Dwarkesh Patel

And the reason that's surprising is if you think about hunter-gatherers, yeah, reading your colleague Joseph Hendricks' book, the amount of information that they needed to hold onto and assess everything from how to process food to how to build shelters, fire, et cetera, compared to my world where I gotta like know how to set up mics and ask questions.

It's just like,

It seems like the demands on intelligence should have been, like, way higher in the ancestral environment.

And so it's very surprising that the beginnings of civilization increase the selection on intelligence.

Yeah.

Okay, so obviously a trait like years of schooling was not itself a meaningful thing in the past.

And the underlying things for it seem to have been

under strong selections.

Whatever in the genome predicts years of schooling seems to happen under strong selection.

And how should we think about this?

What is the actual thing that's changing in the genome?

Okay, just to make sure I understood, you're saying you're...

you're looking at this ancient DNA in Europe and you're saying, well, it seems to predict years of schooling for modern people in Europe, or at least a selection on that ancient DNA seems to predict more years of schooling in modern Europe.

And then you also find, well, it also predicts how the same variants predict more years of schooling for Chinese people in China.

Yeah.

And so this is not just some weird artifact from the way these GWAS were done in Europe.

These parts of the genome seem to robustly predict the kind of thing that actually leads to more years of schooling, at least in people today.

Correct.

Jane Street is pretty secretive, but I did learn about one internal mechanism which illustrates how high trust and weird their culture is.

Researchers aren't given compute allocations.