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The best rule would be to follow the command of the closest relative who has their life together. Nobody else is more likely to have a pure motivation in advising someone. I’m skeptical of a less intelligent person’s ability to understand the correct instantiations of “work hard” and “be kind to people”. This leaves them open to being manipulated. I like the idea of selfless shepherds leading a flock of the lowest IQ with pure compassion, but there’s no institution right now that has a track record of doing so reliably. If we can find a way to select for people like that, though, it would be nice. In my dream system we would select the relatively high IQ who cry easily when you show them sad videos or play them sad music, and then you throw them into a twenty-year-long program where they spend all day reasoning and arguing and being emotionally-indoctrinated into Christlikeness, give them a salary for their whole life so that there’s no competing motivations, and then just listen to whatever they say. That’s probably the best bet: IQ, temperament, extreme training since childhood in pragmatic thinking, propaganda / inculcation (to make them love saying what is right even if crucified for it). Can’t imagine a better selection process than that unless we want to throw in lie detectors / EEG.
I think Tristan Harris or Lee Kuan Yew are good contemporary examples of the kinds of guys you’d want to select for in terms of temperament, whereas you’d want to do everything humanly possible to deselect the dangerously charismatic Elizabeth Holmes types. Probably easier to weed out the somewhat more sociopathic in childhood before they learn how to adeptly lie.
You're shooting yourself in the foot if you do that. Sociopathy is an inherent trait of any leader worth following (the ones that aren't sociopaths aren't worthy of leading).
Which is OK (you can't avoid this any more than you, if you are a man, can avoid being physically stronger than women- you just have that rank, and that's fine so long as you carry out the attendant responsibilities of that rank). You just need the guy doing the manipulation to be aligned, or if you know that you are aligned, that you answer your calling to be doing that before a less-aligned intelligence does; you can generally spot other sociopaths against whom "lesser" human beings have no defense.
Personal experience?
But if you let the sociopathic guide the low IQ, he will probably find some self-gratifying avenue by which he can benefit himself. Maybe he opens up a school that doesn’t do anything cost except his pockets and reputation. Maybe his charisma introduces false hopes. Maybe he completely ignores their needs and just maxxes the political donation -> kickback pipeline. Seems to be infinite ways for him to ignore the Important Thing to act selfishly. The evolutionarily-aligned cognition for helping someone is just compassion / pity, but this of course can also go awry if you are inculcated with modern values, hence the need for training, like how a doctor is trained to perform triage.
Maybe there is some niche where they are most useful, like in a “hype man” role or working on a project where the output metrics are impossible to fudge.
Thinking in light of the Cyropedia, the Spartans, savant training generally, and how Krishnamurti was raised by the Theosophical society. I don’t see why we couldn’t train up savants in this way as we do with chess players, piano players, mathematicians, etc. In the same way that politics selects for the Ruthless Ramaswamys of the world, willing to capitalize on a woman’s rape and conspire with his mother to steal money from Alzheimer’s research, we would maximize in the opposite way, selecting for the most ruthful.
You seem to be under the impression that this is not a natural process, and you have control over if it happens or not.
But it is natural, and you are not in control of it. So you best hope you treat them well, lest they remember you.
Why would you think the moral requirements for an idiot and a savant are the same? (Are you a communist?) The system includes both of them, but the moral requirements are not. (Requires prerequisite: 'equality of effort'.)
Every sociopath will eventually be tempted to do what you have described (and indeed, their work will on occasion look like this to some degree); it is their responsibility not to do that (or they suffer one of the worst fates, that being not getting to exercise that ability any more- it's kind of like being locked in, Mr. House style, until they are dead).
And it is incorrect to expect sociopaths to not benefit themselves. That's how they are paid for that unique ability. (See also: US politicians. They're not paid directly, but indirectly through the power to pass policies that will enrich themselves far beyond that measly six-figure salary.)
Their burden is choosing between "right" and "more right", not "wrong" and "right".
That is not the job of the idiot. It is the job of the idiot to contribute, because that is all he can do. Maybe he knows that, maybe he doesn't, but that is irrelevant to what is required of him.
Their burden is simply choosing between "wrong" and "right". It takes just as much effort for them to do the right thing as it takes the sociopath to do the more right thing.
Equality of effort, not equality of outcome. Some people are better than others and thus deserve more than you do, just as Abel was (effortlessly, and in the exact ways you initially described "selecting a sociopath"- he bore a greater offering from natural alignment, Cain brought a lesser sacrifice for personal gain).
Cain, famously, had extreme difficulty accepting this concept. He found the rock easier to grasp.
I’m not following your argument. If you believe that the sociopathic have some invaluable skill, why would you want them tending to the very stupid anyway? Seems menial. And who is an example of someone you think is a sociopath who has done a lot of good which his non-sociopathic peers could not have accomplished?
If you have two different Centers for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too, one run by a sociopath and one run by a relatively reasonable person with sincere love for the pupils, what superseding benefit should we expect from the former? I would expect to see a lot of waste which benefits the owner’s pockets or reputation. Because the sociopathic ultimately cares about his power, success, status, reputation. (I mean it’s a spectrum, everyone loves this stuff, but there are people on either pole). He’ll probably do a lot of worthless assemblies and meetings where he gets to feel powerful, maybe he’ll send flyers to make the town sad about how little they care for the stupid in a bid to bring in private donations, maybe he’ll overstate how much money the school needs so he can pull a bigger salary, maybe he’ll do a whole redesign of the school that doesn’t matter simply because it makes him feel cooler. Or maybe there’s some “test” that gives him a national ranking so he ignores the holistic needs of the pupils to focus on min-maxxing that one metric, so he can be boastful among his peers. What am I missing here?
Do you mean their moral desert claims? Well, a community should increase the wellbeing of its members, as this is the noblest goal worth pursuing, with everything else being vanity. This aspiration makes sense to me: if I can 80/20 my happiness, the rest of my energy should be spent on my neighbor. I mean, not that I do this, but that this is the most noble and desirable governing principle for a community: abounding in joy. My conscience and reason tells me this would be the best.
Do you mean in terms of raw economic productivity? But that’s not an end unto itself. The 60iq should be trained to fulfill the duties appropriate for his iq, and he should be trained in how to pursue a happy life likewise. That might mean putting him in front of media where he will develop a phobia of gambling, alcohol, or drugs. Maybe it means that his financial decisions are double-checked by someone, or a benevolent ai. Maybe his schooling should literally just consist of an RPG in Roblox where he does mastery practice for the kind of tasks he would find in his future employment.
This is not something I believe. Ideally, each person would have the same amount of wellbeing (high), sacrificing his own for another in need; if anyone is to receive an overabundance in wellbeing, it should be for the instrumental purpose of eventually increasing wellbeing in the longrun, like mothers (to raise healthy children), the very innovative (to produce more innovation), perhaps young couples (to produce more children), soldiers, harsh laborers, that kind of thing. I want the 60iq to have the same wellbeing as the 140iq, in the basic needs sense. As far as we are Abel. Why not?
And this is... unique to the sociopath, somehow?
Well, for it to not go out of business, for one. The purpose of a business is to make money, just as the purpose of life is to reproduce. Whether "going out of business in an environment where such a school is marginally or completely unprofitable" is a moral good or not, I leave to you.
You see waste, I see a price paid to stop him from deciding to do literally anything else. Maybe it's a little, maybe it's a lot, depends on how the market is and his other objectives.
In order: 'feeling power' is part of the compensation package, that's called 'an effective marketing strategy' (is it really his fault most people are literally hard-wired to respond to it?), that's called 'negotiating appropriately with government entities' (that either aren't paying attention or don't care), and as for the last one... it's his money, he can do what he wants with it.
I thought that was just called "standardized testing". In this case, the metric does not match reality, and so Goodhart-ing is the rational response. And sure, if you actually care, you're going to focus on the other stuff too [because it is good to focus on those things- when non-sociopaths say "give back to the community", this is what they mean- compare car companies sponsoring racing teams, it's not just "drive up demand for the product", these people sometimes like what they're doing if indeed a sociopath is capable of liking anything], but if push comes to shove and the school is not sufficiently profitable otherwise, then yes, I'd expect maximization on the metric.
You might have heard this one before.
Let's say you have 3 servants. Let's call them A, B, and C.
You have 800 dollars to distribute between them, so that they will invest those dollars and make you more money.
How should you distribute those dollars to maximize your return on investment, including what those employees cost?
If you give servant A X dollars, and he returns with 2X dollars, should he be honored more, less, or the same amount than the servant B, who you gave X-3 dollars, but returns 2*(X-3)?
How about the servant C, who does nothing?
If he justifies not doing anything by claiming the oppression inherent within the system was too much for him to handle (a point on which he is correct), how would you respond?
Your examples are all instrumental: "an overabundance" is seed money. Seed money for someone who isn't going to work as hard is wasted; it should have gone to the man who could have used it.
If you want to be a wellbeing-maximalist we therefore agree that the transfer goes both ways- that's what the "to each according to their need" part means (otherwise you're paying the guy who is more capable than you less just because he is more capable, and it's fundamentally destructive to do this to the guy who is [in a sense] holding your world up lest he exercise his right to display indifference to that task).
The dirty little secret of Marx and Rand is that, assuming all parties [both the "sociopath" who can see things clearly and the others who are less able] are Christ-like, they reach the same conclusion. The requirements for someone barely capable of anything, capable of some, and capable of much to be Christ-like are all different, and when we decide that "no, actually, they're all the same", we have cheated whoever that reflects least.
I think cheating is bad.
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