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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

That's easy: brains so smart that it eliminates all natural enemies causing an exponential population explosion. But not smart enough to overcome the challenges such an explosion must overcome

It's easy because it's exactly where we are now. Strip mining natural resources, runaway climate- and ecological change. And no way to solve it.

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Wasn't it a reference to a correlation between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence ?

Not intentional. But thanks for pointing to it. Gives me a lot of new reading material!

Fertility and intelligence is only half of the picture. (an important piece, though) What about intelligence and life expectancy of the individual and of children? Also, what about other types of intelligence? IQ, EQ, etc? While very complicated, a multigenerational sampling with more information is really required. There is so much more to this picture, than a negative fertility correlation.

There is only one intelligence, only one factor that can reliably predict future life outcome. It's what we meant by IQ. All the other BS is just a politically correct invention to avoid inconvenient facts. If high IQ individuals are becoming more and more rare as generations pass, the world of the future will not be a very pleasant, nor at least functional, place to live. Internet, sewage, rockets... these are not things created by "high EQ individuals".

It doesn't seem like it.

First, let's say you have two brains, one has IQ 160, the other has IQ 60. They are the same volume, neither suffers any brain damage. What is the IQ 60 brain doing?

Honestly, it seems like the Flynn effect has been a disaster upon the human race, when you look a bit better into history. People did live happier lives. All the supposed horrors seem to be a myth. There was more peace, love, honesty and goodness. Maybe they did know better.

In fact, we’ve got brains so smart they lead to wealthy societies with flat to decreasing populations. Just need to get past the hump.

I truly hope we will. But the more I learn about it, the more I get convinced "we" (human civilization) won't make it through.

It doesn't seem like "a hump" but more like a fundamental law of nature: exponential growth will collapse. And do so violently and with chaos.

I'm not talking about "the next 25 years" but more hundreds of years. Though even the timeline makes me anxious lately. I might see parts of civilization collapse due to exponential growth hitting a roof.

But I was also told by the smartest people that population declines across the world are the actual real threat. What should I believe?

A threat to what?

Because it certainly is a threat to economic growth. And also a threat to "national" safety if you decline, but your neighbor grows.

But it's undeniable that, on global, and millennial scale, exponential growth is unsustainable.

The neighbor thing doesn't seem like a large threat any longer, especially with WMDs (otherwise Russia would be sweating having China as its neighbor in Siberia, but it doesn't seem like a large threat due to Russia being able to defend its territory)

The thing about MAD is that the button only needs to be pushed once. We're on a tight rope until we aren't.

In an exponential growth environment, every group that does not participate in exploding, loses sooner to any group that does (modulo chance).

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