Maga's sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future | Quinn Slobodian

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : Musk, like Trump, frequently refers to IQ as if it is a meaningful and important number.
54% : The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes - that IQ is meaningful and real - brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called "living with inequality".
53% : A coalition fixated on intelligence is staking the US economy on AI - which will devalue the very skills the right fetishises One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ.
52% : Yet in the drive for US supremacy in artificial intelligence - signalled by the $500bn (£375bn) Stargate project announcement in the White House and an executive order to integrate AI into public education, beginning in kindergarten - there is a hidden irony.
51% : The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education.
49% : This department is in the process of being dismantled by Elon Musk's "department of government efficiency", with the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive Linda McMahon promising to complete the task.
43% : It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright.

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