Re: Predators and Prey

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Fri, 27 Dec 1996 15:51:36 +0100 (MET)


On Thu, 26 Dec 1996, The Low Willow wrote:

> What you're missing is the *type* of
> intelligence. Magical knowledge can turn one into a witch or shaman, to
> be burned or respected. People knowledge puts you on top more reliably
> than beating people up.

Good point! Socially intelligent people of course have much better
potential to rise in the pecking order, while other forms of intelligence
doesn't help in this field, except if the owner can apply them for a
status-enhancing activity of some kind.

> } different are mistrusted has been true for all of history, but since when
> } are smart people seen as different? I wonder if this isn't a very recent
>
> Sorcery is rather old, as far as anthropologists can tell. Closer to
> home, smart women were pretty 'different' in Europe for a while.

Actually, the witchhunts were not particularly directed against smart
women despite the popular myth. Their memetic epidemology was surprisingly
similar to the current wave of worry about sexual abuse (not to mention
satanic ritual abuse); the Stockholm witch trials were uncomfortably
similar to some of the hysteria against pedophiles right now. Such
memidemics seem to attack people with weak social connections, i.e people
with less-than-average social intelligence or no strong ties to the
in-groups.

Still, the myth that high semantic intelligence implies low social
intelligence seems rather recent. It is perhaps best represented by the
idea of the absentminded professor or the asocial hacker.

It may be a version of the "you can't be best in everything"-meme: many
people believe you can't be both smart, beautiful and successful at the same
time. This was probably originally a way to console oneself ("money can't
buy happiness") or others, since otherwise the self-image would be hurt
by the fact that one wasn't as good at everything.

A wild guess: the myth about intelligence appeared when we began to move
into an technological society, where most of the people were dependent on
experts (engineers, doctors, scientists) that held valuable knowledge they
didn't possess.

If this hypothesis holds, then we should see a lessening of the belief
"semantic intelligence precludes social intelligence" in areas where the
knowledge is becoming widespread (like in parts of the computer industry)
and an increase in areas where new cadres of experts are developing, as
well as a time-correlation between technologisation and the spread of the
belief in different nations. Any data on this? Perhaps checking popular
literature would be a good idea.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y