Oh wow. We are living in idiocracy! (And we still managed quantum physics and a technological civilisation.)
This raises a semi-serious question: Many major advances have occurred due to people who have an intelligence that is far higher than the norm (e.g. Newton). However, many other advances seem to occur at a slow and steady pace, and many practical technologies occur from people who we wouldn’t necessarily think of as intelligent but are rather extremely skilled tinkerers(e.g. Thomas Edison or John Harrison) .
So, how much slower would technological progress be if humanity never had the top 1% of the population by some reasonable intelligence metric (like say IQ)? Is there some tech level that we would never reach. Would we for example never work out Kepler’s description of the solar system or never get Newtonian mechanics? I’m not sure that this question is well-defined.
I’m wondering also if this helps explain the Fermi paradox- maybe there’s a lot of intelligent life out there but most of it lacks many outliers in degrees of intelligence? If so, most species will stay for extended periods of time at relatively low tech levels. This isn’t as absurd as it might seem at first glance since humans spent hundreds of thousands of years with little advancement.
Oh wow. We are living in idiocracy! (And we still managed quantum physics and a technological civilisation.)
This raises a semi-serious question: Many major advances have occurred due to people who have an intelligence that is far higher than the norm (e.g. Newton). However, many other advances seem to occur at a slow and steady pace, and many practical technologies occur from people who we wouldn’t necessarily think of as intelligent but are rather extremely skilled tinkerers(e.g. Thomas Edison or John Harrison) .
So, how much slower would technological progress be if humanity never had the top 1% of the population by some reasonable intelligence metric (like say IQ)? Is there some tech level that we would never reach. Would we for example never work out Kepler’s description of the solar system or never get Newtonian mechanics? I’m not sure that this question is well-defined.
I’m wondering also if this helps explain the Fermi paradox- maybe there’s a lot of intelligent life out there but most of it lacks many outliers in degrees of intelligence? If so, most species will stay for extended periods of time at relatively low tech levels. This isn’t as absurd as it might seem at first glance since humans spent hundreds of thousands of years with little advancement.
Whee!