I like a lot of rat-sphere and adjacent stuff, but I absolutely do not trust this community to have productive discussions about IQ differences.

Let me explain why with a riddle:

I want to do something. Somebody else, who has 20 IQ points on me, disagrees with my course of action, and says I ought to do something else, instead.

Which course of action should I take?

Obviously, it’s a trick question. I want to learn to read and get married; the smart guy thinks I should work for him for free in exchange for room and board and I don’t get to leave and also he is allowed to beat and rape me with impunity.

Really, he explains, for a guy with an IQ as low as mine anything else would just make me more unhappy. The fact that I say I don’t like being raped and beaten is just like a child who says they want to stay up late on a school night. Obviously they think they want that, but wiser heads must prevail.

This happened. This monstrous, self-serving ideology was, not long ago at all, one of the major organizing principles of many, many places.

What I see, lurking behind almost all rationalist discourse on this stuff, is an implicit but very, very strong belief that there is some large portion of people out there who simply shouldn’t be treated as adults. Who may be adults, who may be able to talk and dress themselves and hold down a job but who aren’t really capable of making good decisions, and society will only advance once we use science to put them under the dominion of the high-IQ elite who are, by definition, capable of making better decisions then their low-IQ counterparts.

That in other words, the only problem with the chattel slavery era was that we weren’t scientific enough about who should be a slave.