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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Even a definite correlation between stupidity and criminality wouldn't necessarily imply a correlation between stupidity and evil. It's possible that smarter evil people tend to avoid getting caught, not by planning the perfect crime, but by realizing the expected value of the crime is negative (both because they're better at such estimation and because they tend to have more socio-economic status giving them more to lose) and just not committing it. Such people would still be evil in the sense that they'd do evil if they could definitely get away with it, but since they can't they just don't try.

I know some psychologists have done studies where they ask people "if you could [do something evil] and be 100% confident that you would face no punishment for it, would you do it?" It would be trivial to plot their responses against their SAT score and see if any correlation presented itself. But such a study would have all the weaknesses of any comparable survey: just because someone says they would/wouldn't do something, doesn't mean they would/wouldn't really do it if they found themselves in such a hypothetical.