I disagree, but it's probably a matter of definitions. I don't want to play with words, so I will concede that cognitive ability is independent from moral reasoning (which is socially enforced). However, this is not what I'm getting at. Cognitive ability ("intelligence") is correlated with optionality and power. Your ability to change this reality is correlated with your cognitive ability.

If you truly are an intelligent person, would you really find no other ways to use your talents than to inflict harm, exploit others, and make our shared reality a worse place? That would be a waste. I won't get into ambiguous cases and moral relativism. Say we can all agree that some things are "evil": child exploitation is evil. Throwing molotov cocktails at a civilian's house is evil. Sending bombs in the mail is evil.

Now what would you call someone who engages in these kind of activities when they could easily do something better and more satisfying with their lives? I'd say they're pretty stupid. They're probably good at fooling other people into thinking they're smart, but their behavior shows otherwise.

Take for example Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist who is worshipped like a saint and a prophet in certain ideological spheres. Ted Kaczynski is supposedly this 140IQ genius who saw it all coming and tried to warn us. But if you actually read Industrial Society and Its Future, you can see it's complete incoherent garbage, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was 12 to troll on internet forums. Ted Kaczynski is what a stupid person thinks a smart person looks like.

A smart person doesn't need to be evil, just like a billionaire doesn't need to go shoplifting. I'm not saying that stupid people can't be dangerous. But they should be dealt with for what they are: stupid people, inferior to us, worthy of pity. Not powerful monsters above us that we should fear.

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phpnode 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is overly simplistic. e.g. Hans Reiser is clearly a pretty smart guy, but how else would you describe his actions, other than evil?

	▲	glerk 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Hans Reiser is clearly a pretty smart guy No idea who this guy is, I'm just reading his Wikipedia page. Looks like he created some file system, good! But it also looks like he got a mail-order bride (suspicious...), was an abusive husband (not good), was not able to get over his divorce (uh-oh), harassed and ultimately murdered his ex-wife (definitely not good!), and ultimately landed in prison. I think Hans Reiser is some sort of idiot savant or well trained monkey. Probably very good at computer science and building file systems, but his general intelligence seems overall very low, which is proven by his performance at the game of life. I wouldn't personally be afraid of Hans Reiser and I'm sure he could be mentally broken very easily.

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scudsworth 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

lol, lot of words for a No True Scotsman. clearly there are intelligent and evil people in the world, however you refuse to engage with a basic question like this

	▲	glerk an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> clearly Gonna call Hitchen’s razor on that since we’re playing logical fallacies bingo.