What if the Earth only had “intelligent people”?

In 2000 I worked as enumerator for the Census Bureau which paid $13 and change an hour.

The hiring process was: they had us gather in a room at the local employment center and take a short I.Q. test. They worked down the list from the top when calling people to offer them a job. They called me up one day to offer me a supervisor job that was just $2 an hour more and seemed almost certain to involved paid overtime. I turned it down.

I was called a few days later and offered a normal job which I took.

My supervisor was the the head of security at the local Wegmans supermarket which I found endlessly amusing because I'd been engaged in a cold war with this guy ever since I noticed he was following around a hippie friend of mine who I think today is even more schizotypal than I am.

Every time I went to Wegmans I would look out for this guy and stand in the spots where he liked to stand to surveil the crowd and I would conspicuously follow him around when he'd follow other people around. (I had just burned out of a postdoc in theoretical physics and had a particularly negative view of the world at this time.)

I got along with him great as a supervisor and came to really appreciate him though. And I really appreciated the rest of my coworkers: across a wide range of experiences we were a crew of above-average intelligence people who were open to temporary employment in April of 2000. There was that time a woman in a meeting said she could buy $25 of worth of stickers that would save us 20 hours of time, the supervisor said there was no process to requisition the stickers, I said she could just add another 2 hours to her timecard and they'd be nothing wrong with that and everybody agreed.

It was a lot of fun but we had our share of screw-ups. We had a plan to count homeless people that seemed to make sense and you think it would work but we couldn't find a single one despite that fact that, as a civilian not wearing my enumerator badge, I would talk to people who "lived outside" almost every day.

At Cornell University we had a low response rate from the Uujuma Residential College which was an African American Living Center as compared to other living centers that were packed with Asians on North Campus. We were supposed to show up in person to get people to fill out their forms, but the bursar's office sent us a printout of the roster from their 390 mainframe on fanfold paper with green and white stripes and no field for "race", so I know we undercounted Blacks!

High IQ seems to bring out arrogance in people. They are always smarter and know better than you. They start to believe that since they are tops in one domain they can be the best at everything. It's impossible to be good at everything. Working with one person like this is a pain. Now imagine everyone you work with having the same attitude. The work output will be less than ideal since every one will be an expert at everything. Nothing will get done.

Read about Robert McNamara the secretary of defense during a great part of the Vietnam war. By all accounts he was a genius. Yet, he could not manage the war. He was an outstanding numbers man by any measure. His expertise did not carry to managing a war. He is just one example.

This is an interesting question!

Here is one suggestion that made for a fun read, though people argue over the particulars: https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools...

In that story, it’s not that everyone is intelligent. There is still a Bell curve, meaning that people are mostly average but that smaller percentages are very smart or very dumb. Instead the author describes a world where the average is higher than it is in ours. The average IQ in that world, if we used our tests to measure it, would be about 140. The author then speculates, in a humorous fashion, about the ways that this higher average intelligence has caused the civilization of dath ilan to be different from our own here on Earth.

In particular, he posits that computers would be slower, everyone would already use self–driving electric cars (but they would be limited to underground tunnels, because that makes it much easier to implement self–driving). There are far fewer surface roads, just large arterial roads every mile or so for moving consumer goods and houses around. Obviously it is much simpler to bring your house with you when you move, rather than to try and find a house at your destination that you like and all of your stuff will fit in. Cities look like gardens or forests dotted with houses.

Their political system is in some ways much more complex than our own. One aspect that I liked (although I now realize that this might have been taken from another document, written after this one), was that nobody was allowed to work their way up in politics. It was quite easy to enter politics at a “local” level, but once you had officially done so you couldn’t then run for election as a Legislator, or a President. You could go the other way though.

Apparently Earth is better at the mathematics of macro economics, however. Not because it’s not useful, but because they tended to use brute force instead. Virtually everyone in dath ilan is smart enough to understand price inflation, so they implemented the obvious fix: just have a holiday once a year where everyone lowers their prices. Simple, easy, problem solved. Thus, nobody ever noticed that you could adjust the supply of money instead.

All in all, a fun story.

This happened in history. please check how Soviet Union or current China built, intellectuals trust their new idea is perfect, they should decide how world work. finally, Stalin and Mao did their work.

In Middle Ages, lords let their slaved solider kill each other. I don't whether this fit requires, but actually only smart guy control everything.

p.s., I also recommend you reading China history! in about 2000 years, only intellectuals control political power.

People generate debt: tech debt, culture debt, and resource debt. Even intelligent people need maintainers, cleaners, and clerks.

Everyone wants to have more time for themselves; whichever activities maximize delegation establishes (yet another) hierarchy.

Just recently related:

Executive Function Theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195483 - 2 hours ago (37 comments)

There are plenty of people who are "good at learning, understanding and thinking in a logical way about things; showing this ability" who have no capacity for getting along with other people, care nothing for others wellbeing, lack the basic skills to look after themselves, ... I could go on. It might be hell on earth.

I think it would be probably be similar to how it is now.

My rational for that is that intelligence isn’t the only thing that influences politics and economics and people’s individual perspectives of these things can be shaped by other things that are independent of intelligence such as culture, religion, life experiences etc.

Anyway, that’s just my intuitive answer - I’m not sure if that would be the correct answer. Interesting question though!

There's a theory that it's not so much "intelligence" as "education" that creates at least some of what you're describing.

There was a science fiction book called "Brain Wave," in which some space phenomenon suddenly spontaneously increases the IQ of everything on earth. It's an interesting thought experiment...

Although someone once said that smart people may also be better at rationalizing their bad decisions to themselves. (And there are also people with high IQs but low empathy.)