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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2277 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.

I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.

And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.

One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."

This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.

There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.

"Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."

I actually start thinking the opposite - there's a weak anti-correlation between high intelligence and wisdom at the top ranges. I observe too many obviously highly intellectually capable people falling victims to various mind viruses, fallacies and fads. It's like there's a car and a driver, and the car - the IQ power, what we call "intelligence" - could we awesome, but if the driver is not skilled and you put them into a race car, they'd likely hurt themselves pretty badly, and may not survive the experience even. And I am not sure what constitutes being a "good driver" yet, but I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with the car power. Of course, if the car is a child's pedal car (very low IQ) you'll never get anywhere far, regardless of driver skills. But if it's in a normal range, or especially - slightly above normal - something else comes into play.

if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.

Sounds great, until some apes try to build a future paradise and murder 20 millions of other apes in the process, because not being murdered is just a short-term interest that can be sacrificed for the greater good of the future.

I think wise apes will consider the future implications of murdering 20 million other apes and how that might impact this paradise they hope to create, or cause other apes to resist their efforts.

The real problem is that even a smart ape might think they can achieve their future paradise without excessive Ape-murder, and embark on a quest that, incidentally, spirals out of of control and results in large scale ape genocides.

I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes. They may decide 20 million ape-deaths is acceptable, of course.

The 'wise' ape will try to completely obviate the downside risk if they go to make such impactful actions.

I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes.

That had been known to happen too, but more often no, they just want the paradise. And if a single ape is preventing us from achieving the future paradise, isn't it prudent and wise to remove the impediment, given as the benefit to all outweighs the narrow interests of a single ape by so much. Then we run the same algorithm at scale, and somehow when the dust settles, 20 millions are dead. Nobody intended that, everybody intended to build the paradise, it just happened. But the real paradise has never been tried, so we must try again.

Indeed. And I really, really hope that by and large the most intelligent apes who are capable of trying to implement 'paradise' are wise enough to either recognize the futility of the endeavor under current constraints, or at least to recognize that its never so easy as just killing the few apes you view as obstacles to it.

In a sense, they'd have to be, or else the species would probably not have survived this long (in many alternative timelines, it probably did not).

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