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A "street-smart" deliveryman or welder aren't economic substitutes for a physics professor or a staff engineer, even though the former guessed right on the murdervaccine. Kinda moot though considering they're not dying, though. In cases where large-scale bad choices are made, there is selection at play, and the high IQ gay techie who doesn't reproduce is in a meaningful sense worse than, and is losing to, the 'working class white' with three kids - but those three kids still can't take the "distributed systems architect" the techie had.
How nice to know that we have arrived at our current state of progress due to easily recognisable hereditary classes/castes. Smart people have always had smart kids in a distinct band of the population different from the dumb masses. No working-class labourer ever made it out of manual work where they grunted at each other over pints of beer up to the elevated cloud mansions.
Sorry, Cardinal Wolsey. No place for you, Thomas Cromwell. You are irrevocably tainted with the smear of the lower, dumber classes. It is only the children of the dukes who will go on to be the intelligent discoverers of scientific principles. There will always be a Robert Boyle, there will never be an Isaac Newton. We can see this via Elon Musk's kids who are all out there working on their Nobels!
This comment would've made more sense if it was posted before my reply to nybbler, where I agreed that many of the current group of very smart people are the children of people outside that group.
I do think that a large, say >25%, subset of the smartest people dying will harm society's overall success more than an equivalent total number of randomly chosen people dying, because genes are very important to intelligence and intelligence is heritable.
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Eh, my grandfather was a working class white person with six kids, and at least three of them could have done that job. Maybe 4.
That's incredibly common, yeah, a lot of smart/successful people come from less smart/successful backgrounds. Sorting is reducing that, but not that much. My point was that the vast majority of working class people can't serve in those jobs, so killing all the physics professors would make society much worse off, which is entirely compatible with that because the number of normal people is much larger than the number of very smart people.
And yet amazingly society recovered from the Black Death. Why, it's almost like you can survive, rebuild, and educate the next generation to become physics professors!
Also income isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 proxy to actual societal necessity.
For every heart surgeon that gets hypothetically mowed down you're losing a lot of senior marketing professionals (as somebody who's done that job), makework and bureaucrats who could fade out of existence with the real world barely noticing. My personal ascent to the 1% has generally been distinctly uncorrelated with any sort of 'how much does my job actually do for anybody' principle.
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