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Notes -
I've been thinking that perhaps the woke/liberal/feminist (there is a lot of overlap between these groups) hatred for intelligence research and FUD-creation around the IQ concept is not merely about the incendiary topic of "race" or ethnicity and IQ that might pop up if society takes IQ seriously, and not just about the basal opposition to anything that goes against "tabula rasa", but perhaps also because men are more extreme in IQ than women. Nature takes more risks with men, while women are somewhat more clustered around the mean. Why does that matter, if the average IQ is almost the same for women and men? Because most of the geniuses are going to be men. Even at 130 IQ there is a major difference. Something like 6/10 of individuals with 130+ IQ are men. If you go up to 145+ IQ, there are fewer and fewer women compared to men. With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies, this should naturally lead to an overweight of positions in the highest offices being filled by men in a meritocratic society concerned with getting the best results for its future. Feminists may have discerned this IRL and in data, and of course do not want to be ruled over by men. Thus they seek to obfuscate and mislead around the topic. Thoughts?
I would like to challenge this. While obviously we don't want the leaders to be idiots, I am not sure I would prefer a 150 IQ psychopath to 120 IQ kind and moral person as a leader. To me, the main role of the leader is to set goals, make choices and keep the group from descending into chaos, and I am not sure sky-high personal IQ is the best way for that. Maybe some other qualities - which I am not ready to define, but could tentatively call as "not being an evil asshole"? - are at least as important? I do not doubt we need to require the leader be smarter than average - but I think there's a point of diminishing returns where pure IQ power stops being the thing that matters. I don't know where this point is, but I think the premise "the more IQ, the better leader, no exceptions" needs at least to be seriously questioned.
This of course is complicated by the fact that a lot of our current leaders are, to be blunt, psychopaths or borderline psychopaths. Some of them aren't that high IQ either, to be honest. So we're not doing great in this area, and we only have ourselves, as a society, to blame for that. I'm not going to name names here because everybody would have their own examples depending on their political and personal proclivities, but there are enough examples for everybody. But if we want to do better, sometime in the future, I am not sure "higher IQ score" is the metric we need to concentrate all our efforts on. I have seen enough high-IQ assholes to make this questionable for me.
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