Every time I see someone bring up "IQ scores" I feel the need to repeat: IQ scores were literally invented by eugenicists and they've always been biased towards privilege

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I don't enjoy discussions of intelligence or genius as intrinsics. Every time someone brings up the "Pareto Principle" I get grossed out.

It may be true that certain individuals are able to outperform others. But what are the conditions that allowed them to do so?

It does not remove someone's accomplishments to say they had help in getting there.

But a system of intentional disparity means that the majority of people get left behind. We have to sell that this is fair somehow.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

So, I am not interested in IQ scores. I am not interested in "genius". I am interested in helping people be able to be their best selves. We can't do that without giving people an environment where that's possible.

That's what matters to me. That's what gives me life.

Dan Sugalski

@cwebber The only thing IQ scores are good for is as a quick sorting function -- anyone who goes on about how high their IQ is can generally be dropped right into the "raging douchebag" category and ignored with some enthusiasm.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

And there's a big tie in, within the end, of the reasons people are frustrated with AI.

People bring up "copyright violation", environmental concerns, etc etc.

But imagine we built an AI that could produce impressive artwork, code, music, and it had no serious environmental impact or violation of copyright concerns. Would you still find it depressing?

I am guessing yes.

I think the big missing part of the AI conversation is the loss of agency, of purpose in peoples' lives.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

The fact of the matter is that there's a rush to build AI tools which *replace people* and which aren't themselves participants, which don't care, which don't take joy in producing things, and hey, we can simply scrape all the annoying artists and programmers and writers and etc out of the way for maximum cash!

A few years ago, we were promised a world where AI would take over menial tasks so people can focus on their art.

Now we're being told artists don't matter.

And that's *depressing*.

Random Geek

@wordshaper @cwebber I did the whole IQ evaluation thing multiple times as a kid (moving to different states and each school district not knowing what to do with me). Got significantly different scores every time.

As an adult, shared that with an IQ enthusiast later and immediately "that's impossible. That cannot happen. Your IQ is a fixed number," and hey welcome to my brain.

But other than it's a stupid useless classist racist metric, those anecdotes are why I don't give IQ any credit.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I am not "against AI". I actually am very interested in building AI systems, but not the kinds which exist or are being pushed today.

To me, the important part of an AI system is its accountability.

We actually do hold much of our software accountable: if it does something bad, we actively change and repair it.

Corporations are rushing to flood the market with tools which don't care, have no accountability, don't have a stake in things.

That's depressing.

anomaly 🌹

@cwebber sounds like you're probably already aware of it, but the Rat Park experiment really gets to the heart of this. It turns out if you keep rats in an idyllic enclosure that meets all of their natural sensory and social needs, not just the typical depressing bare essentials terrarium that provides a minimum of food, water, and shelter - they *don't* choose the pleasure lever until they die. They end up mostly ignoring it to live a nice fulfilling life with their friends instead.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

The world is so depressing right now. One of the *only* reasons I am able to get up every day and face it is that I have work with @spritely where I think we can do something meaningful and interesting to change it, and bring hope. That and the wonderful people in my life are what keeps me going.

And it's *still* incredibly hard to get up in the morning.

But I believe we can do better, we can build tools and spaces for a world worth living in.

I have to believe it. I have to, to keep going.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I have said before that my primary life philosophy is an "Ethics of Agency", and I have talked about this before on a podcast episode https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/11-an-ethics-of-agency.html

I'm not interested in "happiness" as much, because I don't want a rat that leans on a lever. The "ethics of agency" thinking is a rough approach modification of utilitarianism that replaces the measurements of "happiness" and "suffering" in Utilitarianism with "agency" and "subjection".

But "subjection" is weighed more heavily.

aeva

@cwebber I'm going to cast doubt on this. How could the guy who is rich enough to never eat normal people food know anything about normal people food? Remember the wonderful keynote he gave that one year we went to pycon together? He's a petulant little man who doesn't want to read his email or go to the doctor.

squinky

@cwebber 100% agreed.

A couple of years ago I went through a full day of psychological profiling, and the majority of it was made up of six or eight different IQ tests. They weren't being used to determine a number but rather to have a clinical psychologist watch how I approach certain kinds of challenges.

I told this story a few times and people's eyes would light up and they wanted to know what my score was. Usually I explained that I don't believe these things have value and it was usually accepted, but when pressed I would invoke one of the tests that was an outlier because the instructions were presented wrong. I got a 60 on that one. So that's the number they get from me.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@aeva I think casting doubt on PaulG is good and fair. Stopped clocks and all that though.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

It's not agency for the individual, it's agency *for everyone*. The goal is to improve the agency of all. But the purpose is still about agency, so you *do* care about individuals, in that the entire point is that a person is able to be and define their best selves. So there's a push-pull effect.

It's imperfect, but it's how I think about things. It's just one lens of many, but it's the main one I think about things through, in terms of ethics.

aeva

@cwebber I read somewhere that this only holds if the rat is trapped in an unstimulating environment. If provided an adequately stimulating environment, the rat will ignore the drugs button.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@aeva Would love to see evidence of that, if you have a paper please provide it!

But I still think it's the case that even if the rat starts leaning on the drugs button, *it's not the rat's fault*, and that's my main point. My main point was that the rat was provided a system in which the rat couldn't win.

So even if that's true, that still holds to my point: we shouldn't blame the rat, we should blame the system.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

But the real point is that: we should be constructing the best world we can in which people can thrive.

Measurements and metrics can be useful, if taken in aggregate, but we know full well that any metric that is used as a primary goal ends up becoming its own tyrannical destruction of the rest. (And thus, it's not surprising that money as the primary goal ends up being hyperdestructive.)

I don't want to "know who's better". I want to help people be able to be better.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

This was an unexpected detour rant for the middle of the day. But it's something I care about. Perhaps I will collect it into a blogpost later.

I guess I will summarize, then leave the thread here...

Christine Lemmer-Webber

It's incredibly easy to be full of despair right now. I get it, I feel it too.

Don't let anyone tell you that the people who are doing the best are because they *deserve* it or are "geniuses".

And also don't let anyone tell you that a group of people who by and large who seem to be suffering and aren't doing as well relative to the metrics of the system is because they're not worthy or have failed themselves.

We have to try to build the best world for each other we can, the best we can.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Okay, I will add one more thing. Multiple people (thx @stellarskylark, @aeva, @martinvermeer) have brought up "Rat Park", a counterstudy where rats, if given a sufficiently stimulating environment, won't lean on the lever until they die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

This is actually great and in line with what I really wanted to point out, which is that the problem is that we shouldn't blame the individual, we should blame the environment. What environment do we give people?

So yes, yay, rat park!