I’ll flag that while I personally didn’t believe in the idea that orcas are on average >6 SDs smarter than humans, and never considered it that plausible, I’d say that I don’t think orcas could actually benefit that much from +6 SDs even if applied universally, and the reason is that they are in water, which severely limits your available technology options, and makes it really, really hard to form the societies needed to generate the explosion that happened post-industrial Revolution or even the agricultural revolution.
And there is a deep local optimum issue in which their body plan is about as unsuited to using tools as possible, and changing this requires technology they almost certainly can’t invent because the things you would need to make the tech are impossible to get at the pressure and saltiniess of the water, so it is pretty much impossible for orcas to get that much better with large increases in intelligence.
Thus, orca societies have a pretty hard limit on what they can achieve, at least ruling out technologies they cannot invent.
I’ll flag that while I personally didn’t believe in the idea that orcas are on average >6 SDs smarter than humans, and never considered it that plausible, I’d say that I don’t think orcas could actually benefit that much from +6 SDs even if applied universally, and the reason is that they are in water, which severely limits your available technology options, and makes it really, really hard to form the societies needed to generate the explosion that happened post-industrial Revolution or even the agricultural revolution.
And there is a deep local optimum issue in which their body plan is about as unsuited to using tools as possible, and changing this requires technology they almost certainly can’t invent because the things you would need to make the tech are impossible to get at the pressure and saltiniess of the water, so it is pretty much impossible for orcas to get that much better with large increases in intelligence.
Thus, orca societies have a pretty hard limit on what they can achieve, at least ruling out technologies they cannot invent.