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Notes -
Power over humans might be poorly scalable / unreliable / limited by luck. Soft sciences are rather incapable compared to STEM stuff. Maybe 160 IQ focused into math does miracles, while 160 IQ focused into soft stuff lets you predict people to some impressive - but not that terrifying - degree? Human brains are complex systems. And then there are interactions between them. Also, since industrial revolution (or maybe earlier, to some extent), such a genius needs to also take into account crazy changes in tech too.
And then there's other similarly (or significantly) intelligent people to deal with.
Random crap happens and shapes world events to some extent. Does anyone remember ACTA? I was in middle school at the time. I can't remember clearly how, but I stumbled upon some random IRC channel and also Facebook group "protesting" it (just few thousands of users complaining pointlessly, on platform). There were few people on the IRC channel, and they DoSed some random government website. No idea what they were expecting. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but I posted link to the IRC channel, and a link to some JS DoS utility, along with some instructions. I posted that several times, expecting it to just get lost in the flood of messages. Shortly after that I went AFK for 0.5-1h. When I went back there were several hundred people on that IRC channel and apparently they managed to bring some sites down.
So TV news covered it, the same or the next day. In the following days, it was few thousand people on that channel. And also someone defaced one gov site. Some news coverage, 2. No idea if that log is from the same channel.
After it was in the news, physical protests started, and soon spread all over EU. Various elected politicians beclowned themselves rather hard. It was the CurrentThing for some time.
USA also crippled their nuclear tech. EU got caught with pants down because they expected Putin to be "rational". Which was maybe wrong, but not necessarily stupid or unreasonable.
Cutting chip exports to China - is it really high int move, and not simply some base competence?
Or maybe social scientists are just way dumber? Physical Sciences Masters are vastly superior to Social Masters in math AND superior in verbal (study). No wonder: adding to my thesis, it's so painfully clear that our progress in social sciences is kneecapped by the political power of people motivated to use them to obscure rather than discover truth, which repels anyone with half a brain from those fields. Every bit of social science that holds the promise of conclusive, replicable and useful results is politically fraught (of course one could say that safer fruit has all been picked, but was there a lot of it?). We could have had a predictive HBD-based science of economic productivity, criminality, cooperation and social cohesion half a century ago, to say nothing of this polygenic score era, but instead we're still wading through the morass of implicit bias tier fraud and «is freedom of speech worth the consequences»/«shut up scum you have freedom you just have nothing to say» pablum, with grants going into scientific stamp collecting. What do you think comes first, stupidity of the scientists or malice of their effective managers? Does it matter after incentives are, time and again, so clearly spelled out to early career scientists?
On a separate note, @4bpp doesn't seem to give enough credit to Napoleon. It's a somewhat popular idea, that maybe the field is so packed and competitive, our mediocrities would have been brilliant by the standards of yesteryear. Maybe it's powered by the progress in performance of professional athletes, or perhaps by tool-aided improvement in stuff like music. Admittedly I may underestimate Blinken, whose distinguishing features seem to be reliability, stalwart Zionism running in the family, and a history of activism – rather than anything IQ-related (then again, how would I be able to tell if he's hiding his power level?). But, well… this is normal. Napoleon was abnormal.
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I translated fun fragment of the irc log (link to a pastebin containing it is in "Some news coverage").
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