Netflix - 3% (Three Percent)

[K. A. Pital]

Anyone else watching this series?

I must say I really like it. Made in Brazil, so not as fancy as US shows, but quite remarkable compared to the vast majority of generic teenage bullshit ala Hunger Games.

[FaxModem1]

It's a bizarre show, they're creating a temporary upper class who dies off from old age(or other causes), and isn't allowed children. Getting into that echelon is only possible via intelligence testing. Won't this eventually weed out intelligence in the country's population, due to eventual death of the ruling class and braindrain of everyone else?

[TheFeniX]

From what I know, the "Idiocracy" effect doesn't exist. Certain mental defects are hereditary, but intelligence is not. Two geniuses aren't guaranteed a Mensa child. If anything would boost said child's intelligence, it would be having two intelligent parents (and possibly the money to go with it) to give him/her a leg up on other children.

[Imperial Overlord]

From what I know, the "Idiocracy" effect doesn't exist. Certain mental defects are hereditary, but intelligence is not. Two geniuses aren't guaranteed a Mensa child. If anything would boost said child's intelligence, it would be having two intelligent parents (and possibly the money to go with it) to give him/her a leg up on other children.

Somewhat true. Some parts of intelligence are somewhat inheritable, like the schizophrenia genes that run through my family. Studies have correlated them to high intelligence, but get too many of them and you get schizophrenia. That's why despite being so fucking devastating, schizophrenia is comparatively common, because only getting some of the genes is beneficial.

[Rhadamantus]

From what I know, the "Idiocracy" effect doesn't exist. Certain mental defects are hereditary, but intelligence is not. Two geniuses aren't guaranteed a Mensa child. If anything would boost said child's intelligence, it would be having two intelligent parents (and possibly the money to go with it) to give him/her a leg up on other children.

Intelligence is fairly strongly heritable, about .75 in adults. While this isn't all of the variation, height by contrast is has a heritability of roughly .7. Sure, two tall parents aren't guaranteed a tall kid, but very few basketball players have sub 5'9 sons.

[K. A. Pital]

It's a bizarre show, they're creating a temporary upper class who dies off from old age(or other causes), and isn't allowed children. Getting into that echelon is only possible via intelligence testing. Won't this eventually weed out intelligence in the country's population, due to eventual death of the ruling class and braindrain of everyone else?

The process is not an intelligence test as such, though. It is a general personality test.

[Starglider]

Certain mental defects are hereditary, but intelligence is not.

Are you a creationist?

[TheFeniX]

Intelligence is fairly strongly heritable, about .75 in adults. While this isn't all of the variation, height by contrast is has a heritability of roughly .7. Sure, two tall parents aren't guaranteed a tall kid, but very few basketball players have sub 5'9 sons.

Are we talking in general or some end of the bell-curve stuff. I'll preface by saying I'm just some asshole who took two semester of Psych which was... goddamn, almost 10 years ago. Anyway, intelligence (at least the testing) is heavily biased to begin with. Just because someone is poor and uneducated (or not educated at an "acceptable" level) doesn't affect intelligence the way we generally think it does.

If you locked Hawking or Einstein in a box and never let them learn to read, their intelligence would rate quite low. Would that make them less intelligent? Probably. You can't ignore environmental issues that you can't really test for later in life, that can adversely affect adult intelligence. One that poor people deal with more than the affluent: lead. There's numerous other contributing factors.

If you can control for these factors, you're going to end up with enough "smart" people to replace the non-breeding intellectual elite. Just because "dumb rednecks" out-bred the smart people in Idiocracy doesn't even mean those rednecks were idiots. Because there's a rather large divide between a moron and someone who's just poor and uneducated.

But I'm always game to read up on stuff that shows I'm wrong if you've got the material. Way too much of the classes I took boiled down to "Freud was wrong about this, but read this section on Freud." But the stuff on nature vs nurture seemed legit at the time.

Are you a creationist?

You going somewhere with this or you just being glib?

[Rhadamantus]

Intelligence is fairly strongly heritable, about .75 in adults. While this isn't all of the variation, height by contrast is has a heritability of roughly .7. Sure, two tall parents aren't guaranteed a tall kid, but very few basketball players have sub 5'9 sons.

Are we talking in general or some end of the bell-curve stuff. I'll preface by saying I'm just some asshole who took two semester of Psych which was... goddamn, almost 10 years ago. Anyway, intelligence (at least the testing) is heavily biased to begin with. Just because someone is poor and uneducated (or not educated at an "acceptable" level) doesn't affect intelligence the way we generally think it does.

If you locked Hawking or Einstein in a box and never let them learn to read, their intelligence would rate quite low. Would that make them less intelligent? Probably. You can't ignore environmental issues that you can't really test for later in life, that can adversely affect adult intelligence. One that poor people deal with more than the affluent: lead. There's numerous other contributing factors.

If you can control for these factors, you're going to end up with enough "smart" people to replace the non-breeding intellectual elite. Just because "dumb rednecks" out-bred the smart people in Idiocracy doesn't even mean those rednecks were idiots. Because there's a rather large divide between a moron and someone who's just poor and uneducated.

But I'm always game to read up on stuff that shows I'm wrong if you've got the material. Way too much of the classes I took boiled down to "Freud was wrong about this, but read this section on Freud." But the stuff on nature vs nurture seemed legit at the time.

Are you a creationist?

You going somewhere with this or you just being glib?

Intelligence is complicated, but not in quite the way you think.
IQ tests, according to expert opinionhttp://sci-hub.io/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007, are culture-fair and accurate, with 97% of expert psychologists agreeing it measures cognitive ability "reasonably well", and 78% agreeing they're culture fair. They're not perfect, but the common misconception, that is still prevalent in much introductory materials overstates its case. IQ tests tend to be, according to experts, reasonably accurate and fair measures of intelligence.

Second, IQ tests, if they are used normally, do not measure knowledge. Einstein, locked in a box, could still solve Ravin Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s ... Matrix.svg better than a well-educated but otherwise ordinary person. This critique applies to many standarized tests, which may have been the origin of the criticism, but it doesn't apply very well.

Third, while intelligence is of course effected by external factors such as lead or iodine exposure, along with environment, genetics does play a prominent role in it. Intelligence is fairly strongly heritable, and the majority of the variation in it is explained by genetics.

[Starglider]

Are you a creationist?

You going somewhere with this or you just being glib?

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

[TheFeniX]

Intelligence is complicated, but not in quite the way you think.
IQ tests, according to expert opinionhttp://sci-hub.io/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007, are culture-fair and accurate, with 97% of expert psychologists agreeing it measures cognitive ability "reasonably well", and 78% agreeing they're culture fair. They're not perfect, but the common misconception, that is still prevalent in much introductory materials overstates its case. IQ tests tend to be, according to experts, reasonably accurate and fair measures of intelligence.

Your link is borked on my end, but I'm granting your argument. But why can't we "breed Genius?" Or, going the other way "breed stupid?" Why is what I've read on the topic essentially that when dealing with extremes, the offspring tend to slide back to the middle of the curve?

One paper I read, though it might be unrelated, is due to the stability of the human genone. It was debunking the idea that slave owners bred the black race into submission and low intelligence by killing the smart ones and selecting for docility and physical strength. House Slaves were allowed to be smart, but kept fat. Look, I don't try to understand racists, I just read things. Anyways, even granting THAT DID happen, it's been found there wasn't enough time even granting a few hundred years of selective breeding to have made any significant changes to the genome.

Dogs OTOH are stupid easy to breed traits into. Their genes are like legos, you want a trait, you find another breed that has it, 1 or 2 generations later: you've got that trait.

I guess my argument is that everything I've read, you can't "breed" anything into the human race except the broadstrokes. At least in any kind of reasonable timeframe. Maybe through shittons of inbreeding.

Are you a creationist?

You going somewhere with this or you just being glib?

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

Re-reading my old post, I realize I used intelligence as a catch-all. So, that's on me. I'm mainly talking about how you can't really "breed intelligence" one-way or the other, into people. At least nothing I've seen. All attempts at this just produce offspring with a pretty standard distribution. Same even with height or other physical traits: the combination of extremes is more likely (from my limited knowledge) to slide back toward the middle.

Possibly with an extremely strict breeding program over multiple generations. But once again, no expert.

[Zaune]

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

Human capacity for intelligence, yes. But the extent to which higher IQ scores are genetic versus environmental (nutrition, access to educational resources etc) is a different question. How would you even go about studying that experimentally in a way that any university ethics committee would sign off on?

[Rhadamantus]

Intelligence is complicated, but not in quite the way you think.
IQ tests, according to expert opinionhttp://sci-hub.io/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007, are culture-fair and accurate, with 97% of expert psychologists agreeing it measures cognitive ability "reasonably well", and 78% agreeing they're culture fair. They're not perfect, but the common misconception, that is still prevalent in much introductory materials overstates its case. IQ tests tend to be, according to experts, reasonably accurate and fair measures of intelligence.

Your link is borked on my end, but I'm granting your argument. But why can't we "breed Genius?" Or, going the other way "breed stupid?" Why is what I've read on the topic essentially that when dealing with extremes, the offspring tend to slide back to the middle of the curve?

One paper I read, though it might be unrelated, is due to the stability of the human genone. It was debunking the idea that slave owners bred the black race into submission and low intelligence by killing the smart ones and selecting for docility and physical strength. House Slaves were allowed to be smart, but kept fat. Look, I don't try to understand racists, I just read things. Anyways, even granting THAT DID happen, it's been found there wasn't enough time even granting a few hundred years of selective breeding to have made any significant changes to the genome.

Dogs OTOH are stupid easy to breed traits into. Their genes are like legos, you want a trait, you find another breed that has it, 1 or 2 generations later: you've got that trait.

I guess my argument is that everything I've read, you can't "breed" anything into the human race except the broadstrokes. At least in any kind of reasonable timeframe. Maybe through shittons of inbreeding.

You going somewhere with this or you just being glib?

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

Re-reading my old post, I realize I used intelligence as a catch-all. So, that's on me. I'm mainly talking about how you can't really "breed intelligence" one-way or the other, into people. At least nothing I've seen. All attempts at this just produce offspring with a pretty standard distribution. Same even with height or other physical traits: the combination of extremes is more likely (from my limited knowledge) to slide back toward the middle.

Possibly with an extremely strict breeding program over multiple generations. But once again, no expert.

Long-term, it'd probably be possible to breed people for intelligence, if you had enough time (many generations), and a strong enough pressure. Granted, offspring tend to revert to the mean, but that's also true of dogs. It hasn't happened in humans (probably) mostly because human societies, at least recently, don't select that strongly for intelligence, in relation to the energetic and biologic costs. Furthermore, since intelligence is correlated with brain and head size, and since human women, without modern medicine, are at high risk of dying in childbirth, humans are pretty close to maxed out at intelligence.

[Rhadamantus]

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

Human capacity for intelligence, yes. But the extent to which higher IQ scores are genetic versus environmental (nutrition, access to educational resources etc) is a different question. How would you even go about studying that experimentally in a way that any university ethics committee would sign off on?

Identical twins who were adopted and placed in families of different means, normally.

[Q99]

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

It's more 'humans are genetically nigh-identical and there's a lot of factors that go into intelligence so it's far far more complex than there being 'smart genes' and having smart parents.'

[Zor]

Are you a creationist?

You going somewhere with this or you just being glib?

Natural selection only works on heritable traits. If you don't believe intelligence is heritable, then how did the human intelligence come to exist?

On an individual to individual basis mordern human intelligence is more likely to be determined by other factors than genetics.

Zor

[Simon_Jester]

But why can't we "breed Genius?"

It's not clear whether or not we can. No one's ever tried on a large enough scale to produce obvious, deliberate results...

Or, going the other way "breed stupid?"

And definitely nobody's ever tried that on purpose.

Why is what I've read on the topic essentially that when dealing with extremes, the offspring tend to slide back to the middle of the curve?

Oh, they tend to slide towards the middle of the curve. "Regression to the mean" is a thing.

One paper I read, though it might be unrelated, is due to the stability of the human genone. It was debunking the idea that slave owners bred the black race into submission and low intelligence by killing the smart ones and selecting for docility and physical strength. House Slaves were allowed to be smart, but kept fat. Look, I don't try to understand racists, I just read things. Anyways, even granting THAT DID happen, it's been found there wasn't enough time even granting a few hundred years of selective breeding to have made any significant changes to the genome.

It would certainly be ineffective if you didn't have a reliable means of testing for intelligence, as opposed to defiance. Defiance is routinely expressed by people of all intelligence levels, and in fact morons can be as defiant or more defiant than highly intelligent people.

Plus, the racists tend to create a self-contradictory message there. Slave-owners wouldn't be breeding slaves for stupidity, they'd be breeding for docility. Passivity. Nonviolence. And very few modern American racists would seem all that ready to argue that African-Americans are unusually docile, passive, and nonviolent. Doesn't sound like a good fit to the 'accepted' stereotypes.

Dogs OTOH are stupid easy to breed traits into. Their genes are like legos, you want a trait, you find another breed that has it, 1 or 2 generations later: you've got that trait.

I guess my argument is that everything I've read, you can't "breed" anything into the human race except the broadstrokes. At least in any kind of reasonable timeframe. Maybe through shittons of inbreeding.

Nobody has ever bred humans as intensively as we breed dogs, on the same scale that we breed dogs. We straight up do not allow undesired dog matings when we're trying to breed dogs for a trait, we're willing to cull or sterilize large percentages of the dog population to prevent said matings, and we think nothing of picking the single most suitable male dog (or bull, or whatever) and having that particular male father dozens if not hundreds of children in hopes of rapidly spreading a desired trait through the population.

There has never been anything like this among humans, not on a large enough scale to notice.

Though I heard rumors Yao Ming was the result of a Chinese program to breed really tall kids for basketball...

[TheFeniX]

tl;dr: This is getting a bit out there, but my main point was that left to the devices of "affluent people have 0-1 kid and poor people have 15," you aren't getting to "Idiocracy." And when I went on about "intelligence" I meant you'd need a lot more than "two smart people bang out a few kids and that trend continues" to make considerable changes to the average IQ. Humans seem to be moving quicker in other areas due to environmental factors though, but I haven't had the time to dive into any of that and most of the studies I've found seem preliminary at best.

You an ignore the rest if you want, it's just me rambling.

It's not clear whether or not we can. No one's ever tried on a large enough scale to produce obvious, deliberate results...

The short-term doesn't take a lot of doing though. Some slave owners or eugenics guy with an axe to grind. Though the slave breeding likely had external issues, due to rape and the economics of slaves, getting in the way.

Oh, they tend to slide towards the middle of the curve. "Regression to the mean" is a thing.

Yes, as said: even dogs will slide back this way if allowed to just breed however they want. But unlike humans, controlled breeding seems much more effective in the short-term and (any information I've found says) this does NOT work in the short-term for humans. It definitely works for dogs in the long term.

Nobody has ever bred humans as intensively as we breed dogs, on the same scale that we breed dogs. We straight up do not allow undesired dog matings when we're trying to breed dogs for a trait, we're willing to cull or sterilize large percentages of the dog population to prevent said matings, and we think nothing of picking the single most suitable male dog (or bull, or whatever) and having that particular male father dozens if not hundreds of children in hopes of rapidly spreading a desired trait through the population.

Even accounting for the rapid pace of Canine sexual maturity compared to humans, their genes are almost magic. You're literally talking a couple generations of breeding and creating what are essentially easily reproducible freaks of nature. Dogs ranging from 5 pounds to 250. From purse size to taller than a Pro Basketball player when standing. Breeds with significant built-in behavioral traits.

Now, those don't come as easy or as quick. But even taking into account the speed of which you can breed canines, the number of generations required for significant changes is hilariously low. From what I know, no other animal we breed has anywhere near that malleable of DNA. I can't remember the breed, but some guy in (I think) Germany was looking for a hardy, but smaller, hunting dog that was also family friendly. It was something like "take a Cocker, breed with a Golden for temperament, breed with X to get the size down, breed with Y to improve the sense of smell." Man I wish I could find that article again. Would have been mid 2000s.

Now, years of breeding dogs gave him access to all those other breeds to pull from. But from everything I know, they're pretty special in this regard.

By contrast, Fruit flies from reading are useful for research because their DNA is relatively stable, but you can breed multiple generations in weeks. Horses also have a wide range of sizes. But my understanding is that miniature horses are the result of breeding dwarfism and the largest horses aren't anywhere near the size deviation of dog breeds.

[Simon_Jester]

It's not clear whether or not we can. No one's ever tried on a large enough scale to produce obvious, deliberate results...

The short-term doesn't take a lot of doing though. Some slave owners or eugenics guy with an axe to grind. Though the slave breeding likely had external issues, due to rape and the economics of slaves, getting in the way.

An effort to selectively breed humans would by definition take multiple human generations. No one person could mastermind it unless that person was immortal as well as being stupidly powerful.

The most plausible case would be something like the Howard Trust from Robert Heinlein's fiction- a foundation or trust with a rotating board of trustees, dedicated to encouraging selected humans to have as many children as possible and then cross-breeding those children. In Heinlein's case, they were breeding for longevity, but you could do something similar for intelligence or height or other traits.

If you're willing to wait 100-200 years to get results, this is a fairly promising approach. But nobody's done this on a consistent enough basis to show obvious, unambiguous results. Plus, the science to accurately test for a lot of mental traits didn't even exist until a hundred years or so ago.

The best you'd get for evidence of eugenics is 'natural experiment' cases of isolated breeding populations of humans with minimal intermarriage into the outside world, with strong pressure to pick up a certain trait. The only moderately convincing example I've ever heard of is Ashkenazi Jews (not even Jews in general, that specific subpopulation). Who have a whole slew of chronic genetic diseases far more frequently than the norm, but also average something like twelve or fifteen IQ points above the general population. That sounds sort of like the kind of thing you see in dog breeds- optimization for specific traits combined with a bunch of specific side effects found only in that particular breed.

The theory, I gather, is that medieval Europe exercised a lot of unusual selection pressure on the Ashkenazi.

Oh, they tend to slide towards the middle of the curve. "Regression to the mean" is a thing.

Yes, as said: even dogs will slide back this way if allowed to just breed however they want. But unlike humans, controlled breeding seems much more effective in the short-term and (any information I've found says) this does NOT work in the short-term for humans. It definitely works for dogs in the long term.

Nobody has ever bred humans as intensively as we breed dogs, on the same scale that we breed dogs. We straight up do not allow undesired dog matings when we're trying to breed dogs for a trait, we're willing to cull or sterilize large percentages of the dog population to prevent said matings, and we think nothing of picking the single most suitable male dog (or bull, or whatever) and having that particular male father dozens if not hundreds of children in hopes of rapidly spreading a desired trait through the population.

Even accounting for the rapid pace of Canine sexual maturity compared to humans, their genes are almost magic. You're literally talking a couple generations of breeding and creating what are essentially easily reproducible freaks of nature. Dogs ranging from 5 pounds to 250. From purse size to taller than a Pro Basketball player when standing. Breeds with significant built-in behavioral traits.

The thing is, if you're trying to create a breed of dog, you have a lot of freedom to pick your starting point and there's a whole infrastructure to do so. If you want to breed chihuahuas, you don't start with Great Danes, you start with the smallest dogs you can find and breed them smaller.

I think you're overestimating how much of this is 'magic,' and how much of this is just selective breeding being a very powerful force, IF you have absolute control over the mating habits of the population you're dealing with, and if you exert the selective breeding pressure over a dozen or so generations.

By contrast, Fruit flies from reading are useful for research because their DNA is relatively stable, but you can breed multiple generations in weeks. Horses also have a wide range of sizes. But my understanding is that miniature horses are the result of breeding dwarfism and the largest horses aren't anywhere near the size deviation of dog breeds.

To a large extent this may be because no one has tried. Until quite recently, no one would have any incentive to breed tiny horses, because horses are used for labor, not as pets. If the genes for the equine equivalent of the chihuahua are rare enough, they might simply not arise in a horse population naturally very often, and would not be seen if not deliberately conserved and bred for.

Or the resulting tiny horses might have been culled as useless, in the Middle Ages. Whereas the chihuahua had some applications to the Mesoamericans (e.g. as a cooking animal; my theory is that the chihuahua is small in order to fit in a cook-pot, and yappy so that it'll annoy you enough that you won't feel guilty for eating it).

[K. A. Pital]

Technically, the 3% is not about a multigenerational breeding program either, but I don’t want to spoil and using tags from mobile devices is PITA.

[FaxModem1]

It's a bizarre show, they're creating a temporary upper class who dies off from old age(or other causes), and isn't allowed children. Getting into that echelon is only possible via intelligence testing. Won't this eventually weed out intelligence in the country's population, due to eventual death of the ruling class and braindrain of everyone else?

The process is not an intelligence test as such, though. It is a general personality test.

Yes, they screen out a lot of personalities that they don't want, but in general, most of their tests through the process are relying on intelligence, not strength or speed, but intelligence, and knowing how to play the game. That the society then requires that they can't have children is a fundamental flaw in their system, already leading to abuse and corruption of their system through people trying to help their children they had before the test, or with people having children smuggled into main society if they can.

Though these are the exceptions, as the majority of Island inhabitants stop breeding and let their skills and talents die out.

[K. A. Pital]

That the society then requires that they can't have children is a fundamental flaw in their system, already leading to abuse and corruption of their system through people trying to help their children they had before the test, or with people having children smuggled into main society if they can. Though these are the exceptions, as the majority of Island inhabitants stop breeding and let their skills and talents die out.

The Offshore - aptly named - is but a metaphor for the upper-class, its childlessness reflects the lower fertility rate - inverse-correlated with income, as we all know, both on an individual and on a national level:

The 3% reflects a program of class mobility upwards (leaving the working class and joining the capitalist class), and represents the extremely low mobility rate, given the extreme differences in socioeconomic status.

Of course the system is flawed and leads to abuse and corruption. Isn't that also the state of our world now?

[FaxModem1]

Our state of the world ensures that families can successfully bring most of their improvements of their lives to their children. Not that many are willing to abandon their children or other family members in a ghetto for the rich life. Which is how the 3% is supposed to work.

Hunger Games, as silly as it was, at least understood that the rich and powerful wouldn't agree to a system that threw their own children away, even if it did kill the children of those from poor districts.