@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?

@First-light Whats even better is, Labour have already made their grave, they just haven’t moved in yet.

They bled votes to green, meaning to regain their vote they would have to lean left - and polling suggests less than 1% of reform voters would now vote labour so appealing right is futile.

They’ve lost, and continue to lose the support that props up the centre.

That being said, we’re looking at years of hung parliaments and shoddy coalitions that won’t hold water. If FPTP continues, there will be a desert of functional governance coming to the U.K. at the next GE.

To compound this even further, Plaid Cymru swept up, and the SNP fortified I believe too, as well as Sinn Fein in NI. With weaker and weaker governments or none at all in Westminster, the shouting for independence will only become more and more justified.

Well, I’m no Nostradamus but that appears to be the beginning of the UK balkanisation.

…and I didn’t even mention the uplift in Muslim independents voted in this round.

@Stigma

Yes, naturally, intelligence is a product of evolution.

I believe the dimension of machiavellianism is independent of intelligence (re @Vermillion-Rx). It has to do with using other humans, as opposed of using nature. So, if human society is considered something positive, machiavellianism is basically parasitism. It's a strategy.

You can have stupid machiavellians. You see them everywhere. They try this and that small con. They eventually end up playing only with other stupids, because a smart guy figures them out.

Something I, and others, have been pondering, is the natural limit to intelligence. There's this unsolvable problem, death, for which there isn't a solution. We basically deal with it deceiving ourselves in a way or another. A bit too intelligent, and you might lose that capability, making you insane. The mad genius archetype, the bright kid who ends up with schizophrenia, etc.

And something that I have been pondering, is another problem of the same magnitude as death: realizing that your mother is not protective, but is taking advantage of you. The devouring mother is probably another route through which bright kids end up mentally unstable.