities that are sociopathic and ruthless. And that INCLUDES turning on their own kind. But that’s what they want, right? “Survival of the fittest,” a kind of social Darwinism.
“Sorry dad. I know you raised me to be the head of the company, but I gutted it instead, and will be funding my super-race and frankly…? You’re genetically inferior. Goodbye.”
What if having a high IQ also leads to insanity?
I don’t know about insanity, but there are and have been plenty of smart people who also have some very weird ideas. Linus Pauling thinks vitamin C is a panacea. Bobby Fischer believes in antisemitic conspiracy theories. Garry Kasparov thinks history is wrong and has come up with his own timeline of history. Nikola Tesla was terrified of women with pearl earrings and talked to pigeons. Yukio Mishima thought he could restore imperial Japan, something the emperor himself didn’t want. Mayim Bialik is just fucking nuts.
I was surprised after reading your comment that Blossom hosted jeopardy for a while and had a new show. What crazy has she done? Searching her name got me pretty anodyne results about Sony going another direction and her coworkers being surprised she was fired.
Here you go. She has a bunch of nutty beliefs, including making some antivax statements and claiming birth control pills are dangerous.
Edit: Also-
In a 2018 New York Times op-ed Mayim caused offence by suggesting that Harvey Weinstein’s victims invited sexual assault by dressing inappropriately. She reasoned that she had avoided being assaulted or targeted by predators herself because she dressed modestly and did not “act flirtatiously with men.”
She wrote: “In a perfect world, women should be free to act however they want. But our world isn’t perfect. Nothing - absolutely nothing - excuses men for assaulting or abusing women. But we can’t be naïve about the culture we live in." After initially claiming her comments had just been taking out of context she went on to apologize to victims of sexual assault saying: “You are never responsible for being assaulted… I am truly sorry for causing so much pain, and I hope you can all forgive me.”
It’s crazy all of that was before the jeopardy job.
They did a terrible job of vetting her. Replacing the late Alex Trebek with an antivaxxer in the middle of fucking COVID?
We should just rewrite the IQ test with a bias for babies.
Baby comes in test at 160, then if they test later just be like idk what did you do?
