A hermaphrodic species could still need intelligence to outwit other members of the species.
It could. But do you agree that parthenogenesis is a very unlikely reproductive method for a HLI? (I've gotten tired of writing human-level intelligence.)
You made no mention of math earlier. Is there math you think you have to support your position? If so, yes, you are correct that there are game theoretic models that predict certain classes of behavior being more likely.
I thought it was obvious, and have paid for that mistake with karma.
In particular, one expects males to spend more resources engaging in showy demonstrations of fitness. And in fact in many species one does see this (peacocks are of course the most famous example). But in most human societies, females spend as much or more resources than males looking nice.
Let's take a step back here. Do you really believe that women spend more time and effort demonstrating their fitness than men do? Or are you trying to prove me wrong?
I think it obvious that men compete more than women do, that their competitions are riskier, and that human displays of fitness are status-based, and thus only partially visual (and then typically have more to do with posture than ornamentation). Indeed, the primary explanation for peacock tails appears to be the handicap they impose, not that they're visually stunning (although some argue that the eyes on the tails might hypnotize females). I'm confused why I even have to point that out. I agree that women also compete for men, and one of the primary ways they do that is looking nice. But male and female psychology line up with what you would expect from females investing more into children than males, and differences in family structures between regions match what you would expect from the environment.
Jewelry is generally much more common among human females than human males. This is strongly not what one would expect.
Men are more visual, because the health of a mother is important and primarily communicated through appearance; the primary long-term value of a man to a woman is his ability to provide material and social comfort. Thus, one would expect men to provide women with expensive and pretty tokens of affection.
You don't think that ability wouldn't drastically alter perception of self, and many other behavioral attitudes?
It might, but I don't know how much it would. I would look at split-brain patients and extrapolate from there- so there would probably be some oddness, but nothing fundamentally different.
And when one realizes that corvids lay eggs rather than giving live birth, how many issues related to that go away?
What issues related to live birth are you talking about? (For example, development time in womb compared to out of womb appears to be related to the limits that vaginal size puts on head size- I don't know if that favors live birth or eggs, but might be a limiting factor for eggs.)
how many of the things on that list would simply not be important to them just because they live underwater?
Is an underwater species likely to reach HLI before an abovewater species? My understanding is the metabolic demands of intelligence are high, and that appears to favor abovewater species. (Note that our planet, at 70-30 water-land, would seem to favor the species that had access to more of the surface area, suggesting that something else puts land ahead of water.)
And then there's all the stuff on the list that is simply a product of humans being overactive pattern seekers (e.g. luck, magic, faith healing...) or having poor introspection ability (soul-concept), etc.
But, how can you have an intelligence without pattern-seeking? Why would good introspection ability survive Machiavellian evolution?
It could. But do you agree that parthenogenesis is a very unlikely reproductive method for a HLI?
How unlikely is very unlikely? I'd agree that our evidence does suggest that I'd expect it to be less common than conventionally reproducing species. But that's not the point. Parthenogenesis is but one example of many different features which show up in fairly smart species on Earth. I only need to change a few to drastically alter what one would expect.
...Let's take a step back here. Do you really believe that women spend more time and effort demonstrating
One of the most important points raised by the sequences is that not all minds are like humans. In quite a few places, people have discussed minds with slight changes from human minds, which seem altogether different. However, a lot of this discussion has been related to AI, as opposed to minds created by evolution. I'm trying to think of ways that minds which evolved, and are effective enough to start a civilization, could differ from humans'.
Three Worlds Collide would seem like an excellent starting point, but isn't actually very useful. As far as I recall, the Babyeaters might have learned their baby eating habits as a result of societal pressure. The main difference in their society seemed to be the assumption that people who disagreed with you were simply mistaken: this contrasts to humans' tendency to form rival groups, and assume everyone in the rival groups is evil. The Super-Happies had self modified, and so don't provide an example of an evolved mind.
So here are my ideas so far.