@Stigma This is an interesting question. Its worth saying that human intelligence may have peaked towards the end of the last ice age. Farming does not require as much mental power as hunting scarce game. Even in fairly recent times one wonders if we are not as smart as they were a few hundred years ago. Read Hamlet and then ask yourself are you smart enough to really get it all as a piece of evening entertainment (which is all a play is) not as a work of literature with commentary notes?

Certainly brain sizes have been shrinking since the end of the last ice age. Life is so easy for people in cities these days that compliance and agreeability seem to be highly selected for traits.

Of course that may yet all change when the people get thinned and renewed in due course. Who can really say what sort of minds will work best with AI? AI has yet to develop enough to know how auto generative it can be. Nerds who can code may be pointless in future.

Intelligence is a combination of many genetic traits and life experience. It is very important for selection but at the moment we are living in strange times.

Smart people are machiavellian in smart ways and dumb people in dumb ways. Fooling an increasingly vigilant system that uses past data for reference points may change who gets away with it?

@adam-l

therefore it relies on deep, ancestral faculties.

To add technical detail as a starting point for a deeper dive. Primate level cognition and metacognition, on the level that humans consider setting us apart from "lower animals ", is based in the Neocortex, which evolved long after the Old Mammalian and Reptilian brains, both of which still make up the bulk of human braincase content. Dark Triad individuals can perform dumb AF at tasks and skills that run on neocortex circuitry, yet some can greatly outperform their "intellectual " peers at crafty self serving and group dynamic manipulation. It makes me think of the terabytes of Naughty Dog shorts showing how creative canines can be at getting something placed out of their reach, often gaming humans and other dogs with rather detailed multi step schemes requiring forethought and planning. The underlying brain circuitry driving such behaviors evolved EONS before we clever monkies built our neocortex atop it.

It can require a LOT of neocortex processing time, for a trusting intellectual type. To detect when a seemingly dumb person is successfully manipulating them by outperforming at using these older brain circuits.

Lol, autocorrect kept trying to change Neocortex to Neocon. NOOOOOOO!

@Vermillion-Rx

I'm not sure as for the machiavellianism. I don't think a fool is capable of the tactic and foresight for it.

I'm here to warn men: individuals can function very poorly by cognitive measures, yet actually EXTREMELY skilled at manipulating people socially and emotionally. I got tangled up once with a real Lucifers Daughter. Figured initially would make a convenient fuck buddy and easy to discard. Ended with her breaking into my house as I slept, AFTER screwing all the doors and windows shut from the inside, and repeatedly disappearing into thin air when the increasingly skeptical cops arrived. Glorious was the day I finally got my day in court for a restraining order, and she had the poor sense to show up to contest it WITH active arrest warrants. Bottom line: never get complacent assuming low cognition means safe from high Machiavellian function level!!!