The phrasing here is a bit tricky, since Bouke De Vries seems to be stating (from my brief skim of his article and of) not that people are getting less smart, but that less smart people are reproducing faster than smart people.

Overall, this seems like the kind of social science issue where most of us haven't read the research and barely grasp the meaning, and yet people tend have opinions on it anyway. I'd take a more cautious approach and wait either A) until I've read through some of the literature to have sufficient context to actually understand it, or B) until someone with good contextual knowledge of the research can write a summary.

As an example of how our ignorance of the research can lead us astray, some of the sources Bouke De Vries cites (Egeland, 2022, Lynn and Harvey, 2008) don't seem to fully support the argument that "residents of many Western countries as well as high-income non-Western ones are becoming less intelligent." Even the book he cites (Dutton and Woodley of Menie, 2018) seems to have overly simplistic and fallacious arguments, such as claiming that the Concord no longer flies between London and  New York because we are too dumb to figure out how to make it fly, rather than the decision to stop it due to high operating costs.

But maybe the facts really do support Bouke De Vries argument and my quick skim of a dense academic article is leading me astray, because I don't have the context to fully understand.

"we had nothing in common, they couldn't explain why they chose to set up a meeting with me.”

To add on to this: even without any non-platonic vibe, I had a few people (single digits, maybe between 2 and 6 people?) reach out to me on Swapcard without any reason/justification and without any explanation. People requested a meeting without any context about what they want to meet about. In my mind, this is very similar to strangers attempting to add me on LinkedIn without any message; they are just "collecting contacts" through a kind of fear of missing out, or they think being connected to me  might be useful someday. I try to respond with a polite way of figuring out what they want, such as "can I help you?" or "what can I do for you?", but I do wish that people would be more clear about why they are requesting a meeting (or a connection).

To be clear, this was only a few individuals. The majority of people that reached out to me seemed to do a fine job of providing justification for why they wanted to meet and providing context.

I really appreciate that you consolidated all this. This is a really helpful overview.

I'm not 100% confident, but I suspect that I've read more on diversity than most EAs, so I'll venture a guess and share some musings. The goal of many diversity efforts is less about adding an additional condition, and more about removing a "hidden" condition that we weren't really cognizant of. In fact, my impression is that it is incredibly rare to have sex, race, etc., as a condition for employment (although it may often be an unofficial condition in a social, non-professional context). I do think that often this is done poorly and it often fails, but I don't think that is an EA-specific thing.

Broadly speaking, my informal mental framework is that there tend to be two reasons for diversity and similar initiatives for an organization/company: the justice/fairness argument, and the innovation/creativity argument. I'm at the risk of rambling here, so I'll instead just leave a link to a Notion page that I put together a while back: Joseph's notes on Diversity.

I don't have any data, but I hypothesize that most engaged EAs care about both instrumental diversity and diversity^[1]. Each of them has uses/benefits, but it would be a bit foolish to naively assume that either of them is useful in all contexts, for all end goals. I do think that a diverse outlook (or experience, or knowledge) can be very helpful in certain contexts, but unfortunately we (I mean people in general) often use membership in a certain group as a sloppy and imperfect proxy for that outlook.^[2] When superficial diversity is what gets emphasized, then you end up with "All skin folk ain’t kinfolk." I'm reminded of a quote from The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, from a Mexican student at Harvard College who "struggled to come to terms with the huge gap between himself and other people who looked like him."

I started realizing race and class didn’t always go hand in hand. There were minorities I thought I could relate to, but when they talk about money, I feel the distance.… Moving in, my floor posted our hometowns on the doors. I see Mexico City. I was like “Another Mexican? We’re about to be homies!” I was so excited. But he was an aristocrat from Mexico. He says, “Dallas Cowboys; they’re my favorite team. I have my dad fly me out to every home game.” Excuse me! Plane ticket, game tickets, hotel: Are you joking? That was shocking; my first introduction to the huge disparities... he has this Ralph Lauren velvet, beautiful bathrobe. He’s like, “I don’t want to pack this.” He’s going to throw it away. I took it. 

For a more light-hearted critique, here is a meme/joke about diversity along Wall Street Analysts. (for anybody without the culture context, the snarky joke here is that these people are all from incredibly wealthy backgrounds, and are quite similar in all ways aside from superficial diversity).

1. ^{^}

   Although we might label them as something like the appearance of diversity and diversity of perspective. Both of them have value, but American pop-culture tends to focus much more on the former. I might also be engaged in too much sloppy generalization, assuming that my values and perspectives are widely shared. So take this all with a grain of salt.

2. ^{^}

   I'm reminded about hearing how many black Americans were very happy in 2008 when Obama was elected as president, but who also felt that in a certain sense he didn't really represent them, because his childhood and his experiences were so different. The thought experiment that I occasionally use is to think of a stereotypical college brochures showing a group of students, and imagine which variation would be more diverse:

   • a group of students of the same race, gender, ethnicity, and disability status with radically different worldviews and life experiences (maybe one is a upper middle class American Marxist, one grew up in a slum and can barely read, one is a hardcore Buddhist who as taken a vow of silence, one was orphaned and then grew up in a series of short-term foster care homes), or
   • a group of students of a various races, genders, ethnicities, and disability statuses, all of whom had broadly similar life experiences (maybe they grew up in the same neighborhood, with similar family income levels, attended the same school, read the same books, etc.).

15-20 people sharing costs for a small EA weekend sounds really cozy. :)

Could you describe the sleeping arrangements/accommodations a little bit? Did the person who volunteered the house happen to have a large number of guest bedrooms? Did participants bring tents and sleeping bags? 

I don't have a clear answer to the question, but I want to point on the simplicity/simplification of some of the claims. (to be clear, I am not making claims here that one country/government is better than the other, or that one would be preferably to have AGI)

The idea that the Chinese government is responsible for improved prosperity of the Chinese people is somewhat true, but an alternative narrative would be that the Chinese government stopped preventing people from improving their lives, and then lots of foreign direct investment helped. There is also something to be said of "catch-up growth." Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest of understandings of the factors that influenced Chinese growth over the past few decades. I think it is also worth nothing that many of the things that the Chinese government has done for the flourishing of it's citizens are things that the US government had done previously (infrastructure, consumer protection, public universities, etc.).

The claim that a wealthy China will take care of everyone is a very strong claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nations and governments tend to show a strong preference in favor of their own existence and their own people.

While there are plenty of things I dislike about the United States, I very much like the "liberal" aspect of liberal democracy: individual right matter, and a very strong justification is needed to violate individual rights. The USA doesn't always do this well, but I feel comfortable saying that it is less common for the US government and for government employees to violate individual rights than in China.

It is true that America's founding and expansion were based on exterminating other people. It is also true that many countries throughout history (including China) have spent military and government resources exterminating "others." It has been several decades since the USA engaged in or openly endorsed the extermination of a people. I hope that hope modern people look on those events with shame and disgust, regardless of whether they were 10 years ago or 500 years ago.

These are, of course, a very complex topic with lots of details and nuance. Plenty of full dissertations have been written on them. But to the extent possible I'd like to nudge us toward avoiding overly simplified narratives here on the EA Forum.

Thank you. Both the links to the tag on LessWrong and the dozen examples are helpful. I appreciate it.

When people write "more dakka," do they simply meaning that we need to try harder and/or try more things? I've seen this in two or three pieces of writing on the EA Forum, but I've never seen a clear explanation. Apparently "dakka" is slang from a sci-fi video game/tabletop RPG? Is this useless in-group terminology, or does this actually have value?

As best I can tell, "more dakka" is a reference to this quote. Can anyone point me to a more clear or authoritative explanation?

We know the solution. Our bullets work. We just need more. We need More (and better) (metaphorical) Dakka – rather than firing the standard number of metaphorical bullets, we need to fire more, absurdly more, whatever it takes until the enemy keels over dead.

Very interesting work! A few questions:

• Would it be easier to convince lots of people to buy and consume chanca piedra than to convince lots of people to drink an extra liter of water each day? Any thoughts comparing the relative impact and tractability of these two paths? I’m particularly thinking of patient compliance and of the fad/popularity of large water bottles in recent years.
• Have you spoken with a doctor or medical researcher specializing in kidney stones about this?
• Considerations regarding the distribution of pain? Not all kidney stones result in intense pain; some result in moderate or minor pain, which can be managed with analgesics and muscle relaxers. It does make sense that accounts online tend toward the more extreme, but we don’t want to assume that these are representative of kidney stone experiences. As an analogy to cancer, The top voted and most visible posts about cancer online are never stage A1 cancers that are easily treated and cause minimal life disruption.

I’ll certainly add some chanca piedra to my digital shopping cart and consider actually buying some. I appreciate you taking all the time and effort to do this. I imagine it took a lot of effort.