I've realized that I have an even deeper problem with the whole notion of eugenics-for-"intelligence" here. It's mired in the better-living-through-[TECH THING] mentality.
I'll digress with an example from medicine: humanity made amazing, world-changing strides in health care on two important fronts: antibiotics and trauma surgery. These areas, the pill and the scalpel, then grew to encompass the vast part of the mindshare of modern Western-style medicine. But at some point the model fails to meet with the real world: pharmaceutical companies spend vast resources trying to create pills that alleviate symptoms, but don't address root causes. Surgeons invent surgeries we don't need, which have no effect on end outcomes. Here, the slowly growing field of "functional medicine" is seeking to move forward with rigorous, evidence-based approaches to diagnosing and addressing many previously intractable (or only superficially treated) conditions by tackling underlying root causes.
Back to the eugenics thing. It presumptively answers the question of "why, as a society, aren't we a whole lot smarter than we are?" with a generic "Better genetics FTW!" I have a counter-hypothesis: humanity is currently terrible at maximizing the potential of the members of society we have right now. I'd go so far as to say that the idea that eugenics-for-smarts is even useful is built on little more than a whole bunch of terrible classist, racist belief systems. Worse, it's like some junior dev ratholing for weeks optimizing the heck some function which uses .001% of the app's resources. There are bigger problems to solve, start with those.
A breadcrumb in that direction: we've now had multiple examples of fantastic high-school level math instructors who pop up, take an underserved student body that an "honors" class series wouldn't touch, and turns them into star math students, knocking down AP Calculus exams with aplomb. Yet the school districts they're in invariably end up fighting these teachers tooth-and-nail. We should be sending in people like field anthropologists to understand and document the personal, social, and pedagogical methods at play here, and figure out how to train teachers and build schools to make these wins fully replicable.
I am fully on board with tackling the social issues that prevent equalizing education. I guess my hope is that a spread of smarter kids will find a solution, when we've spent the last 2,000 years failing to find solutions to unequal classes.
I'll digress with an example from medicine: humanity made amazing, world-changing strides in health care on two important fronts: antibiotics and trauma surgery. These areas, the pill and the scalpel, then grew to encompass the vast part of the mindshare of modern Western-style medicine. But at some point the model fails to meet with the real world: pharmaceutical companies spend vast resources trying to create pills that alleviate symptoms, but don't address root causes. Surgeons invent surgeries we don't need, which have no effect on end outcomes. Here, the slowly growing field of "functional medicine" is seeking to move forward with rigorous, evidence-based approaches to diagnosing and addressing many previously intractable (or only superficially treated) conditions by tackling underlying root causes.
Back to the eugenics thing. It presumptively answers the question of "why, as a society, aren't we a whole lot smarter than we are?" with a generic "Better genetics FTW!" I have a counter-hypothesis: humanity is currently terrible at maximizing the potential of the members of society we have right now. I'd go so far as to say that the idea that eugenics-for-smarts is even useful is built on little more than a whole bunch of terrible classist, racist belief systems. Worse, it's like some junior dev ratholing for weeks optimizing the heck some function which uses .001% of the app's resources. There are bigger problems to solve, start with those.
A breadcrumb in that direction: we've now had multiple examples of fantastic high-school level math instructors who pop up, take an underserved student body that an "honors" class series wouldn't touch, and turns them into star math students, knocking down AP Calculus exams with aplomb. Yet the school districts they're in invariably end up fighting these teachers tooth-and-nail. We should be sending in people like field anthropologists to understand and document the personal, social, and pedagogical methods at play here, and figure out how to train teachers and build schools to make these wins fully replicable.