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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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This is absurd. Why would we favor intelligence like this?

Because more intelligence means more qualia.

Intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently.

Ants are more biologically successful than humans, composing much more of the Earth's biosphere. Do you support an ant takeover of the Earth involving human extinction? Since intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently, ants are perfectly equal to humans, so if they figure out how to take over while having no qualia per ant body, that's perfectly fine right?

making a meritocratic system that rewards economic output measures the actual thing that we care about.

Only if you are an egalitarian who thinks we should Goodhart what the median person finds to be productive. A tree is a living organism, and fortunes have been made by reducing their GDP per capitas. For example, logging companies. In this case, an organism is simply chopped down for the sole benefit of a superior being. There is no credit from trees that one must earn by pandering to the forest. Extremely intelligent people should not be the slaves of 100 IQ people. Your economic model says that they are and that that is fair. It is predicated on the egalitarian idea that all humans have equal moral worth and therefore get equal economic rights. Polygenic scores applied to apes showed they have gene scores between 40 and 55 IQ points. That means a bright ape is 45 IQ points from the median person. Nietzsche said the Übermensch will see the median person of his day like an ape. This implies the median Übermensch will have an IQ a little north of 145; a society run for and by such people will not give equal economic rights to most people alive today. We can create such a society by increasing the correlation between wealth and intelligence, and through it the correlation between fertility and intelligence.

Because more intelligence means more qualia.

Is that true? If that were true, how would you know? It seems vaguely plausible, but I'm fairly certain that consciousness and qualia are not well understood enough to conclude that. You only know about your own qualia in your own internal experiences, and can only attempt to extrapolate to other people based on similar brain chemistry. I'm not confident, but I'm fairly certain that computers do not have any qualia at all, and yet as AI gets smarter and smarter their IQ increases. Even when it surpasses that of humans, they still probably won't have qualia. It's still just a mathematical function that turns numbers into other numbers in a deterministic way.

Ants are more biologically successful than humans, composing much more of the Earth's biosphere. Do you support an ant takeover of the Earth involving human extinction?

I'm a human supremecist. I think that humans have moral value, and animals don't except in-so-far as they are useful or psychologically pleasing to humans. If there were an AI computer with IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support it taking over the world and replacing you? If the ants formed a hivemind that, when all of them combined their thought processes together, had an IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support them taking over the world?

Extremely intelligent people should not be the slaves of 100 IQ people. Your economic model says that they are and that that is fair.

Who is being enslaved? My economic model says that people should do things which are mutually profitable. That both people gain from their mutual interactions. You should do good things for other people and then they should reward you for it in equal measure! That's why people who are more productive should be paid more. YOUR model says that low IQ people should be enslaved to high IQ people, and do things that high IQ people want without getting compensated for it. My model does not involve slavery, because anyone can do anything they want, but they get rewarded from the value they actually create. We can chop down trees because they are trees, not people. If you could earn just as much money from chopping down a 60 IQ human being and harvesting their organs this would be horrible and evil, even though they're less intelligent than us, because they are people and would experience real suffering that we should care about. They are less economically useful than a 100 IQ human, and therefore will be less productive and will earn less money on their own. Therefore they will earn less money and have less money, automatically, without us needing to authoritarianly go in there and decide for them how much we think they're worth. Reality tells people how much they could be worth if they tried, and then they themselves determine how much they're actually worth by their own decisions and efforts.

Nietzsche said the Übermensch will see the median person of his day like an ape. This implies the median Übermensch will have an IQ a little north of 145; a society run for and by such people will not give equal economic rights to most people alive today. We can create such a society by increasing the correlation between wealth and intelligence, and through it the correlation between fertility and intelligence.

Why? That sounds like a miserable society for most people to be in. I think you're just using a maximally selfish definition of the word "good", where you imagine a society which maximizes your own personal hedonic value, or some sort of aesthetic preference for order or unity/conformity/dystopia. Usually the words we use for this is "selfish", not "good". The classic evil dictator wants to have themselves enslave everyone below them and maximize good for themselves and themselves alone. This is not what people mean when they talk about "good" in the moral sense.

I'm a human supremecist. I think that humans have moral value, and animals don't except in-so-far as they are useful or psychologically pleasing to humans.

How do you justify that? I'm just applying logic like that upwards with more consistency.

  • If there were an AI computer with IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support it taking over the world and replacing you?

I support a non-human super intelligence, yes. It could be alien or sillicon based as long as it has superior qualia/consciousness. As Nietzsche writes, the Übermensch will not be a human, it will merely be evolved from humans biologically. A human is a particular animal that has been around in forms biologically close to now for a few thousand years. Predecessors from before that are at the very least racially distinct.

Why? That sounds like a miserable society for most people to be in.

No, because it is evolved, there won't be low IQ people in it at all. So it will be an incredibly jovial and wonderful place.

I think you're just using a maximally selfish definition of the word "good", where you imagine a society which maximizes your own personal hedonic value, or some sort of aesthetic preference for order or unity/conformity/dystopia.

It's hard to categorize it as either selfish or non-selfish. I would be a low status member of such a society, if I would even make the cut. I am, after all, merely a human. I think I will die before 2100 and that I won't get to personally benefit from the fruit of a society like this, but I still see it as good for it to come about. What is really selfish, to me, is egalitarianism. It's a form of mass selfishness, where people get together and decide rank selfishness is fine as long as there are a lot of other people just like them being similarly selfish. This is where you get illogical speciesism is two directions from. Subjugate those below, prevent the coming about of those above, never question why the median person today is apparently supposed to be perfect and infinitely deserving given this behavior. Call anybody who opposes the maximally self-serving stable egalitarian coalition a variety of names, including selfish or self-serving, böse, a dictator, enemy of our democracy, etc.

YOUR model says that low IQ people should be enslaved to high IQ people, and do things that high IQ people want without getting compensated for it.

No it doesn't. First and foremost my model says smart people should stop having their own wealth redistributed away from them. Second it says reverse the redistribution, which is fair after all of the years of servitude. The lower people owe a debt for taking from the higher for so long. Third, it doesn't have to go to things smart people want. Primarily, it should go to the reproduction of smart people, which is typically undesired by smart people themselves. It shouldn't go to more leisure or vacations from the start.

If you could earn just as much money from chopping down a 60 IQ human being and harvesting their organs this would be horrible and evil, even though they're less intelligent than us, because they are people and would experience real suffering that we should care about.

Are you a vegan? Chickens, cows, and pigs definitely experience real suffering by being butchered too. Unfortunately I selfishly struggle to cut out all meat, but I don't eat pork because they are more intelligent than cows and chicken, and I make effort to avoid buying factory farmed meat. I'm of the opinion that grass fed cows seem pretty happy and lack the intelligence to know that they will be killed in the future. It's possible to kill them painlessly and without them knowing. I'm also optimistic about lab grown meat as an alternative to farmed meat and its perfection by the close of this century.