Is Intelligence, “Intelligent”? By Brian Simpson

Racial realist sites fall over the idea of intelligence, and particularly salivate over alleged East Asian IQ, which I have questioned in other blog posts, and will do so again. One would think that sites that were supposed to be pro-White would have devoted some critical energies to deconstructing this, but no, naïve empiricism rules. Or is it just that they are just CCP fronts?

But can intelligence be self-undermining, or socially self-destructive? My work at this blog has been to document the evils which intelligent people do, such as scientists, academics and technocrats,  and I prose that the higher the intellect, the greater the probability of evil being committed by positive acts or omissions, because of human hubris, or if you like, original sin.

Further to this, a study published in Social Psychology Quarterly puts the case that intelligent people, so-called, often adapt novel evolutionary strategies, that could prove to be socially destructive. From a longer term evolutionary perspective, intelligence could r maladaptive, especially if we use out technology to destroy ourselves. This could happen from many fronts, from the end of sperm and human fertility, to nuclear war.

https://phys.org/news/2010-02-intelligent-people-unnatural-values-human.html

“More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."

"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles."

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0190272510361602

This research was further developed by Satoshi Kanazawa in The Intelligence Paradox (Wiley, 2012):

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Paradox-Intelligent-Choice-Always/dp/0470586958

More recently Felix Rex, Black Pigeon, has done one of his sombre videos on the same theme, that intelligence has its limits, and can be socially self-undermining. As I see it, too much analysis of problems, which the intelligent love to do as part of their hubris, can have diminishing returns, and thus make solutions difficult, compared to simply opting for one good, possibly sub-optimal solution, that can be quickly implemented with fast and frugal heuristics. See Gerd Gigerenzer (et al.), Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart (2000).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT40_gqTXFo