More Remarks on IQ by Race and Gender

In a recent Commentary Magazine article, Charles Murray updates his findings on IQ as it relates to race. Back in 1994, before I was aware of such issues, Murray and Hernnstein published The Bell Curve, a sociological look at how small differences in IQ, evolved over tens of thousands of years in separated populations, might influence modern social dynamics. His recent article linked above refers to a significant body of research that has been done since the publication of his book.

The thrust of this blog is entirely devoted to helping all humans transition to the next level, regardless of race or gender. It is my emphatic assertion that such a transition as I envision will render any remaining differences in intelligence between groups both random and insignificant. I make a further, more emphatic assertion. The people who oppose research into group differences in intelligence and cognitive abilities, are the very people who are obstructing the transition to a higher level of intelligence for the groups they purport to help. In other words, they are only another version of shit-throwing monkey, criticising honest researchers out of an innate instinct rather than from a rational, principled counter-hypothesis.

These monkeys could learn a lot from a group that they look down upon and secretly despise. I am referring to the class of blue collar worker known as maintenance workers. A maintenance worker is tasked to keep machines and systems of varying complexity operating. If the machines or systems break down, the maintenace person is called upon to repair the system. There is no fudging to be done here. Either the system will be fixed by the maintenance person or it will not. If not, another maintenance person is called who can fix the system. The maintenance person has to understand how the system works, and what has gone wrong. If he cannot do that much, he certainly cannot repair the system, in most cases. Any maintenance person who persists in denying that a system is broken, despite the obvious fact that it does not work, will be relegated to the unemployment line rather quickly.

Shit-throwing monkeys, on the other hand, are paid handsomely to deny that the broken system is broken. The louder their denials, the more they are paid. Millions may suffer because the broken system is neglected, not properly repaired, due to the denials of the monkeys. Nevertheless, the monkeys grow old, fat, comfortably well off, and retire as legends in their own minds.

When two different populations of initially similar individuals are allowed to evolve in isolation from each other for many hundreds of generations, significant differences between the populations are bound to arise. Even when two populations are coexistant geographically, but mostly separate in terms of mating and procreation, differences will show up. Finally, even when two groups coexist geographically, and mate freely with each other, significant differences can persist if the two groups were significantly different to begin with. As in human males and human females.

Yes, the differences in IQ by race and gender do exist, at least statistically and reproducibly. Perhaps they are not significant when it comes to real life performance, or more likely, the differences are only significant in a few specific areas. All the more reason to understand what is happening, and to utilise the very best of the best in the pursuit of the keys to the next level.

The Limits to Biology

Human beings are made of mostly soft tissue that is easily cut, bruised, crushed, burned, penetrated, torn, and liquified. This "too, too, solid flesh" is actually too, too, insubstantial flesh. Worse, this flesh is programmed to fall apart when its capacity to repair itself runs down.

Humans are too heavy to fly like birds, and also lacking in gills and proper streamlining/muscularization to swim like fish, limited to a narrow reach of the biosphere where oxygen concentrations are high enough, temperatures are mild enough, for frail humans to survive. To survive for a short time, long enough to breed and pass on enough knowledge to progeny so that they can live and breed.

The human brain is massively parallel, and composed of marvelous mechanisms of responsiveness and creation. Alas, it is also slow. Even were the human brain much faster in its responses and assessments, the human body would be unable to react with speed, for fear of tearing something loose, or breaking something. Real world mechanics places strict limits on what the human can do, and how quickly.

Ever since the dawn of computing machines, humans have dreamed of truly intelligent machines, machines that might even surpass man in ability to learn and reason. Artificial intelligence. The twists and turns taken by that field are fascinating and instructive, but not for today's posting. Something else that is artificial, synthetic biology is worth considering.

Most of you are familiar with the development of artificial replacement organs and tissues. Artificial appendages have become a big business for plastic surgeons and urologists. This business will only grow. [Chuckle]

Synthetic biology dives deeply into the mysteries of cellular workings, and aims to develop living materials that never existed. From the lowliest organelle to the cells, to tissues, to anything else that can be engineered. Using mathematical and numerical methods, borrowing from genomics and bioinformatics, doing in practice what nanoengineers only dream of doing--synthetic biologists are building a new biology almost from scratch.

What will this new biology accomplish? Yes, would you not like to know that? Perhaps you would also like to know the names of some biotech stocks that are likely to increase in value by ten or a hundred in the next five years? Yes, so would I. But that is largely informed guesswork. That is just money, something that next levels will be rolling in, if they wish.

Seriously, the new synthetic biology promises to accomplish many of the intermediate steps that de Grey and his SENS technologies are attempting to accomplish. The new biology is actually assembler nanotechnology in its most basic, imitative form. All of us knew that assembler nanotechnology would have to bootstrap itself up from the proof of concept, the biological mechanisms of life. Now that is being done.

This level of manipulation of life is a thing of science fiction, a tremendous jump ahead of what most science fiction authors would have predicted. You will not hear a lot of solid details for a while. Too much is riding on the early discoveries and patents. Information will be held close to the vest. Still, information has to be used in order to convert it to more tangible benefits.

When will you read about major advances from this technology in your local paper, or see a startling breakthrough on your local television news? Long, long, after you know all about it from other sources, if you keep watching and reading.

The Exponential Growth of Knowledge

If time is the horizontal axis and knowledge is the vertical axis, the resulting curve takes on an exponential shape with a vertical asymptote placed along the time axis somewhere before the end of the present century, perhaps before mid-century. A lot of assumptions are involved, but the underlying idea is sound.

Some people call the vertical asymptote on the graph "the singularity." The singularity being the point of no return, the point in time when humans accumulate so much knowledge that the knowledge feeds upon itself in a positive feedback loop that takes the curve truly vertical.

A lot of things can stop human progress between now and then. Nuclear war, a large asteroid strike, inter-civilisational wars of a global nature, massive releases of chemical and biological contaminants, toxicants, and pathogens . . . In many countries electricity generation is so centralised as to be vulnerable to multiple large-scale attacks. The same is true for fuel supply for transportation. Without electricity and transportation, the western world would crash. Food could not get to the consumer, water could not be pumped and purified, hospitals could not store blood or medicines safely, all the high tech equipment the western world depends on would turn into expensive landfill garbage.

People talk about large scale economic disruption, but as long as there is electricity and transportation, with provision of edible food and clean water, the economy can bounce back. Without the basics, the economy is done. With a long-term economic crash, human research and progress will slow to a crawl. There would be no increase in intelligence, longevity, or miracle cures for spinal cord injuries, cancer, heart , lung and liver disease, etc.

The western world is the heart of secular liberal democracy, the rule of law, orderly government, and the scientific approach to knowledge acquisition. The Anglosphere of English speaking nations is the "Sanctum Sanctorum" of the western world, the heart of hearts. As long as the Anglosphere is kept safe and free from excessive interference from outside ideological interests, the knowledge singularity will arrive eventually.

What we need to do, as preparers of the ground, is to develop better methods of modeling knowledge, in more dynamic and interactive ways. It is important to decentralise this better modeled knowledge. It is also important to decentralise the production of electric power, at least significant backup power, and to develop alternative fuels for transportation that can be easily produced in emergency, albeit at higher costs than we are currently accustomed to.

The more difficult it is to crash western civilisation, the more likely the singularity appears on the horizon. We have to plan as if it is coming, at the same time we are planning to ensure that it does come.

Walking the Walk

I am over-educated and over-qualified for most occupations. Too many degrees, too much higher education. As a consultant and writer, I let those credentials work for me. As anything else, I would have a lot of explaining to do. Especially explaining why I continue to train in new fields. To break new ground, a person must understand the ground that has already been broken.

One problem is, it is much too easy for someone to bullshit about longevity and intelligence. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw have made a good living bull-shitting ever since the 1980s. I met them once and spoke with them briefly. It did not take long for my bullshit detector to go off. They attempted to come across as bio-medical experts, but I was the one who was in medical and graduate schools at the time. They failed the test, they simply did not know what they were talking about. Good enough on a surface level to snow-job the uninformed. Not good enough to back it up.

Preparation for next level humans is too important, too complex, to be left to pretenders and bullshitters. Those types of people may well dominate the interaction with popular media, and that is fine. Consider it a smokescreen of sorts to help conceal the actual work behind the scenes.

Next level humans will be incredibly intelligent, intelligent enough to know how to augment their own intelligence. Time will be a constraint, even for someone with a lifespan of 500 years. Priorities will be set, critical paths laid out, redundancy and rapid adaptability built into the system. No one can really anticipate what it will mean to have an IQ three times normal combined with a several century lifespan.

When next levels are ready to begin walking the walk, they will need guidance, in the same sense that a space ship needs guidance. The dangers are great and numerous and need to be mapped out. Someone has to prepare the way. This is part of the work that needs to be done, along with the nuts and bolts of combining longevity advances with intelligence improvements and emotional balancing/wisdom generation. Long life and intelligence would be a curse without emotional balance and wisdom. All of the above together would be less than fulfilling without tangible guidance and direction.

We cannot any of us know everything. Some of us compulsively try to do so. The best we can accomplish will be very little beside the accomplishments of a next level. All the more reason for the compulsives to do everything in their power to bring the possibilities to reality while there is time for them.

Another Look at Islamic Terrorism

Muslim terrorists generally have one thing in common: they want to install a global Caliphate to administer Sharia Islamic Law over every human being in the entire world. Anyone who violates Sharia would pay whatever penalty the religious judge chose to administer. Beatings, imprisonment, amputation, beheading, death by stoning.

The great return to the Stone Age? Not exactly. Not immediately. There are plenty of modern and semi-modern weapons and munitions to be used by non Salafists against the muslim terrorists. Nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional weapons--all would be used nearly to exhaustion of all supplies. The entire earth would become a wasteland, except those lucky regions where the inhabitants had managed to exclude the Salafists and the effects of their weapons. Even there, the impact of war would intrude, as refugees tried to swarm in to get away from radiation, plague, famine, persecution, and war, bringing much of what they are trying to escape along with them.

Many people scoff at the threat from islamist terrorists. A lot of these scoffers are frightened to death of globalization, global warming, the US "pax americana", eurocentrism, the fruits of modern scientific research, even rational thought itself. These are persons totally unprepared for the violent storm waiting to break. Unconsciously they assume the authorities of the western world, who they hate, will protect them, should the violence they deny so loudly actually come to pass. They are, in short, total fools who deserve nothing from anyone. Unable to protect themselves, unwilling to protect their neighbors, capable only of throwing shit on the very organisations that stand between them and bloody total mayhem. Like monkeys throwing shit.

What can stop this coming deluge of blood and murder? Only rational thought. Only the triumph of western rational thought over the irrationality of the postmodernist shit-throwing monkeys and the religious extremists.

A carpenter, plumber, electrician, and janitor is far more rational than the most "intelligent" postmodern university instructor. Every member of those occupations has to understand what he is doing, and perform appropriately within his task environment in order to do a job well. There is a clear difference between a good job and a bad job in those occupations. Not so for the monkeys employed as postmodern university instructors. Their bad jobs are so obscured, so politically protected, that they cannot be corrected or repaired. There is no discipline for a postmodernist monkey. They are encouraged to throw as much shit as they wish, the more the better.

When looking for rational solutions, do not look to the universities. You expect irrationality from the Sociology, Ethnic Studies, Language Departments, all the Humanities. Even the Psychology, Biology, Paleontology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science departments have been heavily infiltrated by the monkey scat-tossers. Rationality flees the universities as nepotism and political appointments fill the ranks of professors, even in the Science Departments.

Do not look to the corporations. As true-believing nepotists infiltrate the Human Resources departments, further hiring is dominated by nepotistic hires.

Do not look to governments: provincial or central government. The shit tossers took over the bureaucracies over twenty years ago. Rationality is out the window.

Do not look to the media. Only the least intelligent students go into journalism, and they typically halve their intelligence over the course of their training. The best way to lobotomise oneself is to follow the media too closely.

Muslim terrorism has few real enemies willing to stand up and oppose it. It is a grassroots movement supported by activities at tens of thousands of mosques around the world in most countries, even Canada. It will not stop until you are dead or dhimmi.

Think about it.

What of Love?

The road to the next level is also the road to financial success. Time, intelligence, wisdom, financial savvy, a profound understanding of. Life. will be busy, prosperous, and full. But what of love?

Love is like an ice cream flavor. Like everyone's favorite ice cream flavor. It is so much a favorite, it is also a daily quasi-required nutrient.

A person can live without love, but not very well. Living for centuries without love is a terrifying prospect.

Most people think of humans as a rational animal, above the other animals because of reasoning. If humans are able to reason better than other animals, it is only a matter of degree. Humans use emotional "fuzzy logic" for reasoning. It is a quicker form of reasoning than the formal logic of mathematics or computers, but less precise. Humans depend on their emotions for everyday thought. It is emotions and feelings that connect our minds to our bodies. Emotions are the basis of our reality.

Love is an emotion that stimulates the endocrine and immune systems of the human body to perform especially well. Love is essential for optimum health. Love suppresses other emotions that will stimulate the sometimes vital but for moderns physiologically damaging, fight or flight reflex. Without love the blood pressure easily rises, the heart gets stiff, the blood vessels lose their flexibility, tissues suffer.

Love is not a symphony. Love is an essential part of the symphony, the part that the audience waits for in anticipation. The reason people came to hear the performance.

Manfred Clyne, a neuroscientist and musician, learned something about the symphony of emotions. Clyne discovered a sequence of emotions which could be consciously triggered, resulting in the person feeling like he had just walked out of a very satisfying 2 hour movie, after only a few minutes of "sentic cycling." You know the feeling I mean--when a movie has really worked you over, but left you with a clean, positive feeling?

During the studies, Dr. Clynes was able to resolve at least 20 different emotional states, or Essentic Forms Patterns including: anger, hate, grief, love, sex, joy, reverence, and no-emotion. Others essentic forms studied included hope, courage, guilt, and shame. There are probably a lot more, but sometimes they are combinations of emotions, like envy.

This allowed Dr. Clynes to precisely map different physiological and behavior patterns based on the particular evoked emotion. __Source

Our emotions have to be exercised, must be acknowledged. Love is at the focal point. All emotions relate to love somehow. But all emotions are not love. They still must be exercised and experienced. Next levels will learn to treat their emotions with the respect and regard that they deserve. Love will earn the center position of the next level human's existence.

Only the Few

We are living in the age of technology. Technology for the masses. That is the story of modern capitalism, the way that technological innovations work their way down from the upper classes to the lower classes. Technology is ubiquitous.

Solid state technologies such as we find in cellphones, gameboys, mp3 players, pda's, notebook computers, large screen televisions, etc. are the most ubiquitous. There are many other technologies that are starting to enjoy the economy of scale deriving from ubiquitous silicon technologies seen in information, communications, and entertainment devices. Medical devices, research devices, security devices, energy related devices. The improved productivity and efficiencies from the diffusion of this technology has only just begun.

Technology is expensive to develop. Wealthy people tend to utilise technology initially, helping to finance the transition to better designs and mass production methods. Then the middle classes start to buy into the new technology, lending the support that allows even less expensive design and production methods, and pulling in more competition, further lowering prices.

Price is not the only bottleneck restricting acceptance of new technology. In more regulated and litigious areas of commerce, the threat of lawsuits or heavy fines may cause a company to avoid entire areas of research and development. This is good for the families of the trial lawyers and high level bureaucrats, but the millions whose lives are lost or harmed from being deprived of new technologies are invisible ghosts among us, unmourned.

Technologies of higher intelligence and longevity will eventually make their way down from the wealthy to the middle class. Trial lawyers, government bureaucrats, political activists--all will do their best to stop it, while attempting behind the scenes to acquire the benefits for themselves or their loved ones. The technology will nevertheless become widely available, due to human nature and the everpresent desire for a better life. This will not automatically lead to a more mature human, or one more wise.

At that point, what will be the bottleneck preventing the transition to the next level? Almost the entire intellectual thrust of the modern western world is oriented toward the idea that all world cultures are essentially of equal value, except western culture which is inherently racist, oppressive, and controlled by evil white males. This is the basis for the curriculums of western schools from the lowest level to the highest. This is the basis for every news broadcast, almost every motion picture, much popular music. It is the editorial stance of most western newspapers and printed journals. It is the invisible substrate of reflexive ideation that guides most politicians, labor activists, university professors, journalists, and civil rights activists.

The rejection of rationalism, the insistence that the creed of postmodern multiculturalism is sacrosanct and not to be analysed by modern scientific methods, is at the foundation of this pseudo-intellectual movement that has come to control the schools, the media, the entertainment industry, most government bureaucracy, labor unions, the legal sector, and much of the commercial sector of the western world.

This idiocy will prevent most people from transitioning to the next level. Many will come to live longer and be more intelligent. Few will become wise enough to make the transition through to what is possible.

How many rational and wise next level humans would it take to guarantee the survival of next levels? The answer may surprise you.