Astral Codex Ten

Galton

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Galton

Article

Galton is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between November 18, 2021 and March 14, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Steve Sailer has an interesting way to put all these Victorian geniuses in context: Darwin and Galton were a little bit like their contemporaries”; “long after Galton had proven that genius was genetic”; “As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew”. It most often appears alongside Ehrlich, Google, Greg Cochran.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: November 18, 2021
  • Last seen: March 14, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Darwin and Galton were a little bit like their contemporaries in the English-speaking countries who invented most of today's major spectator sports, in that the time was right.
Links For February
February 22, 2022 · Original source
14: You’ve probably heard statistics about how 50% of transgender youth attempt suicide before age 21. This paper tries to analyze the situation in more depth. The 50% number usually comes from surveys, but there’s some evidence people exaggerate on surveys, rounding up “I think about it a lot” to “I attempted”. The authors gather data on completed suicides among trans people, and find that they’re about 0.01%/year (which is about 5x the cisgender rate). If we suppose that people have about 5 years between becoming transgender and turning 21, then the 50% attempted suicide rate → 0.05% completed suicide rate implies that 1/1000th of the youth who report attempting suicide on surveys complete suicide - which sounds about right to me [but see this comment for a critique] 15: Gwern on the failures of 20th century eugenics. I’ve previously linked a piece about how, aside from the general moral failure, the 20th century eugenicists got lots of implementation details really wrong. Gwern adds to the picture: they had a purely Mendelian (as opposed to polygenic) model of intelligence, and felt that bad traits were probably caused by single recessive genes. This dichotomized the population in a way that contributed to the moral problems - if IQ is truly a continuum, then someone with 120 IQ might still wonder if they were “inferior” to someone with 130 IQ, in a way that made them feel some sympathy to someone with 80 IQ who was being pronounced “inferior” by the eugenicists of the time. But instead, they thought some people had the specific recessive “low intelligence” gene, those people could be “cleansed” from the population, and then everyone else would be fine! It also prevented them from considering improving the populace by encouraging intelligent people to breed more (as opposed to sterilizing unintelligent people) - this wouldn’t eliminate the recessive variants that were causing all the trouble! I’m confused how they could have believed this even with the limited knowledge of the time; this was long after Galton had proven that genius was genetic, and once you have genetic genius you know there’s more going on than Mendelian inheritance of subnormality. 16: Sexual selection bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes 17: NFTorah: “The Torah [is] the original blockchain”. I think it’s funny that this exists, but it’s exactly what you would expect, and you don’t have to click on the link. 18: More IRB nightmares. 19: @ethanbdm When we piloted a public lottery to evaluate cash transfers in Liberia, the potential recipients arranged beforehand to insure one another. After the randomization and grant, the winners compensated the losers and unraveled the field experiment.","username":"cblatts","name":"Chris Blattman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 18 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":77,"like_count":678,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 20: DeepMind made a programming AI that was able to participate in a human coding competition and place around the middle. Nostalgebraist gives his thoughts: “impressed with the raw performance, not massively surprised, not sold that it implies anything big in particular”. A lot of people will be watching whether it can win programming competitions outright a year or two from now, though I bet their perspectives on how relevant this is for AI takeoff speeds will be pretty mixed. 21: Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits. 22: Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. “Why should we care? Brain efficiency matters a great deal for AGI timelines and takeoff speeds, as AGI is implicitly/explicitly defined in terms of brain parity.” 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth: 24: Best of Scott Sumner archives: There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality. “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption. If … tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase. Someone else paid, even if they wrote the check. If they invested less due to the tax, then workers might have received lower wages. If they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.” 25: The latest in the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis: Harrison, Noble, and Jennions publish a meta-analysis failing to find evidence of greater male variability in the personality of non-human animals. Del Giudice and Gangestad have a rebuttal saying that they were underpowered to detect it even if it did exist, plus noting the ways that media coverage of this study was incredibly irresponsible even by its own terms. 26: Some recent critiques of Cook (2014) on racial violence vs. black patents, including Michael Wiebe challenging the violence measures and AnechoicMedia arguing that the black patent measure declines right when switching from one (more complete) dataset to another (less complete) one. Rebuttal by Brad DeLong here, he argues that Cook uses multiple methods and some of them don’t have this problem. Relevant since Cook is now being considered for the Federal Reserve; see eg this Wall Street Journal editorial against. 27: Claim: 31% of British people say they have seen or met Queen Elizabeth (this seems plausible to me, I would answer ‘yes’ to this because she visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car). 28: This couple-of-month-period in wokeness: Scientific American attacks late biologist EO Wilson, in a screed whose highlight is calling him problematic for describing ants as having “colonies”. This is part of a more general (and surprisingly fast) pivot at Scientific American from real science to culture warring; when even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke, you’ve gotten too woke.
Inline links: This paper, this comment, the failures of 20th century eugenics, bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes, NFTorah:, IRB nightmares, DeepMind made a programming AI, Nostalgebraist, Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits, Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality, Harrison, Noble, and Jennions, Del Giudice and Gangestad, challenging the violence measures, arguing that the black patent measure declines, here, this, seen or met Queen Elizabeth, highlight, even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
Inline links: has a great review of
Adraste: - against this kind of thing. Which brings me back to my objection to your seemingly-compassionate-and-sensible eugenics proposal. Francis Galton said we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way3. People listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did eugenics in a coercive and horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be concerned. People roll their eyes at slippery slopes, but some slopes are genuinely slippery, and the slope from “thinks about eugenics at all” to “involuntary sterilization campaign” seems steep enough that I would just rather people not think about eugenics at all.
Inline links: 3
Francis Galton had the good fortune to die before people started misusing his ideas, allowing us to hope he would have opposed such developments. Ehrlich is still very much alive. When asked in 2015 if he still agreed with everything in his book, he said that “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Inline links: he said that
Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid
March 14, 2024 · Original source
And Galton, Ehrlich, Robespierre Corbusier and Kipling All saw their actions ripple out And worsen in the rippling