On Intelligence, why everyone is depressed and gay, and objective post-morality

Or why Mormon will conquer the Universe

This post is based on a response to my friend Peter Bank’s note, which too long and image heavy to be it’s own note and informative enough to be my magus opus.

Part I: Is Intelligence a Mental Illness?

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Thinking about g

One of the most common responses to Peter’s note was IQ denialism, which is retarded. IQ is a way to quantify the g factor, and the g factor is real.

In ye olden times, Spearman noticed that the test scores of schoolchildren on many different tests correlated. This is what is meant by the positive manifold of intelligence. The correlation can be thought of as the amount of overlap in cognitive “skills” between tests. This thing that all the tests are drawing from is defined to be g, and although it can’t be measured directly, it can be estimated using statistical methods.

The correlation between different tests of cognition has been the most replicated finding in all of psychology.

This thing g is the best single-factor definition for what most people call intelligence, because it’s the single number that explains the most variance between people in many tests of cognitive ability.

In other words, it’s literally defined as the number that would best predict how good you are at solving problems. Any definition of intelligence that doesn’t include g as its main component is cope.

People who argue there are multiple forms of intelligence are wrong because proficiency in all tasks is correlated, and it is only the principal factor of these tasks that is predictive. Specific abilities independent of g do not predict job performance.

Because g can only be estimated using the correlations between tests that, when large enough, are normally distributed, it cannot be given an absolute value—just one relative to a population. IQ is just one way to standardize this measure, by setting the mean to 100 and the standard deviation to 15.

Because g is just the measure of your ability to solve problems, it makes sense that it correlates with everything most people think is good, and anti-correlates with everything most people think is bad.

g is not everything, but it is the most predictive part of most things.

Thinking about p

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After g, most of the variance between people is encompassed by personality. If you do the same statistical procedure used to estimate g, you get what psychologists call the General Factor of Personality—p. p correlates with everything people consider to be mental illness. However, unlike g, most of the predictive validity in p isn’t from the primary factor itself but at the item level. This makes it less than ideal for prediction, but when talking about mental illness in general, it’s the right tool to use.

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When you look at how p and g covary, you find a negative relationship. Being smart makes it less likely for you to be insane. The problem with simply ending the story here is that by choosing a vector of personality and labeling it mentally healthy, you are making a value judgment. How do you know that depression, anxiety, schizophrenia… are actually bad?

There is a reason these traits evolved in humans. All traits are at least partially heritable—and more often than not, mostly heritable—so if they did evolve, they have to have some benefit to reproductive fitness.

If you look at the modern polygenic data, that’s just what you find. Neuroticism and depression—both constructs that correlate strongly with p—are being selected for.

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Although there is most likely a nonlinear relationship between fertility and neuroticism—and by extension, p.

To quote Kierkegaard,

Here it gets very interesting. Many of the sibling comparisons show elevated fertility. The two largest 'benefits' are depression and substance abuse for women. Since we know that 'unaffected' siblings are actually not entirely unaffected on average, but do not meet the threshold for diagnosis, these siblings will be about halfway towards the mean assuming a sibling similarity of r ~ 0.50. As such, if a standard score of 2 is required to get the diagnosis, the siblings will have a standard score of about 1. I think what these findings show indirectly is that some level of P factor, general psychopathology, which is mostly the same as neuroticism, is adaptive (associated with higher fertility), especially in women. Another way to think about this is to think of a normal distribution and the fertility rate as function of neuroticism. I think it may look like this:

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Some, like DeepLeftAnalysis, believe that this is the proper way to frame the idea of “mental illness.” Leftists aren’t ill—they just have a different evolutionary strategy. This definition is alluring because it’s based on something objective: namely, reproductive fitness. If something is favored by the invisible hand of evolution, it is healthy; if not, it is ill.

It’s okay if you don’t care about evolution, but evolution certainly cares about you.

If we run with this definition, then intelligence—at least at the global level—seems unhealthy. More smart means fewer babies, and the god of evolution wants more babies.

And at the scale of nations, less so—the correlation is typically around -0.1. If we imagine Peter Bank’s 145+ IQ country and extrapolate the curve, its fertility is going to be near zero.

The genius no want make babies. Whomp, whomp. If a g-supremacist Thanos snapped anyone below 145 out of existence, humanity would certainly cease to exist—right?

Not quite. g has a known interaction effect with conservatism, but it’s still not enough to select for g.

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Mormonism does though.

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Thus, by using the objective definition of healthy, a religious Mormon, mildly neurotic, intelligent, right-wing extremist is the healthiest a person can be.

Nature will continue to select for these people until they are the global majority.

Eugenics are cool.

Part II: Will the Mormon’s conquer the known universe?

Of course, this story is far too convenient. I basically just described myself.

Am I the Übermensch, or am I just insane?

There are a few ways this can go wrong:

1. AI, some asteroid, or another existential threat wipes out humanity.

2. Mormon defection rates are too high, and the religion goes extinct.

3. The selection effects aren’t strong enough to overcome mutational load.

Defections

The first problem is a problem for all, so I won’t address it here. Many people smarter than I have thought about it and produced their own brand of stupid takes.

Regarding the second: which religion a child chooses—if any—as their own is one of the few things that are primarily mimetically transmitted. However, how religious someone is is largely genetic, like everything else.

Although there are fewer Mormons in Utah per capita than there were at the turn of the century, the absolute number has continued to grow—at least well into 2010.

Now, it is plausible that church membership—and especially activity—has decreased in the last decade. This would have to be due to changes in the environment: i.e., Utah integrating into worldly culture at higher levels than before, the proliferation of the internet allowing anti-Mormon messages to spread, etc., etc.

The Church does not publish these statistics, and if they did, it most likely would not be in their best interest to do so.

But let’s say it did. The heritability of religiosity is about 0.6. In the most extreme case, there might have been a 2 SD increase in environmental pressure against religiosity. This corresponds to about a 1.25 SD decrease in religiosity in the population. This still allows the right tail to continue reproducing, stay Mormon, and make more Mormons.

It’s unlikely that the environment will become more hostile to religion in a way that weakens the faithful. Persecution will only make them stronger.

Globally, the Church is still growing faster than the global population rate, and the eugenic selection of Mormonism replicates across races—not just whites.¹

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This leaves only the third problem —and the most difficult to address: mutational load.

Mutational Load

Using Bronski’s equation for calculating selection pressures in a population:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find data for the SD/mean fertility term—but if we assume it’s near the U.S. average, and that very few mothers have over four kids (I know many Mormon families larger than this, so this estimate is probably a lowball), this term turns out to be around one.

And the number’s in the Kierkegaard paper,

We also fitted a model that included the proposed interaction terms simultaneously, as well as religious attendance (attend, as with politics views, we recoded this on 0–1 scale for interpretation and improved statistical precision). The model showed that each of the predicted moderators of the intelligence-fertility relation held up when jointly analysed. The overall effect of g on fertility is − 0.34. The interaction with Latter-day Saint identity is 0.20 (0.087, p = 0.019), with political ideology 0.14 (0.036, p < 0.001***), and religious attendance 0.10 (0.027, p < 0.001***). Thus, a Latter-day Saint who attends church often and who is politically extremely conservative is expected to achieve a fertility-intelligence slope of − 0.34 + 0.20 + 0.14 + 0.10 = 0.10, i.e., each standard deviation of intelligence would predict an additional 0.10 lifetime fertility. This estimate is, however, very uncertain. At the request of a reviewer, we also tested for the interaction between political ideology and the two measures of religiousness (self-identification as a Latter-day Saint, and religious attendance), but neither showed an interaction (p’s = 0.06 and 0.94). This result is probably low power, so cannot be interpreted as strong evidence for a lack of an interaction. The full model output is given in the supplementary materials.

Active, extremely conservative Latter-day Saints probably make up around 10% of the LDS population.
0.8 * 0.1 * 1 = 0.08 SD per generation, which is the same order of magnitude as the ~0.05 SD per generation decrease in g measured in Western countries. This decrease is as we seen partially due to selection as well so this give a maximum value for how long the effects of mutational load could be.

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An additional SD in g would make the increase 0.16 SD per generation, and this would be about 4% of the global LDS population—or roughly 640,000 people. This, of course, assumes that this group would only mate with each other, which is the case if the assortative mating correlation is 0.4—a plausible number.

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The mutational loading of leftism is higher—about 0.15 SD per generation. This is plausibly overcome at 2 SD g, which corresponds to a gain of 0.24 SD conservatism per generation and a population of 80,000 Mormons.

This estimate is by no means rigorous, but I’m too lazy to design a better model at the moment. I will probably have haters in the comments telling me that my methods were flawed for x, y, z reasons, but—hey, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up statistics.

Currently, I put the odds of Mormon dominance at 80%. More data must be collected, and math must be done. Expect to see more of this in the future.

At time of publishing, I’ve began collecting data so a more accurate figure can be produced

1. As of April 2025, it is a hypothesis, and it has been pointed out to me that the paper cited does not support this idea, however in unpublished simulations, this still doesn’t seem to be a major problem because the heritability of ferality is high enough that once the interaction effects are taken into account, the white Mormon population return to above replacement levels of ferality before they go extinct.