[rsaarelm]

So you're saying that it's naive to suppose that everybody being much smarter than they are now would transform society, because any wide-scale societal change requires ongoing social cooperation between the many average-intelligence people society currently consists of?

[keiferski]

Here’s a simpler way to put it: intelligence and social cooperation are not the same thing. Being good at math or science doesn’t mean you understand how to organize complex political groups, and never has.

People tend to think their special gift is what the world needs, and academically-minded smart people (by that I mean people that define their self-worth by intelligence level) are no different.

[rsaarelm]

Yes, because you need to spend a lot of time doing social organization and thinking about it to get very good at it, just like you need to spend a lot of time doing math or science and thinking about it to get very good at it. And then you need to pick up patterns, respond well to unexpected situations and come up with creative solutions on top of that, which requires intelligence. If you look at the people who are the best at doing complex political organization, they'll probably all have above-average intelligence.

[nradov]

Intelligence isn't even particularly helpful in making good decisions, or predicting the outcomes of those decisions (often unintended outcomes).

[corimaith]

The prisoner's dilemma is a well known example of how rationality fails. To overcome requires something more than intelligence, it requires a predisposition to cooperation, to trust, in faith. Some might say that is what seperates Wisdon from Knowledge.

[khafra]

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QX98rCSXPkPSMriYi/rational-a...

[rbanffy]

“Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end” – Spock

[bryanrasmussen]

I think they're saying adequate intelligence to solve all problems is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet - and never will be.

[rsaarelm]

Why will it never be? If the adequate intelligence is what something like 0.1 % of the populace naturally has, seems like there's a pretty big difference between that level of intelligence being stuck at 0.1 % of the populace and it being available from virtual assistants that can be mass-produced and distributed to literally everyone on Earth.