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How valuable is intelligence?
One data point that I've been mulling over: humans. We currently have the capability to continue to scale up our brains and intelligence (we could likely double our brain size before running into biological and physical constraints). And the very reason we evolved intelligence in the first place was that it gave adaptive advantage to people who have more of it.
And yet larger brain size doesn't seem to be selected for in modern society. Our brains are smaller than our recent human ancestors' (~10% smaller). Intelligence and its correlates don't appear to positively affect fertility. There's now a reverse Flynn effect in some studies.
Of course, there are lots of potential reasons for this. Maybe the metabolic cost is too great; maybe our intelligence is "misaligned" with our reproductive goals; maybe we've self domesticated ourselves and overly intelligent people are more like cancer cells that need to be eliminated for the functioning of our emergent social organism.
But the point remains that winning a game of intelligence is not in itself something that leads to winning a war for resources. Other factors can and do take precedence.
This assumes that something like human level intelligence, give or take, is the best the universe can do. If super intelligence far exceeding human intelligence is realizable on hefty GPUs, I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the effects of marginal increases in human intelligence.
I agree with you, I think that there were diminishing returns on intelligence in the ancestral environment. If your task is to hunt mammoths, then a brain capable of coming up with quantum field theory is likely not going to help much.
Today, sure. (Not that we have identified the genes which we would have to change for that. Also, brain size is not everything, it is not the case that a genius simply has a much larger brain than an average person.)
In the ancestral environment, I don't think so. Giving birth is already much more difficult for humans than for most other mammals, and the cause is the large cross-section of the head.
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I think you need to have a clear idea of what "intelligence" even means before you can start to assess how valuable it is.
As one thinker just posted on Truth Social an hour ago:
/images/17446546611532226.webp
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I've been pulling heads out of very stretched vaginas for the past week, and suspect there are biological reasons other than metabolism that larger head size is selected against.
This might go away if we got rid of the sexually antagonistic selection that's limiting larger hip sizes in women.
Human heads used to be bigger, though. And childbirth is much less likely to result in death now than before, thanks to human intelligence and the heroic efforts of professionals like yourself. And if increases in intelligence did offer a significant reproductive benefit, larger hips that enabled that intelligence would be selected for.
Bigger faces as adults, due to e.g. much larger jaws iirc. Don't think head size at birth was much different, was it?
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