That is an impressive amount of poor scientific understanding to cram into so few words.
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If AI is so close and so smart why waste a bunch of money on things like Mars? Why not wait until we have AI and ask it what to do with the money?
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My general understanding with humans is no. Number of neural connections may have some relevance. In general across species I think brain size as proportion to body size is significant but may not always apply.
I think the wackiest thing may be the idea that “assortitive mating” (smart people reproducing with smart people) is somehow significant. What percent of children are the result of assertive mating and it is any more significant than random? Take mating between to college professors as indicative. This could only happen in like 20 percent of the baseline world population over the last 50 years because of female education and job prospects and would only apply to a trivial percentage of the overall population. And, as usual, it assumes that intelligence is one easily identifiable thing, rather than something influenced by over 1000 genes that is crudely measured by IQ tests.
Basically, this is just peak caliper Elon.
(I bet Elon is mad at Bill Gates for promoting medicine around the world because it increases the number of dumb brown and black people.)
It’s amazing how many of the children and grandchildren of peasants in India, China, and Eastern Europe go on to demonstrate great intelligence in the US and other developed countries.
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A quick check of the recent literature suggest a moderate correlation between head/brain size and intelligence.
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Elon thinks he is smart, thereby invalidating any opinion he may have about ‘smartness’
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All you need is a pile of inherited wealth and family connections and outlets like Forbes will almost do your hustling for you. Remember when they gaslit everyone into believing Elizabeth Holmes’s grift?
Elon’s post is dumb, but not for the reason you’re suggesting. Assortative mating for a polygenic trait should produce an immediate impact on outliers. C sections are probably not relevant though, because we should expect humans to have very strong mechanisms to prevent a fetus’s head from growing too big to be born successfully. If the limiting factor in the optimal percentage of “smart” gene variants was viable head size, you’d expect everyone to be maxed out on smart genes and have their head size controlled some other way, with the result that everyone is about as smart as it’s possible to be with a birthable skull. A two-tailed normal distribution suggests that people evolved where the downsides to being too smart and two dumb were balanced, like the downsides of being too tall or too short.
As you mention, better childhood nutrition is a much more likely reason to expect individuals with lots of “smart” variants of genes to develop successfully into geniuses more often than they would have 50 or 100 years ago.
This could also cross post in the good news thread.
2000 to 2018. Access to higher education has gone from 19% to 38%.
But yeah. It’s the cesareans…
Part of Elon’s motivation for going to Mars is to reduce existential threats, including from AI. Larry Page pointed out to him that AI could just follow us there, which alarmed him, but didn’t change his mind about how great Mars is.
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According to Elon, you have to “Take it down to the physics!” C-sections are physics, education is not.
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I guess this proves time travel is impossible, because AI in the future would definitely send something back to kill Elon.
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Maybe it has to wait for Elon to invent it before killing him. So start to worry about real AI and time travel scenarios if Elon gets whacked.
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never been more proud to have been born by c section… it meant i gots the big brain.
I was a massive baby and somehow they squeeze me through the natural way, must have crushed my brain and killed my intelligence.
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Elon should create a company that does skull enlarging imo.
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I also have a giant baby head and see very little correlation with being smarter than anyone else, it’s been traumatizing and for some time now I’ve been searching for a little head.
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IIRC scheduled c-sections are usually done a week or two before term to avoid the mother going into labor, that’s got to factor in somewhere.
Irieguy’s big thing was that everyone should be inducing early labor to avoid complications.
I don’t know anything about anything but it makes a lot of sense to me - why not have a more controlled and predictable situation if there isn’t a downside?