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ChrisHibbert comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong
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It's highly non-obvious that it would have significant effects. Political process is imperfect but very pragmatic - what makes a lot of sense as there's only as much good an improved political process can do, and breaking it can cause horrible suffering. So current approach of gradual tweaks is a very safe alternative, even if it offends people's idealistic sensibilities.
My rebuttal to
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.
Public choice theory is important, but I still think there is good reason to believe increasing average IQ by such a huge amount would help. First, because better informed voters improves the incentives for politicians. Second, because the relatively bad incentives politicians face is not the only constraint on better goverment.