Confounding the evidence is the fact that there appears to be a coupling of social-cue-blindness and higher potential intelligence via whatever mechanism causes autism. I also know a number of remarkably intelligent people who are crippled by anxiety which amplifies the perceived negative consequences of trivial rule-breaking far beyond the objective reality.
Highly intelligent people who do not have a distinct social situational impairment are better than average at understanding and navigating social norms. In every way. They’re better at interpreting an existing norm legalistically to condemn an enemy. They’re just as good at interpreting that same norm in a way that convincingly absolves them of their own violations. They’re better at being both cats and mice as the situation demands it.
They’re not even necessarily calculating and Machiavellian about it. The Elephant provides true-seeming self-serving justifications for free no matter what your perspective is. Even very smart people don’t tend to think in terms of “norm policing”; by dafault we think in deontologically-flavored statements like “What Sue did to me was really shitty,” or “Why is he being so unreasonable about this? I didn’t promise that I wouldn’t look for another job.”
To perform the obligatory ritual of evo-psych hand-waving, higher intelligence benefits you both when you’re a mouse (you can evade norms in ways that differentially benefit you) and when you’re a cat (you can construct and impose norms that keep you in power).
I think the answer to ” Why didn’t we develop intelligence to compete against each other for food, back when we lived in the sea? ” is that “we” did actually. Schooling and hunting behaviors in fish seem pretty impressively optimized up to a certain point. But there’s a ceiling, or more precisely a stark point of diminishing returns. In the war between swordfish in search of tuna, there’s a jump discontinuity between the intelligence we see in the swordfish and the intelligence a swordfish would need to have in order to develop a meaningfully more powerful tuna-hunting system. In fact, their bodies are possibly so optimized for their current hunting strategy that higher intelligence might only trip them up.
In humans, though, there was no jump discontinuity—you just need to be a little bit smarter than your neighbor to realize a marginal benefit—and there was no upper limit, or, that upper limit was high enough that it tooks until homo sapiens to reach it.
True. Can’t ignore the fact that as far as we know hominids are the only animals that figured out fire, which is essentially a multiplier on the available nutrients we could access from a given unit of food.
Confounding the evidence is the fact that there appears to be a coupling of social-cue-blindness and higher potential intelligence via whatever mechanism causes autism. I also know a number of remarkably intelligent people who are crippled by anxiety which amplifies the perceived negative consequences of trivial rule-breaking far beyond the objective reality.
Highly intelligent people who do not have a distinct social situational impairment are better than average at understanding and navigating social norms. In every way. They’re better at interpreting an existing norm legalistically to condemn an enemy. They’re just as good at interpreting that same norm in a way that convincingly absolves them of their own violations. They’re better at being both cats and mice as the situation demands it.
They’re not even necessarily calculating and Machiavellian about it. The Elephant provides true-seeming self-serving justifications for free no matter what your perspective is. Even very smart people don’t tend to think in terms of “norm policing”; by dafault we think in deontologically-flavored statements like “What Sue did to me was really shitty,” or “Why is he being so unreasonable about this? I didn’t promise that I wouldn’t look for another job.”
To perform the obligatory ritual of evo-psych hand-waving, higher intelligence benefits you both when you’re a mouse (you can evade norms in ways that differentially benefit you) and when you’re a cat (you can construct and impose norms that keep you in power).
I think the answer to ” Why didn’t we develop intelligence to compete against each other for food, back when we lived in the sea? ” is that “we” did actually. Schooling and hunting behaviors in fish seem pretty impressively optimized up to a certain point. But there’s a ceiling, or more precisely a stark point of diminishing returns. In the war between swordfish in search of tuna, there’s a jump discontinuity between the intelligence we see in the swordfish and the intelligence a swordfish would need to have in order to develop a meaningfully more powerful tuna-hunting system. In fact, their bodies are possibly so optimized for their current hunting strategy that higher intelligence might only trip them up.
In humans, though, there was no jump discontinuity—you just need to be a little bit smarter than your neighbor to realize a marginal benefit—and there was no upper limit, or, that upper limit was high enough that it tooks until homo sapiens to reach it.
It is much more likely that intelligence beyond this point simply costs too much relative to the benefit. Brains use a lot of energy.
True. Can’t ignore the fact that as far as we know hominids are the only animals that figured out fire, which is essentially a multiplier on the available nutrients we could access from a given unit of food.