In my previous comment, I was talking quite explicitly about political taboos, not societal taboos.
When I was a kid, the general population of Czechoslovakia would not be shocked by a joke about stupid drunken Soviet Communists, but if someone snitched on you, that joke would still land you in prison.
As with Iran (and I noticed your Persian handle), I absolutely understand that there is a lot of agnostic and skeptical Iranians, but saying that Allah does not exist in front of some henchmen of the Islamic Republic will likely lead to trouble, am I correct?
the logical next step
Well, would it be? We're 100 years downstream from those times. It is a bit like saying that if a modern American city wants to reintroduce streetcars, it will logically resurrect the wooden boxes of the 1920s that will shake your bones whenever they accelerate.
As of now, we know preciously little about natural intelligence, and I personally don't believe that "ignorance is strength", neither am I a fan of fear masquerading as wisdom. We have likely missed some low hanging fruit because of our deliberate ignorance.
If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
It is well possible that 100 years from now, something like "glasses for the brain" will exist, something that sharpens your thought process much like glasses sharpen your vision. Of course that the road to this will be full of potholes, but we should try anyway.
so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another
Why should higher intelligence be considered a basis for "superiority"? We don't consider richer, more beautiful or more eloquent people to be "superior" to the poorer or uglier ones, and we should treat differences in intelligence the same.
I don't see what your definition of 'political taboo', which seems to be related to top-down restrictions on speech or behavior, has to do James Watson's remarks.
There are few explicit or implicit rules about making racist claims that don't incite violence/hatred in most western countries (unlike the example you gave in Iran), or if they are, Watson didn't seem to suffer much for 'breaching the taboo'. Watson was shunned by the public and lost some scientific prestige/status because he didn't provide any evidence for his huge claims.
An editorial in Nature said that his remarks were "beyond the pale" but expressed a wish that the tour had not been canceled so that Watson would have had to face his critics in person, encouraging scientific discussion on the matter.
I think there's a big taboo against making huge claims that aren't supported by anything other than your own authority (such as Linus Pauling claiming that Vitamin C can cure cancer), and an even bigger taboo when those claims are explicitly ranking groups of humans on the basis of their genetics or even vaguely defined features like intelligence.
I find it interesting that you're spending so much time talking about the presence of this taboo but no time at all analyzing or evaluating the actual claims. Because if the claims are false, who cares if they're taboo? Are all taboos bad? Is it a good outcome if we get to a point where all countries have the same taboos?
> If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
First we need to have good definitions for intelligence or stupidity. I don't particularly like IQ as a proxy for overall intelligence but if you are defining it using IQ, scores are slowly improving at the population level with hispanics and blacks gaining on whites.
Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it.
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
The West is no longer a dominant civilization on this planet. The US seems to be very afraid of the possibility that Chinese AI research will overtake the American one. I find it very short-sighted that a similar concern is absolutely absent when it comes to natural intelligence research. There is a shitton of underdeveloped natural intelligence around as, and if our political adversaries manage to actually develop it first, the AI race may not matter at all.
Of course, that is a big "if", much like with railguns etc. Some technologies never bear fruit. But historically, we have seen extreme concentrations of brain power in some time-and-space limited regions (Hungarian "Martians"?), which indicates that there is a lot more underdeveloped talent than we think and that it could be, given the right methods, developed to overwhelming dimensions.
For Pete's sake, we cannot even recreate Bell Labs as they once were. No one precisely knows what was the actual magic that had them going, even though everyone has their favorite theory. It reminds me of alchemists doing experiments in the early 1600s. Aren't you a bit nervous about the fact that phenomena such as Bell Labs emerge on their own and disappear without us being able to create them on purpose? We must have wasted a lot of human potential by not knowing how to harness and develop top talents.
"analyzing or evaluating ..."
This is quite obviously a vicious circle. The topic of natural intelligence is taboo, scientists who try to attack it earnestly face a lot of hurdles in funding (see also [0], an interesting article), thus the amount of actual data is remarkably small, and, as you yourself say, even the definitions aren't really good. Which, in turn, leads a lot of people to cloak their disgust over the entire topic in a plausibly sounding word bubble like "there is not enough data, it is all so nebulous and murky, there is no sense in studying such a weird topic, don't spend any money on it and don't play with any dangerous hypotheses".
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?
When I was a kid, the general population of Czechoslovakia would not be shocked by a joke about stupid drunken Soviet Communists, but if someone snitched on you, that joke would still land you in prison.
As with Iran (and I noticed your Persian handle), I absolutely understand that there is a lot of agnostic and skeptical Iranians, but saying that Allah does not exist in front of some henchmen of the Islamic Republic will likely lead to trouble, am I correct?
the logical next step
Well, would it be? We're 100 years downstream from those times. It is a bit like saying that if a modern American city wants to reintroduce streetcars, it will logically resurrect the wooden boxes of the 1920s that will shake your bones whenever they accelerate.
As of now, we know preciously little about natural intelligence, and I personally don't believe that "ignorance is strength", neither am I a fan of fear masquerading as wisdom. We have likely missed some low hanging fruit because of our deliberate ignorance.
If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
It is well possible that 100 years from now, something like "glasses for the brain" will exist, something that sharpens your thought process much like glasses sharpen your vision. Of course that the road to this will be full of potholes, but we should try anyway.
so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another
Why should higher intelligence be considered a basis for "superiority"? We don't consider richer, more beautiful or more eloquent people to be "superior" to the poorer or uglier ones, and we should treat differences in intelligence the same.