My da is an extremely smart and intelligent man.
That does not mean that he is right all the time or not susceptible to propaganda.
It also does not mean that he cares about the well-being of people or has empathy for their hardships and suffering.
In short: just because you are smart doesn’t mean that you can be trusted to do the right thing for people.
The pros would be for the few smart people at the top. They would have lavish palaces and tons of wealth.
The rest of us would suffer miserably, and the world would get steadily worse.
Such a conventional view. Practically dogma in USA. But I’m looking for something more speculative.
Assume that the smart people are nice.
Could we get a kind totalitarianism? That would be good.
The smart people would be good at tricking the masses into thinking they’re nice. So they could seem nice without actually being nice.
Intelligence and kindness or benevolence aren’t necessarily correlated, so there’s no reason to assume the smart people would be nice.
You’d have to find leaders who are kind and benevolent, and smart, and genuine.
And being smart isn’t enough. No one person can be completely knowledgeable about everything, nor can one person manage everything that needs to be managed.
So you’d need teams of people from all kinds of different domains who are all smart, kind, benevolent, genuine, and also want to be in charge.
You’re asking for an impossible fantasy. Or something a cult leader would promise or something.
Maybe a brainlinked hivemind, I hear brainlinks are a thing now. That would give us the smartness. And the niceness… I guess we’d need a test for that.
Also, a brainlinked hivemind could be immortal (in a Ship of Theseus kind of way).
Would immortal be good? (It’s kind of crazy to think that we can actually almost do that now)
How about instead of assuming sci fi deus ex machina solutions to the agency problem, we could design a political system that can handle imperfect people.
Because a smart person will game any system every time. So to head off that random choice, pick the right person/s.
How do we decide someone is smart?
In theory democracy “should” be doing that.
smartness test. Can we do 80% accurate?
Who decides what is on the smartness test? Who writes it? Who grades it? IQ tests are more and more being considered trash. Also people with high iq doesn’t mean they are educated, just means they are quick learners when they wann.
who speaks entirely in rhetorical questions?
These aren’t rherorical. These are logistical questions that would have to be answered.
Your questions sum to “I don’t think there’s a good smartness test”.
This social media convention of framing your assertions as questions is exhausting.
So the con is there is no way to determine who is the smartest. There is no good smart test.
If you disagree though I’m happy to hear about it, as this is a silly debate I have no stake in.
Yes, you already said that.
Your conversational technique is abysmal. I blame society.
Intelligence and leadership have an overlap but they’re still mutually exclusive. If you’re intelligent, you can build a good governing system, but the defining aspect of a leader is knowing if it’s good to greenlight it.
Agree even though that’s not what mutually exclusive means
Smart people aren’t always good people. Putting smart people with egos in charge will lead to stronger class divide and bad choices.
Good point. We should have a niceness test too.
Brilliant people are only brilliant at their area of expertise. They can be horribly, even dangerously stupid in other areas. What’s worse is that they often think they are brilliant at everything. (See Linus Pauling, vitamin c.)
Agreed. We’d want the broad kind of smartness, of course.
