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Will_Newsome comments on Muehlhauser-Goertzel Dialogue, Part 1 - Less Wrong
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That's true and important, but stereotypical worldly intelligent people rarely "grave new values on new tables", and so might be much less intelligent than your Rousseaus and Hammurabis in the sense that they affect the cosmos less overall. Even worldly big shots like Stalin and Genghis rarely establish any significant ideological foothold. The memes use them like empty vessels.
But even so, the omnipresent you-claim-might-makes-right counterarguments remain uncontested. Hard to contest them.
It's hard to tell how relevant this is; there's much discontinuity between chimps and humans and much variance among humans. (Although it's not that important, I'm skeptical of claims about bonobos; there were some premature sensationalist claims and then some counter-claims, and it all seemed annoyingly politicized.)
However, non-worldly intelligent people like Rousseau and Marx frequently give the new values that make people like Robespierre and Stalin possible.
In the public mind Rousseau and Marx and their intellectual progeny are generally seen as cosmically connected/intelligent/progressive, right? Maybe overzealous, but their hearts were in the right place. If so that would support the intelligence=goodness claim. If the Enlightenment is good by the lights of the public, then the uFAI-Antichrist is good by the lights of the public. [Removed section supporting this claim.] And who are we to disagree with the dead, the sheep and the shepherds?
(ETA: Contrarian terminology aside, the claim looks absurd without its supporting arguments... ugh.)
Depends on which subset of the public we're talking about.
I'm confused, is this an appeal to popular opinion?
Of course. "And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him [the beast/dragon]" Revelations 13:8
People in a position to witness the practical results of their philosophy.
Why exactly did you remove that section?
I would say that it is simply the case that many moral systems require intelligence, or are more effective with intelligence. The intelligence doesn't lead to morality per se, but does lead to ability to practically apply the morality. Furthermore, low intelligence usually implies lower tendency to cross-link the beliefs, resulting in less, hmm, morally coherent behaviour.