Signaling Beats Race-IQ For Controversy

On Sunday I gave a talk, “Mind Enhancing Behaviors Today” (slides, audio) at an Oxford FHI Cognitive Enhancement Symposium.   To suggest how society might treat future mind enhancements, I reviewed how we today treat mental enhancements in six different areas of life: grunt-work, sport, medicine, nutrition, school, and story.  I discussed signaling explanations our behavior in these areas and in passing mentioned the low marginal health value of medicine.

Also speaking were Linda Gottfredson, on how IQ matters lots for everything, how surprisingly stupid are the mid IQ, and how IQ varies lots with race, and Garett Jones on how IQ varies greatly across nations and is the main reason some are rich and others poor.  I expected Gottfredson and Jones’s talks to be controversial, but they got almost no hostile or skeptical comments – it was my talk that was clearly most controversial!  Alas I don’t have a recording of the open discussion session to show you.