[ExI] article highly recommended

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 12:58 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>  Intellectual ranks are always going to be apparent to just about
> everyone.


Yes because its obvious that some people are smarter than others, however
intellectual rank does not correlate very well with social rank. Honey Boo
Boo and Paris Hilton outrank most Nobel Prize winners and all Field Medal
winners in the social hierarchy; there are no paparazzi camped out in front
of a mathematician's house regardless of how smart he is.

> My question is: are the two correlated?  Social and intellectual?


Generally I don't think so, at least not directly. Social rank is
correlated with power and power is correlated with wealth, but intelligence
is not strongly correlated with either. The wealth gap between today's CEO
and the average worker in one of his factories is not 10 times what it was
in 1978 because he's 10 times smarter than the CEO back then, its because
the skills of the average worker are 10 times more common and thus less
valued do to advances in technology. And this is just the start, its only a
matter of time before machines are better at doing every job than any
human, and that includes the job of being a CEO. Well before we reach that
point the traditional libertarian repugnance of anything with even the
slightest aroma of socialism will have to be modified because people get
very angry and do stupid dangerous things when they lose their job if there
is no economic safety net to fall back on.

 John K Clark
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