I'm not saying that intelligence is not useful, just that its social costs can help explain why we're not smarter. Of course intelligence seems extremely useful, which is what makes our dumbness puzzling. Is your position that the other known costs of intelligence (more energy use, more difficult births, what else?) are sufficient to explain this?
That and the difficulty of creating intelligence.
To make sure we're not misunderstanding each other, you're says that having higher intelligence is not so bad, because one can either (a) still be dumb in certain areas, or (b) fake being dumb in all areas, right? I'm arguing that (a) is not an equilibrium, and (b) reduces the benefits of intelligence too much.
I argue that (a) can be an equilibrium. We are rather smart in some areas, but the mechanisms in us that allow that are not up to the task of faking being dumb in other areas - we are actually dumb in those other areas. This is/was an equilibrium because people who tried to fake often got caught.
I suggested that people have trouble thinking carefully about economics because evolution make us bad at that on purpose, in order to protect our cherished misconceptions about the social world. There is a distribution of such abilities, and economists tend to be in the high tail of ability. Such people cannot typically hide this ability - others see their willingness to cross sacred moral boundaries and are wary of them. And in fact on average economists are probably less trustworthy partners in various ways. We see this in various experiments comparing economists to others.
Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
