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Notes -
You think you're smarter than the people around you, which is true. This leads you to believe that you're smart enough to get away with grifting one of them, which is also true. This leads you to think you're smart enough to get away with making a habit of it, which turns out to be false because of complex social dynamics that you aren't smart enough to navigate flawlessly. You get a bad reputation, the tribe cuts you out and you die alone, or maybe you get your head smashed in with a rock.
Pride, arrogance, hubris, these are vices that elevated intelligence encourages. See also the monotonous failure of technocracy from the Enlightenment to the present day. Just because you're the smartest person in the room doesn't mean you're smart enough to pull off whatever crazy plan your ego talked you into.
I don't think this works, but it is hard to speculate on this stuff.
Reasons to believe otherwise include the phenomena of cults and cult leaders. They tend to be more intelligent than their followers, and they benefit massively from stringing the followers along in a massive grift. In general, the outsized benefits of such a successful grift, e.g. the 'access to women' one sees in said cult leaders (compare to polygamy where the chief has many wives), probably outweighs it failing often.
Someone might also notice the grifting repeatedly fail, and then stop doing it - this might permanently slightly reduce his reputation in the tribe, without him being kicked out or smashed with a rock.
this substack on the "The evolutionary anthropology of deception, magic, and violence.", often gets into how deception or one persongroup taking advantage of another were common in premodern societies - also making the above seem less plausible.
Plus, anecdotally from normal-IQ friends, people-of-normal-intelligence successfully scam or trick each other all the time. If it's sometimes a successful strategy for people of similar IQ, it should often be successful for those of higher Iq as well.
But as I said, hard to make accurate statements about the way intelligence evolves.
I'm not exactly sure what 'technocracy' means here, but the current state of society seems like a 'success' for technocracy in the natural-selection sense of 'reproducing'.
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