[whatshisface]

>A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.

The world is full of societies of 120 IQ individuals. That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers. That's 1 in 10 people. Even 145 is 1 in 1,000. This gene stuff could only begin to surpass what you'd be able to do by holding a conference in an academic field at... 170? 180? For the foreseeable future the kinds of selection that operate on full-grown adults will greatly surpass this other kind which is limited to four or five embryos.

In so many words, more than four or five former embryos are selected between in a typical round of SWE interviews.

[mywittyname]

>A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension

> That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers.

Is this an argument in support of the OP?

Anyway, much like with global warming, the issue isn't so much the averages, but the impact on the extremes. Now the world suddenly has 10x as many 140 people or 100x as many 160s, etc.

This cuts both ways too. A smart person isn't necessarily a nice person. A 20 point IQ increase could make the difference between someone who is a successful telephone scammer, and someone who brings down entire economies.

[taylorius]

>>an insufferable hell beyond comprehension

>That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers

Well, quite... ;-)

[bpodgursky]

Spend a week in a workplace with an average IQ of 80 and get back to me about which feels worse.

[whatshisface]

All of our culture deals with interactions between average people. People with significantly greater or less intelligence than average do not have a bank of ancient answers to ancient questions to draw on. One simple example of that would be norms against debt and lending - if you are very clever they don't apply to you, but that doesn't mean you don't need any norms. In fact someone who borrows and lends needs more guidelines and more complex guidelines if they're going to navigate business risks successfully.

[krageon]

The workplace that feels worse will be the one with an average IQ that is furthest from your IQ :)

[taylorius]

Very true!:-)

[analog31]

>>> That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers.

Or jazz musicians.

[whatshisface]

A society of jazz musicians would look a lot more foreign to us than one of software engineers. ;)

[analog31]

Oddly enough since I'm both a programmer and a jazz musician, I've noticed some interesting parallels. In both cases the practitioners come from all walks of life, and many of them either bailed out of the mainstream education system, or had a negative experience with it. For this reason you have people with music degrees sharing the bandstand with those who learned by doing. I'm halfway between those camps, having taken classical music lessons through high school but learning jazz on my own.