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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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If it happens that making robots to clean toilets is more trouble than assigning people to toilet duty, I expect the 150 IQs to clean toilets.

If

If assigning 150 IQs to toilets results in a "mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top," then that seems to mean it causes quite a lot of trouble. I'm not sure that making robots to clean toilets is less trouble, but I would guess that a society filled with 150+ IQs would be able to accomplish this level of robotics without too much trouble, likely less trouble than comes about when a mass of 150-IQ angry losers applying their smarts to manipulate society to place themselves at the top. Then again, perhaps a mass of 150-IQ angry losers wouldn't be much trouble at all if the rest of society is all 180-IQ or something.

Hard to say without seeing it play out empirically which will actually be more trouble.

What it looks like to me is that we're not lacking in 150 IQ people as much as we lack in resources/cooperation required to obtain them, and cooperation doesn't magically spawn from enough smart people. Plenty of smart people are in politics and other zero-sum pursuits.

The historic record is replete with people's who, if they had the knowledge and intelligence to put the resources available to good use would have been unbelievably better off. It is every previous generation of man. What makes today so special?