Speakpigeon
Contributor
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2009
- Messages
- 6,317
- Location
- Paris, France, EU
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationality (i.e. facts + logic), Scepticism (not just about God but also everything beyond my subjective experience)
It clusters around 100 per definition.
Why are people with an average IQ not great at solving complex problems, and why is this true for a majority of people?
Our social organisation is characterised at least for now by social inequalities, including living conditions, educations, health etc. As I see it, intelligent people have an objective interest in the renewal of the population of people who are of average intelligence, essentially to do the jobs they don't fancy doing but are nonetheless necessary to the economy and to the privileged few. Our social organisation is effectively re-enforcing the unbalance in the natural intelligence spread. The increase in IQ scores seems to me to be a direct effect of the industrial, democratic and meritocratic politics that has developed over the last few centuries and that prevails now. It was in the interests of intelligent people to develop our industrial, and therefore technological, and therefore scientific capabilities and therefore expertise, with a huge increase in the number of students as well as better paid workers. Isn't that good enough?
But even if intelligent people somehow made sure the less intelligent ones vanished, there would still be a natural spread, only less pronounced, and perhaps with a much smaller population.
I'm not sure that would solve the problems humanity is facing, though.
Again, it's emotions that decide what we want to do. So, if war, then war, intelligent or not.
EB