The Unearned Privilege We Rarely Discuss: Cognitive Capability

This article feels like arguing against a statement that was probably never made on Less Wrong.

I even think I remember Yudkowsky saying that individual differences in IQ are unfair, and that in the glorious transhuman future of course everyone should get at least IQ 200, or something like that.

The implicit assumption that anyone could reason as we do if they simply tried harder.

Frustration or dismissal when others fail to grasp concepts we find intuitive.

For me, the frustrating thing is that many of those people who have the sufficiently high intelligence still choose to be irrational. There is a book "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith Stanovich that used to be popular here, and it is precisely about how intelligence isn't rationality.

Personalized AI tutors could help those with lower cognitive capabilities catch up, but access to these technologies is uneven. If high-quality AI education tools remain expensive or exclusive, the divide will only widen.

Ironically, this part seems like you making the very mistake that you are accusing rationalists of. Suppose that perfect personalized AI tutors are available to everyone, for free. What happens? I think the divide will widen anyway, simply because the more intelligent people will benefit more from the AI tutors.

This is a mistake people frequently make when discussing education, even if we completely ignore the AI or computers in general. Yeah, education sucks for everyone, both for the smart, the average, and the stupid, in a different way for everyone. It could be made much better, and everyone could benefit from that. However, that alone does not imply that optimal education for everyone would make the differences disappear. If I simplify it a lot, if the improved education helped everyone achieve twice as much as they can achieve now, it would be better for everyone, and yet the differences would now be twice as big, not smaller. You would need to argue that there are ways to dramatically improve the education of the stupid, but no comparable ways to dramatically improve the education of the smart, which goes against the usual experience of smart kids being bored at school most of the time.

Recognizing your cognitive privilege is the first step toward engaging with others more fairly and constructively.

I agree, but in the current (or maybe recent) political climate, acknowledging that some people are more intelligent than others would get you in deep trouble.

Intelligence should not be the sole determinant of value or opportunity. If it is largely unearned, then structuring society around cognitive hierarchies is deeply unjust.

Here, the tricky thing is how to decouple "good life" from "making decisions". Capitalism kinda conflates those two things: if you have more money, you can live a more convenient life, and you can also decide the use of more resources. This already assumes some cognitive capabilities -- merely throwing more money at stupid people doesn't necessarily improve their lives; many of them get scammed, spend the money on drugs, etc. Democracy is also built on the assumption that letting stupid people vote creates better outcomes for the stupid people, which again is not necessarily true.

So the problem is how to create some kind of kindergarten environment for the stupid, where they can live as well as possible, but won't be expected to manage the environment. It is a historical experience that not letting people make the decisions often leads to abuse. The problem is that without cognitive abilities, letting people make the decisions also often leads to abuse... so, I guess, it is not obvious how the society should be structured.

What implicit assumptions do you make about others based on your own cognitive experiences?

I don't anymore. I have advanced towards the state of silent despair.

How should the recognition of cognitive privilege shape discussions on AI ethics and policy?

Mostly by realizing that the machines of the future will probably be smarter than all of us? Which again is not a controversial thought in this community. The original plan was to build a Friendly AI, and that still seems to me like a good outcome to strive for, even if I have no idea how to contribute to it.

"We should try to deserve such luck; we may deserve it by exploiting it."

The term "privilege" is bad here; prefer "advantage".  "Privilege [LW(p) · GW(p)]"—privi-lege, private law—implies that there's an authority deciding to grant it to some people and not others, which would be unjust (since most things that affect intelligence, such as genetics and childhood nutrition, happen long before a person does anything to "deserve" it more than others), which in turn encourages people to get angry and suspicious, and encourages the advantaged to feel embarrassed or even guilty by association when they've done nothing wrong.  Calling it "privilege" is only useful if you want to encourage that kind of conflict.

That said, there are plenty of people who downplay the importance of intelligence, and/or exaggerate the degree to which it can be improved through hard work, educational interventions, school funding, etc.  However, those people are much more likely to be social justice activists than rationalists.  The #3 top voted post in the 2023 Less Wrong review [LW · GW] was about how to use genetic technology to improve intelligence (and other qualities) in the general population.  It's interesting to note that the 2023 post is trying to fix the problem of people not being as smart as they would like to be, while this post's recommendations do not include trying to fix that problem.

I'm just not sure the central claim, that rationalists underestimate the role of luck in intelligence, is true. I've never gotten that impression. At least my assumption going into reading this was already that intelligence was probably 80-90% unearned.

Looks like LLM content.