Comment on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:07:59 GMT

My rebuttal to

imagine how much saner the political process would look

is to point at the work of Tullock and Buchanon on Public Choice theory. Basically, the take away is that politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives. If the voting public were smarter, politicians' behavior would be different during elections, and the politicians would try to make their behavior in office look different. But they would still have an incentive to look like they were addressing problems rather than an incentive to actually solve them. It's much harder than 10 IQ points to align those outcomes.

And bureaucrats and middle managers in government would still face the same incentives about obfuscating results, multiplying staffing and budgets, and ensuring that projects and bureaucracies have staying power.

Discuss