The IQ Shredder Is Good, Actually

Our would-be eugenicist overlords are optimising for the wrong traits

Before I write anything about intelligence, humans, and intergenerational continuity, the obligatory throat-clearing. It’s repugnantly spreadsheet-brained to think about humans primarily in aggregate, as a mass of data points to be optimised. This is the eugenicist mindset: you don’t have to go a very long way down that road before you’re reclassifying “genetic undesirables” as not really human and bumping them off “for the good of the race”. Nothing that I would wish to endorse can be found down this path.

But provided we keep firmly in mind the truth that all humans are human, it ought to be possible at the same time to think about families, peoples, and cultures in units greater than one. Right? With this in mind, a brief reflection on a very thought-provoking report by

Kulak

from two summer events at the fringes of online subculture: Vibecamp and Porcfest, respectively the festive gatherings for America’s Bay Area rationalist/postrat and New Hampshire libertarian communities.

What struck me in particular about Kulak’s observations was the relation of each of these communities to children - and especially what he had to say about the genius-tier intelligence and almost total childlessness of the Vibecamp crowd, and comparatively intellectually more mixed but considerably more fecund Porcfest attendees and their semi-feral, often homeschooled, startlingly agentic children.

I see a great deal of discussion on the tech-optimistic progressive Right about how important IQ is, whether in immigration policy or - in some quarters - reproductive choices. For example the high-tech “pronatalists” Simone and Malcolm Collins told me when I interviewed them that they screened their IVF-conceived children for genetic traits including intelligence. But against this blanket fixation among the tech-forward Right, on optimising people for cleverness, Kulak’s report called to mind one of those unspeakable hypotheses that sidles across my mind now and then. Namely: what if the IQ shredder is good, actually?