Inconvenient questions about human genetic diversity

A friend recently accused me of gross myopia. And no, it's not about "race", which is a confusing fuzzy distraction. Since 2019, I have tried to focus my own personal energy on five real centers of value or telos: (1) reducing the chance that the human species will go extinct within a century or two, due to what some of us now know about climate change (http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm and http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/09/worlds-greatest-engineering-society.html); (2) likewise, reducing the "existential risk" to humanity due to a complex of huge changes coming to the world internet; (3) human potential, as in helping us connect better to the noosphere of which we are a part, embedded of course in a large cosmos; (4) passing on important unique things I have learned in an incredibly information rich life; and (5) working on the kind of direct human connections which keep us all alive. BUT: MYOPIA. Even before huge changes in technology and in our relations to the noosphere changed the path of human history, great civilizations were dying in just a few centuries, more than the century we get for climate and internet effects. Many of the causes of those deaths are still in play. I even proposed doing my PhD thesis on what I learned about those issues before 1972, and the Harvard faculty preferred that over neural networks and backpropagation and such, what I ended up choosing. Selection effects are clearly central to what pathways are really open to humans in the coming millennium, and I am sorry that I have not done as much justice to them as they deserve. but where can an honest and deep enough dialogue be created on that? For my climate and internet concerns, there is at least important public discussion now on "existential threats". But for selection effects? All I can offer now are a few diffuse observations and questions. Back when I was an undergraduate, a classmate once said: "Washington and Jefferson did such a deep job of creating a whole new order, a new social contract. They created a great rat race. But now we who must live in what they created have no choice but to learn to be rats. That's not fair. It's not what I want with MY life." That social vision was grounded in liberte, egalite, fraternity, and I have seen where Lafayette and Washington met. For many years, people in neuroscience and neural networks followed the vision of Donald Hebb, which assumed for neurons what many have assumed for humans: one universal social contract, one learning rule for all neurons, leading to great cooperation. From 1963 to 1964, it was a huge transition for me to understand how and why Hebb was wrong. ONE neuron type does not work. One can build a real intelligent system (without cheating) only by having at least a few very basic very different TYPES of neuron, adapted to different signals, responsive to different feedbacks. The caste system of India worked out in truly horrid, nonsustainable directions, which reminded me of the opening scene of the old Superman movie explaining how the caste system in Krypton caused the explosion and death of that planet. Those risks are very serious, more serious than we would imagine if we only had estern values in play. But simple money-based selection mechanisms ( selecting which genes persist) may be equally fatal, and there is lots of experience showing that too. In nature, speciation is a very pervasive fact of life. No new economic system, whether based on (1) law, on (2) chaos, on (3) gene manipulation or on (4) most varieties of what seems to be Sustainable Intelligent Internet (SII, a new option for social contract) can avoid the very deep and serious implications of whatever selection mechanisms are in effect for humans over future centuries. Anyone who claims that his or her choice from this menu (1 to 4) avoids the existential risks implied here is lying, either to himself and herself or just as a con game. What POSSIBLE sustainable outcomes might be possible? I tend to believe that some kind of SII (http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm) might be the most workable, maybe. GIVEN that we have brain designs with just a few basic cell/organ types (like giant pyramid cell, limbic ell, etc), perhaps a sustainable intelligent market design which provides for just a few parallel roles in the larger market system, might be sustainable, if it includes the kinds of conflict of interest provisions which we now know are essential to stability even in less intelligent brains. (See the discussion of DHP stability in http://www.werbos.com/HICChapter13.pdf.) A kind of rule-based honorable competition. Alternatives? Well, I see in the EU what happens when folks with roles like that of Schroder migrate to jobs funded by Gazprom, massively perverting EU markets in a way which screws up the EU economy here and now, blocking the kinds of climate technology which COULD be saving us all. Good old fashioned conflict of interest effects, reaching fatal proportions, and not just that one example!!! But I see other modes of gross instability in every other region on earth!! If ALL of us fall into myopia, because we ALL face incentives to do so, then we all die together! The rules need to be better crafted to support the kinds of functions which our brains rely on neocortex to perform. (I do hope Amit and Benjamin will send us URL of our discussion of that in their conference last week.) Best of luck. We all need it... a lot of it... ====================== Deep in my files I still have that thesis proposal to Harvard from 1971/1972. But I know a lot now which I did not know then.