Staircase Wits
12th September 2023
ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.
Whenever the downward trend in Western intelligence gets discussed, the focus is always on the right side of the curve. America is no longer able to get to the moon because NASA is full of diversity, but it also lacks the smart guys it used to have to solve the necessary problems. In other words, the West is no longer able to make these great leaps because the decline in human capital has reduced the number of geniuses that are always needed to make those leaps.
At the heart of this line of thinking is the assumption that a society can only be successful if it is moving forward toward something and expanding in terms of material prosperity and cultural progress. This may be true, but it is one of those assumptions that has been handed down so many times that no one remembers who made the original claim or why they made it. Why must the economy always expand? Why must humanity expand its domain to the stars?
One reason to ask those questions is to think about the other side of the bell curve that gets neglected in these discussions. What happens to a society when the supply of stupid people increases? The model of societal intelligence is always a smooth normal distribution, so when the number of smart people declines it means the number of stupid people must increase. The curve moves left. What is the impact on society when the curve moves beyond some critical point?