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Like Sabine Hossenfelder, I Was Offered Money to Tell You AI Will Kill Us (www.youtube.com)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 5 days ago (3 children)

Professor Dave is pretty good at including ample material to demonstrate why people are full of shit. There’s no reason to give that sociopathic shitstain any more views.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (2 children)

    It's also very easy to take things out of context. For example, I can see someone being a defender of pure science and saying, "no topic should be beyond the purview of science. There are no sacred cows. There are undeniable differences in any number of physical features between various ethnic and racial groups. Think of how the people of Tibet and Nepal have evolved greater lung capacity to handle high altitudes. The brain is an organ like any other, why shouldn't there be differences in brain structure between certain racial or ethnic groups? Maybe some groups have slight advantages in certain kinds of intelligences and cognitive abilities."

    Honestly, that doesn't sound like an absurd hypothesis at all. Certain groups have any number of physical advantages or disadvantages, why not mental advantages? This wouldn't be a universal, "this race/ethnic group is smarter than another." It would be "this ethnic group has an advantage in this particular cognitive task, this in another." Would that really be so absurd? Certain groups have advantages in long-distance running, why not in say, 3D mental object rotation, or facial recognition, or social relations management? Maybe some ethnic group that has always lived in large extended families and clans would on average be better at keeping track of complex social webs.

    I would find it absurd to propose that one ethnic or racial group was universally "more intelligent" than others, but that's because there isn't just one type of intelligence. But I could easily see certain groups having advantages in certain areas. We know that physical advantages can exist, it would be unexpected if the same didn't happen to certain specific cognitive tasks.

    I haven't watched the video, but I could easily see how someone could take an argument like the above and slander someone by removing all nuance and saying, "this person thinks black people are less intelligent than white people!!!"

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (1 child)

    Well, the reality is that most of that research on “intelligence” differences between races is funded by the Pioneer Fund, which was founded by racists for racists.

    When you see IQ studies claiming black people have lower IQs, those are all based on studies from apartheid South Africa. Wealthy racists have been pumping money into this idea for years and found nothing.

    There’s no meaningful mechanism either. Race as a factor in intelligence is not scientific and foundationally racist.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 days ago

    Nuance my friend. Nuance. Any study based on IQ is bullshit, because IQ is bullshit. And you're making the same mistake I alluded to - lumping all forms of intelligence as the same. And I can propose all sorts of evolutionary mechanisms. I proposed one in the above comment. Again, I'm not talking about a broad conclusion that one ethnic group is smarter than another. That's preposterous, just like there isn't one ethnic group that is universally better at athletics than all others. But I can think of three physical advantages that are well documented and differ between ethnic groups:

    1. High altitude breath capacity adaptation.

    2. Long distance running advantages.

    3. Lactose tolerance.

    The brain is an organ like any other. I can think of many potential cognitive advantages one ethnic group could have over another, with very clear evolutionary mechanisms involved. These are pure speculation, but very plausible:

    1. An ethnic group with a long tradition of larger than average and more tightly knit extended families may have superior social skills. In that society, the more socially skilled had an advantage in reproduction over those that were less skilled.

    2. There are differences in the kind of cognitive tasks involved in farming and hunter-gathering. It would not be absurd if ethnic groups that have been farming for thousands of years have evolved an advantage on the cognitive abilities most useful to farming and a disadvantage on those tasks involved in hunting and gathering.

    3. Differences in rates of neurodiversity and neurodivergence. There is a prominent theory that many "conditions" like autism and ADHD are evolutionary holdovers. The theory is that while certain neurotypes can be disabling in modern societies, these same neurotypes could have been advantageous in pre-agrarian history. If that is truly the case, why wouldn't rates of these neurotypes differ among ethnic groups? The people of North Sentinel Island still live off hunter-gathering. While there are some ethnic groups that have been farming for 10,000 years. If certain neurotypes really were more advantageous in pre-agrarian societies, ethnic groups with no or shorter histories of agriculture should be expected to have higher rates of these neurotypes. Honestly it would be extremely fascinating to test a whole bunch of people for autism and ADHD and plot that against some estimate of how long their ancestors have been involved in farming. If there is a correlation, it would be pretty slam-dunk evidence for the neurotype evolutionary advantage theory. Maybe the rates of autism among the Sentinelese are sky high.

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