The Death of Stupid?

Are you in favor of eugenics? Of course not, right? The idea that the human population should be cultivated to encourage certain traits and skills to flourish, by weeding out the undesirable strains of mankind, has been thoroughly discredited by its past history of association with forced sterilizations and Nazi horrors. But there is something about the notion that we'd all be better off if we could just get rid of the 'wrong sort' that the idea keeps popping up in different guises.

So I suppose I should give Julien Savulescu credit for honesty, then: he doesn't deny that what he's talking about is eugenics. Instead, he tries to rip the term away from its evil, 20th century practitioners. See, for example, this quote from an interview he did recently with the Guardian:

"It depends what you mean by eugenics," he says. "In point of fact, we practise eugenics when we screen for Down's syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. The reason we don't define that sort of thing as 'eugenics', as the Nazis did, is because it's based on choice. It's about enhancing people's freedom rather than reducing it."

Let me back up. Julien Savulescu is a prominent bioethicist at Oxford, and he is arguing that eugenics is alright as long as it is a personal choice (of the parents, of course, not of the fetus) and not forced by the state. He is pro-cloning, pro-gene enhancement, and definitely in favor of selecting embryos to be implanted for intelligence. He's been quoted as saying that embryos that do not have the right genes for high intelligence should be destroyed to ensure, "the economic and social benefits of higher cognition."

Despite my disgust at the notion of throwing away human life--even embryonic life--as if it was an insignificant bit of garbage, I'd like to focus more on the end result of Savulescu's proposal: should we be in favor of a world where people are designed to be smarter?

In an earlier post, I wrote that our society might be evolving into one where a few people have exceptionally meaningful, creative work, but the majority have little to do at all. But perhaps that problem would be solved if everyone was what we would today call a genius, if they had the mental gifts to do meaningful work in the increasingly complex scientific and intellectual areas that define modern life.

So lets say we could eliminate unintelligent people not by killing them before they're born, but by altering their genes to increase their intellectual capacity. Should we have any objection to this? I can see several: that we're messing with the essence of who we are as people, that it will favor those who can afford it over those who can't, that we will make one generation "obsolete" with the enhancements given to the next. But I can't say I find any of those arguments convincing: humanity is either endowed by God with intelligence (as I believe) and therefore we should use that intelligence to improve our lot in life, or else we are here as a product of blind evolution, in which case we should do all we can to advance the species and our own quality of life. Either way, the issue is not whether we should enhance our intelligence or not, but whether we take unethical shortcuts in our effort to do so.

There is, I have to admit, a nagging voice in the back of my head that says this is the path to creating a class of amoral Ubermenschen. And when I first conceived of this post, my intention was to bash the idea of artificially enhancing intelligence. But isn't this hypothetical concern about the perils of evil, rogue geniuses a bit of a red herring? It seems a much more practical worry that we are going to leave behind millions of good, hardworking people who simply don't have the gifts to contribute all they would want to an ever-more knowledge-based society. The person with a below-average IQ doing manual labor is not less valuable than a smarter person, and it is dangerous that we might see them as such if most people had enhanced intelligence. But wouldn't most, if not all, of those people appreciate the chance to add to their intellectual capacity?

Clearly, I'm still struggling with this issue. (Thus all the question marks.) So I'll leave it here: Julien Savulescu's casual disregard of human life is appalling, but high intelligence is a great gift that would be worth spreading more widely through the human family if we could do so safely and ethically. Someday, we'll be able to do so, and the burden of proof will be on the naysayers to argue why we shouldn't.

Three Cups of Tea, Branding and Our Desire to Believe

Why are we so quick to believe liars and fabricators? We are plagued by journalists who invent facts and sources, by politicians scurrying to bury scandal, and by memoirists who find their lives are best seasoned by liberal doses of fiction. Into this last bucket place Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, founder of a charity intended to build schools in central Asia, and--as 60 Minutes revealed in a recent expose--a fabulist and a crook.

What is amazing, as this post by Bruce Bawer makes clear, is that the improbability of his story should have been apparent to even a casual observer:

[Mortenson] was the star of his own story. The whole point of his talk was how much one brave, selfless individual can accomplish in this world even against the most formidable of odds. And that individual was him. The premise of his spiel was that he’s a miracle worker, pacifying belligerent jihadist types by sitting down with them over three cups of tea and listening to their concerns. Yet the egomaniac I saw that day was somebody you couldn’t picture listening to anybody else for more than thirty seconds. Mortenson’s shameless self-celebration in Three Cups of Tea left me speechless. As Oscar Wilde observed of Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop, how could any sensitive reader react to such nonsense with anything but derisive laughter?

Bawer continues by showing how callously Mortenson turned on those who had been kind to him to bolster his own reputation:

Then there’s Mortenson’s lie about having been kidnapped by the Taliban. He stuck a picture in his book of him and some Afghani acquaintances — who had treated him kindly — and identified them in the caption as his kidnappers

When we hear stories of people using others this way to bolster their own stories, we are rightfully disgusted. When we hear, as in Mortenson's case, that he was doing it in large part to enrich himself, and use his charity to support a lavish lifestyle, we howl for blood. But why do we buy in to begin with? It is easy to say, "We want to believe," but why? Wouldn't it make more sense for us to be exceptionally skeptical, and to disbelieve even true stories to protect ourselves from fraud and disappointment? Why, in other words, are humans so quick to trust?

Part of the answer, as David Brooks and Mark Earls and many others have pointed out, is that we are social creatures. We essentially outsource some of our decision-making to others. So if enough people tell you Greg Mortenson is a hero, you may not evaluate that claim very critically yourself before you, too, are singing his praises.

But I think it goes beyond that. People don't just have their small social groups, they love to organize themselves into big, abstract teams, teams that are defined by a series of positions its members are either for or against. Successfully aligning with these positions is the key to popularity for both brands and people.

Look, for example, at how Microsoft and Apple fostered opposing tribes of believers on the basis of different operating systems and technical specs. Mortenson did the same thing by aligning with deep-held beliefs in non-violence, in the power of the individual to make a difference, in multiculturalism. He pushes against the idea of cynicism (or what some would call realism or humility) and an us-versus-them mentality.

This places him squarely on the liberal-idealist team, which has many players in academia, in government, and in Western urban culture more generally. Many of these people struggle to solve the seemingly intractable problems in society, and are understandably inspired by someone who seems to be taking on big challenges with verve and success. Mortenson's story reflects their beliefs and aspirations so perfectly, they were desperate for it to be true. (Similarly, eight years ago who took what was commonly called the 'neocon' worldview really wanted to believe the Iraqi people were going to "greet us as liberators.")

We should remember that people (and brands) are not perfect. So if their stories are perfect, it should set off our BS warning sirens. The lesson is that we can't just investigate our enemies and be skeptical about those we don't agree with. To avoid our natural tendency to believe, to accept social decisions, and to take sides, we need to bring a critical eye even to those we want to love.

Lazy or Sick?

As a thought experiment, imagine that we discovered a virus that inhibited certain higher brain functions. Most subjects infected with this virus would exhibit a greater tendency towards short-temperedness, and would be seen as 'difficult' or 'moody' by others. A few, though, become criminally anti-social. When a treatment for this virus is developed, many formerly hardened criminals become model citizens, exhibiting none of the destructive tendencies that had seemed so hard-wired.

How would this change the way we viewed criminals? (And, for that matter, the cranky uncle who drives everyone nuts at Thanksgiving?) My hypothetical above does not claim that the criminals and the cranky were powerless to resist these urges, just that it was harder for them than for the non-infected. I would contend that society would be split between those who felt those with the virus had been dealt a bad hand, but their behavior was still their fault, and those who would argue people cannot be held really responsible for behavior driven to a large extent by an outside influence.

I bring this up because of a brief article in New Scientist that outlines the link between a mouse virus and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). The science is clearly at an early stage, and previous attempts to link CFS to a virus have not borne out. But here is the key finding:

Shyh-Ching Lo of the Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues found that blood samples from 32 of 37 people with chronic fatigue syndrome contained "polytropic" murine leukaemia virus-related fragments, compared with only three of 44 healthy blood donors.

Now, having done some work in this topic, I can say that many physicians, especially older male physicians, put CFS in a bucket of "women's conditions", along with related syndromes like Fybromyalgia and Restless Leg Syndrome. They tend to believe that the women in their care have underlying psychological problems that are manifesting themselves in these syndromes. That some anti-depressants have proven helpful in alleviating several of these syndromes reinforces their view. To say these physicians are dismissive of these problems and these patients is an understatement.

Patients would widely embrace the identification of a 'real' cause, and would undoubtedly demand a level of care and support for their condition far beyond what they receive today. But notice that not every CFS patient has the virus, and not everyone with the virus has CFS. That implies either that the virus may contribute to the syndrome without fully causing it, or that the reaction to infection might vary enough that a significant number of the infected aren't noticeably sick. (And would this be so surprising? After all, people react very differently to infection by the same cold viruses.) But if, for example, 25% of the people infected with this mouse virus are not noticeably fatigued, and another 50% are fatigued or lethargic to a degree, but are still able to function, many people are going to dismiss the 25% who are most affected as lazy, as milking their diagnosis. And it will be hard to prove the truth either way.

As the science of health continues its amazing advance, we're going to learn more and more about the environmental influences (viruses, bacteria, chemicals, etc.) that impact human performance. If pre-natal pollution exposure lowers IQ, should the less intelligent from dirtier environments be compensated, or get preferential treatment at schools? If certain gut flora lead to obesity, do we give them health coverage for bariatric surgery? With each new learning or theory, we move farther from the notion that people should be held accountable for their choices, and closer to a world where every personal failure is attributed to an outside force. It may be hard work to preserve the notion that we are masters of our own lives.

Dot Connectors Wanted

I read this past week a fascinating exchange by Shane Harris, author of a new book called The Watchers, and Patrick Radden Keefe. Both of them have covered the various controversies over government spying and data collection, and Harris' book takes a deep look at John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that created a stir during the Bush administration.

What struck me, as I read the exchange, was their observation that the government has become good at "collecting the dots", without increasing its ability to connect them. TIA was meant to automate this process to some degree, but when they ran tests on its effectiveness it failed. The job of connecting the dots, it seems, cannot be outsourced to computers, at least not yet.

So that begs the question: are we failing to teach human beings to connect the dots? This seems like one of the basic building blocks of both wisdom and creativity, and yet it is a skill in short supply. Part of the problem, I think, is that people are increasingly encouraged to specialize: don't just know advertising, be a strategic planner. Don't just do advertising, do healthcare advertising. Don't just know healthcare, know oncology. (Just to cite a personal example.) While that intense specialization might help a person find the conventional answers within their space faster and better, it does not help them incorporate new knowledge from other areas that might revolutionize their area of focus.

The explosion of knowledge made possible by the Internet rewarded specialization, as there is just more to know in every field. Yet in many areas, the dot connectors have been left out, and each isolated topic has tapped a lot of the value it can get out of specialization and narrow focus. The dots have been collected, and the future will belong to those people who can take the critical step of connecting them.