[ExI] Evil genius, further thoughts

[Dan]

Given the comments by Damien and others, I also wonder if what's going on here is not so much evil people leveraging their increased intelligence to do more bad things, but simply better technology and other improvements allowing evil people to do more damage.  Damien's example of "script kiddies with their fun viruses."  I don't think it's so much that these kiddies wouldn't be daft in earlier times, but that their antics would've been a lot less global.  Maybe they'd burn down the barn a few hundred years ago, but they'd be less likely of doing much more than that -- save in rare cases.  (John Law and the Mississippi Bubble comes to mind as an example of how intelligence might go wrong in such a way that it harms lots of people in earlier times.  In Law's case, however, it's debatable whether he was an evil genius, but he definitely appears to have been very intelligent.)

Regards,

Dan