At climbing trees,a human in a primitive human tribe will still be less successful than the chimps.
It’s not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it’s what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren’t as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn’t be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I’m not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn—how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends… some will have to learn the hard way… and some will never learn.
It’s not whether he is more or less successful than chimps, it’s what environment he will be most successful in.
From your comments, I took it as the usual career status and money scale. On a first approximation, being able to produce more intellectual product quickly should be an advantage, if used in accordance with the reward structure of the environment.
On advantages/disadvantages relative to less intelligent people, each in their best environments, I see a few issues.
Being on the tail of the human distribution likely means that the genes aren’t as robust as more central genotypes. Less testing. I wouldn’t be surprised if biologically based mental illness is more likely.
It is likely that there is some trade off between intelligence and other brain functions, some functional cost to more intelligence, depending on how you want to slice and dice brain function.
But in the current environment, I think the environmental disadvantages are so huge that I’m not losing sleep over the intrinsic disadvantages.
For starters, being shuttled through the usual factory school system is easily crippling for a smart kid. Not only does it fail to teach a kid what every kid most needs to learn—how to focus and apply himself, it rewards a smart kid just for being smart, which is about the most dysfunctional lesson he can learn.
I agree with this. All kids would benefit from a better system, but smarter kids could get greater benefits. In addition to the generally useful stuff, they could also learn about how to live specifically as a person more intelligent than others. Not just signalling their intelligence to the teacher.
Without systematical support, some of them will get the information from their family and friends… some will have to learn the hard way… and some will never learn.