REALLY BAD ANSWERS, I’LL TRY TO DO BETTER
1) How can the world be ‘significantly better’?
2) If the world would be significantly better, for whom would the world be ‘significantly worse’ in your interpretation of how the world would be ‘significantly better?’
3) Before we took action on our hypothesis of, how would we know the world would in fact, ‘be significantly better?’.
4) Isn’t the most scientific way to make the world significantly better, to experiment with small changes and see if they are successful?
5) The reason the world is not ‘significantly better’ is not for lack of efforts. Aristotle, Aquinas, Smith and Hume, all made the world better by explaining how the real world works.
6) When smart people have tried specifically to make the world ‘significantly better’ by telling us what we SHOULD do, rather than what we DO do, they have caused enormous bloodshed (Marx).
7) Smart people make the world better all the time.
8) There is some truth to the fact that very, very, smart people do not engage in the social sciences (it’s the university discipline with the lowest IQ professors and students.) That is because very abstract problems are more interesting; and it is more interesting to convince other very smart people of the obvious, than it is less smart people of that which is not obvious to them. Secondly, unfortunate as it is, we tend to communicate well in a radius of about 15 points of IQ, and cease to be able to communicate across 30 points of IQ. So it’s the people who are above average, but not exceptional that tend to speak to the majority the best.
9) To make matters worse, morality increases above 100 points of IQ, and decreases rapidly below it. Furthermore, the ability to determine whether someone is attempting to deceive you or not decreases as well. This leads to the Dunning-Kreuger effect: where we become unconsciously incompetent and overestimate our abilities when we have insufficiently mastered a field of inquiry. Whereas people with higher trust, higher intelligence, and more general knowledge, and who learn by abstract problem solving rather than imitation or training, tend to be able to discern deception, verbalism and pseudoscience, from a truth candidate. So what happens is that smart people find that less smart people can’t discern fact from fiction, and treat them skeptically, and so it is just too much effort, time and frustration to try. (Really. I work very, very hard at it, and people say I’m good at it, but frankly I think people just can tell that I’m honest, and so that’s why they listen to me, not because they understand what I say.)
10) The underlying assumption is quite problematic, and only a northern european, a victim of the fallacy of **altruistic punishment** would ask that question. Most of the world does not want to make the world better, but better for them. The difference between warfare and commerce is merely that commerce is mutually constructive. In both cases we are still competing. In fact, given history, I am very concerned about anyone who thinks he or she is smart enough to recommend how the world WOULD be better, because it would require a great deal of violence to change it. I think instead, it is better to state how the world *IS*, in the most scientific terms possible, so that we can make constant improvements to it through incentives. Lots of marxists justified the murder of 100M people and the destruction of eastern european civilization. Lots of others spent the 20th century constructing pseudosciences and deceptions. The cost of which we now bear. As far as I know, science is the only way to make the world better. And even then, it takes a skilled mind to know the difference between science and pseudoscience.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine.
https://www.quora.com/Why-don’t-those-with-high-intelligence-or-those-at-the-top-of-society-end-up-making-the-world-significantly-better