[bm3719]

This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:

  Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
  sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
  cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.

Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred" the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town. Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to the place.

Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.

[malfist]

This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.

Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.

And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town

[dauertewigkeit]

I agree with you that STEM don't hold a monopoly on intelligence.

> engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town

Maybe so, but not for the same reasons. Back in their home town, they cannot vibe with anyone because the few who might be compatible have long since left. In a STEM hotspot, they go to an event and meet compatible people, but it's 11 guys for every 3 girls, so unless they are top dog in that room, they aren't going to score.

[malfist]

And yet, the population of Singapore isn't 79% male.

[dauertewigkeit]

IDK the dating scene in Singapore. I frankly didn't even know that Singapore was considered a tech hub. I was using it as a synonym for a tech hub because that is what I assumed the author was doing.

[9dev]

…not to mention they are completely ignoring the existence of smart girls as well

[raincole]

Higher education is strongly associated to lower fertility rates. Especially for women, but for men too. So no the argument doesn't ignore the existence of smart women. Smart women (and men) just far less likely to reproduce, statistically speaking.

[9dev]

> […] overflowing with smart guys. […] smart guys build […] he's the smartest guy […] local rich guy would start a business […]

It’s pretty clear this entire crude theory is based on a thinking system that has little place for women in active positions.

And if your immediate reaction to that is annoyance because it seems like an insignificant detail, maybe reflect on that for a moment.

[newsclues]

Are you upset about biology or the logic that follows the reality of human biology?

[9dev]

What now, human biology dictates men lead and women bear children? I'm upset some people carry that pathetic incel narrative over to HN.

[bm3719]

We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online shopping, and targeted advertising.

Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as a given and built around that.

[g8oz]

>>It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.

More like French post-structuralism.

[internet_points]

> can't get laid

huh, I thought it was talking about how expensive extra bedrooms are in big cities so people choose not to have (as many) kids there

[Forgeties79]

It’s the same nonsense as people going “Idiocracy is a documentary.“ Of course none of them think they’re the idiots.

[NegativeK]

I was going to comment the same. Complaining about how there are too many dumb people is a trollish red flag I've learned to disengage from.

Also, stop blaming your damn users.

[oblio]

> Singapore is an IQ shredder.

Heh, I've just realized about 2 years ago that it's worse.

Cities are people shredders. Based on the information I've found, cities have lower fertility rates than rural areas and this has been the case ever since they were created.

I absolutely love cities, but with ever increasing urbanization and unless we make HUGE changes to facilitate people easily having kids in cities (and I'm talking HUGE, stuff like having stay at home parents for the first 6-7 years of their childhood, free access to communal areas that offer all the services required to take care of kids of any age, free education, etc), humanity will probably not be able to sustain a population of more than say, 1 billion people. Probably much fewer.

Which I guess, could work, but we will be in totally uncharted territory.

And then AI comes in and things become... very interesting.

https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria

[simianwords]

Apologies but either I don’t understand your post or it is nonsensical.

What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?

If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.

[bm3719]

AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on said barriers being present.

I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries, because that's what we're optimizing for.

I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have been extracted.

Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going to go because that's what the global economic machine desires right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.

To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked out great for me as it probably has for others here. However, this system isn't a free lunch.

[simianwords]

It looks like it’s working as expected then? This is what I would have done with AI if I had complete authority to decide where money flows and what people should do.

What’s the alternative

[hunterpayne]

> Very few are American or ethnic Americans

Maybe you should look into why that is. Or specifically look at the scores and grades of students applying to grad school in the US vs who is admitted (this isn't a recent thing either) by country. If anything, we are probably behind where we should be because we don't admit the best into the best schools. We admit those that don't need grants (usually because their government pays instead).

[wodenokoto]

What amazes me about this theory is that being the 115 IQ guy in a town where the next guy is 105 isn’t better than being the 115 IQ guy in and office averaging 120.

Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not better than being a small fish.

[moomoo11]

Why not just not compare to others because it’s easy to game anything?

Just look for patterns and then act out of self interest. Nobody is coming to save you.

I’m no high IQ person but if I can figure out how to get a STEM job without STEM degree, make money by getting lucky at a unicorn, invest and sell for profit and invest again (only losers HODL so others can take profits), then there’s really no excuse why someone else can’t.

And I’m originally from a country that has like 70 IQ nationally or so it is said. So I’m not a genius, maybe the only quality I have that makes me different is I don’t know how to quit until I meet my goal.

More people should stop crying and be a man. Our ancestors literally survived against nature and each other so we could post here on HN. I don’t mean being able to lift 500lbs like a caveman either.

Exercise your brain, it gets stronger too because I have a hard time understanding concepts sometimes, but taking steps to break it down and digest it in pieces helps me. Takes a bit longer but hopefully you have tomorrow.

[Synthetic7346]

I can't tell if this is satire

[nubg]

MENA slop

[moomoo11]

Whatever you need to tell yourself to cope!

I tried to help, but maybe I should have given you two a tissue box instead.

[dyauspitr]

What’s the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated, can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally better local government?

[bm3719]

Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.

It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.

One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.

Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.

[gom_jabbar]

Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to the problem of "IQ shredders":

"The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames." [0]

[0] Nick Land (2014). IQ Shredders in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

[bm3719]

Thanks, been awhile since I read it.

I think the only solution is territorialization if you want to preserve the human. If you don't care about that (or think that it's not possible anyway), then yes, accelerate.

[AndrewKemendo]

Glad there’s other fellow travelers here

[dyauspitr]

We’ve had 50 years of genetic engineering and it’s about time we started using it. I wish someone with more central authority like China starts doing experiments of genetically altering humans to start making super humans. We have the technology, it’s only ethics holding us back. So what if a few thousand people (preferably volunteers) die in experiments, we should just make sure they’re condemned (like death row or terminally ill) and carry on.

[WillAdams]

California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.

[raincole]

Yeah, more separated would be ideal. Local government (and churches or other organizations) should have strong incentives to keep talents in their hometowns, or at least their home countries. Imagine how much stronger technologically the EU would be now if their skilled workers didn't get brain-drained to the US for decades.

[HPsquared]

A little less min-maxing, perhaps.

[sjjsjdk]

this is genius