You’d pick the smart people, sure. But would you necessarily pick the smartest and exclude those who may not be intellectually exceptional, but are highly skilled in other areas?
I wouldn’t be surprised if intelligence followed a U-shape curve with respect to societal benefits. In a certain range of above-averageness, there’s only pluses. But then you hit a point of diminishing returns, possibly followed by negatives.
Count in me with the others who find the OP too broad to answer. Smart people are more deserving of roles and responsibilities that require intelligence, along with the perks that come with those roles and responsibilities (status, money, power, etc). It’s hard to generalize beyond that, though.
Me too, but in everyday contexts, I’m not sure the advantage is always so pronounced amid the sea of other variables - good enough is sufficiently good that no discrimination is necessary or appropriate.
I think when it comes to a thing like a manned Mars mission, picking the most intelligent people might not necessarily be the ideal strategy. You want smart, competent crew, but you also want to avoid specialists, in the event that a key crew member becomes incapacitated, or worse.
Right now, the best we can do is a six-month trajectory, which means a lot of time cooped up in a tin can. When it comes to not strangling each other, high intelligence may not be sufficient to maintain accord. Hell, it might even become detrimental, as really smart people have a tendency to want to be right all or almost all the time. A proper Mars exploratory mission would mean looking at the same small group of people for two and a half years, colonization would mean probably for the rest of one’s life, getting-along-with-others skills would be at least as important as academic prowess or technical ability.
Intelligent people don’t neccessarily receive more than less intelligent people unless they earn more. A person should be entitiled to earn what they can regardless of skills or intelligence.
At the the bottom of the scale I believe everyone should at least have an opportunity to earn a decent standard of living if they choose to do so. I know plenty of very intelligent folks who sometimes find themselves destitute and plenty of not so smart folks who manage to do quite well. Deserve doesn’t come into play, I think earn is the key word.
And probably most of them are engaged in zero-sum self-aggrandizing pursuits that contribute very little to the common good.
Honestly, I’d probably rather rescue the person with a 110 IQ than the one with either 200 or 50. Other things being equal, which they never are. And of course I’d rather rescue all three. But if I had to choose, closer to the norm would be better than extreme outliers in either direction.
For the record, given that IQ is (largely) a heritable trait that’s out of our control, I don’t think people should be rewarded for it any more than they’re rewarded for being tall, athletic or good looking. (Which they are to some extent, but not by explicit social or economic policy). Society needs the factory worker as well as the university professor, and I don’t think the latter should necessarily make a better salary than the former, if they’re both hard working and diligent.
Intelligence is an asset, but people have been very successful without being particularly brilliant. Perseverance and the ability to focus on a task are mental traits that can be just as valuable as intelligence as far as being successful in the marketplace. There’s also charisma, good looks, and height as was mentioned before. Success is more about recognizing and utilizing your strengths while not putting yourself in a position where your weaknesses will scuttle your efforts.
Funny thing is, I’ve known a lot of poor intelligent folks. What I have yet to see is a poor beautiful person. It seems that our society rewards beauty even more than intelligence.
Success is about talent, to some extent, but is much more about access to capital, social networks, and luck. If you want to be successful, your much better off being born rich and dumb than poor and smart.
People don’t choose their genes, their parents, or their upbringing. Dumb people can’t help being dumb anymore than retarded people can help being retarded. It’s interesting that you can make fun of people being dumb, but you can’t make fun of people being retorted. It’s just a matter of degree.
That’s because there are a lot more people who are dumb by choice than by factors beyond their control, just as there are a lot more people out of shape because they don’t want to work out than people out of shape because they can’t work out.
The estimate I’m most comfortable with for heritability of IQ is the one from Devlin et al., 2007 in Nature. (FWIW, I’m speaking as a layman here, but I suspect so are you). That estimate is around 50% of variation due to inherited variation (presumably mostly genetics) and another 20% due to variation in prenatal environment. Some other estimates for heritability of IQ are closer to 70-80%, but lets’ not go there. At the very most, then, in modern industrial societies 30% of variation in IQ is due to stuff that happens to us once we’re out of the womb. And most of that has nothing to do with choice.
If you’re talking about pure IQ, I won’t dispute your estimates. However, I don’t think we have a whole bunch of low-IQ people running around. What we do have is a lot of people with average to above average IQs who haven’t cracked a book in 10 years.
It doesn’t work that way. Intelligence is controlled by genes. You can’t will yourself to be more intelligent.
It is true that people do dumb things. Often times it’s because they’re constrained by circumstances or conditions you’re not aware of. And it’s true that people believe dumb things. In that case, it’s usually because believing those things makes them happier, or makes them feel better about themselves. For example: “People who are suffering deserve it,” helps relieve people of the sense that they have a responsibility to help anyone.
The idea that people who are suffering had nothing to do with their suffering is just as absurd. Might as well say that a woman beater who never seems to have successful relationships is merely suffering from bad genes.
And again, I wasn’t referring to people who were born with low IQ. I’m referring to people with capacity to better themselves but who are uninterested in intellectual pursuits. They spend all their time pursuing instant gratification.
And telling people their problems are not within their power to fix ensure that they will continue suffering. You seem to have a different idea of what constitutes “help”. The conservative community has been quite charitable and quite good at helping people in trouble. The postmodern view of poverty is one in which they just had bad luck. Things like drug use, unwillingness to work, inability to control emotions(anger issues especially), and poor education, those things “just happen”.Could happen to anybody. Why tomorrow, I could become a crackhead.
The key to solving poverty is a tough, honest look at why a person is in poverty and a plan to correct the deficiencies that have led to it.