Indeed. Humans and not other apes reached the moon by our great proclivity to long distance running, through our exceptional sweat glands... ah, wait.

How is it possible to live in the world around us and not see, apparent and transparent, that intelligence is the lever on which everything rests? Humans are surprisingly weird animals, but it's not our hairlessness or our fairly average propensity to violence that did this. We don't have more houses than chimpanzees because we're _strong_. We haven't defeated the tolls of disease because we're atypically devoid of restraint. We don't have more effective governance than termites because we're more communal.

Of course intelligence is the main bottleneck. The arguments here are so confused. What do you think regulation is made of? What do you think money buys? What do you think determines how well you can gather data, or how efficiently you can consume it? But of course, as the genre, after spending the first third waxing about how its opposition could be so foolish, the last third is spent finding a pretty insult and wallowing in it, so as to not to leave enough space for the brief argument in the middle to consider such things as why someone might disagree.

It's very clear that we have plenty of intelligence but we are not acting in it. What intelligence are we missing that is needed to solve climate change? (our most pressing problem - which AI is exacerbating)

> We don't have more houses than chimpanzees because we're _strong_.

You're literally making the point that we already have intelligence. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be an argument for a shortage. To revise: The point you are arguing against is not that intelligence is not important but that it's not the bottleneck.

The perfectly rational actor myth in economics will have Mary doing all sorts of things she doesn’t actually do. Mary just really likes peaches and the whole construct of rational actors is a fictional superstructure. Same with this idea of intelligence levering all our behavior.

Maybe Mary keeps intelligently finding new ways to find scarce peaches, but her ultimate benefit is eating the peach. It’s that human desire if anything.

How much more intelligence will it take to get people to be ok with data center construction? How much more intelligence will be needed to reduce overuse of antibiotics? How much more intelligence is necessary to enable free trade with Canada?

As far as I know humans with the same sort of brains as your brain and my brain have existed for 100,000's of years, perhaps as long as 2 million years.

They did not go to the moon. They did not make mechanisms, they did not make pottery, they did not smelt iron, they did not press shapes onto clay and leave it in houses that burned down, they did not have houses.

All of that has come in the last 12,000 years. I think that there are people in the Amazon today who could not write or read a word, could not drive a car or solve an equation or argue a case or compose an algorithm who are as intelligent as me, or you, or more. I think that people like that have existed for more than a million years.

So if they were so smart, why didn't they go to the moon?

Seems intelligence is actually a bit antithetical to the idea of a stable society. Look at the rate of change of our species. Within our own lifetimes there is so much change that it eventually exceeds our abilities to property mental model this change by the time we are elderly.

Meanwhile, consider the termite. Their society has been stable for millions of years and they've colonized the earth. Intelligence is not needed for that.

I love when tech bros think they can make up a new groundbreaking theory about a topic, in this case economics, they demonstrate zero knowledge in. You're definitely projecting on the confusion point