IQ: The Good, the Bad, and the Popperian

🧠⚡

Paul Berg

Sep 27, 2025 @ RatFest

Personal Background

• 👔 Co-Founder and CEO @ Sablier Labs
• 👨‍💻 Software engineer for 11+ years
• 📖 Studying David's work for 4+ years, as a hobby

"What has David said about this?"

👍 The Good

• Genes alone do not explain human behavior and cognitive results
• Culture and memetic evolution play a bigger role than genes (chapter 15)

👎 The Bad

💡 The Popperian

Knowledge in brain genes contain meta explanatory knowledge

🔩 A "Valve" of Conjecture Generation

IQ is the rate at which conjectures are generated

💭 Intuition Pump

Human in a Vat

🎂 Explanatory Cake

Genes and memes are like a cake of explanatory knowledge

🧑‍🦳 Life of Conjectures

• Genes are involved in the number of conjectures a person generates throughout their lifetime
• If two people both live 80 years ...and one has an IQ of 80 and the other an IQ of 120, the latter will generate a lot more conjectures and hence more explanations
• Thus, IQ genes are 'meta-explanatory'

End of Talk

@PaulRBerg