The post suffers a bit from sloppy ontology.

The argument being made appears to be that improving technical ability at the edges of a graph doesn't help when governance of inter-node processes is still a primary limiting constraint.

Ok. Yes. And it's a very strong position to take.

But that's not the same thing as intelligence not being the bottleneck, because governance is absolutely a manifestation of intelligence. It's just intelligence at a hub node instead of at a leaf node.

Good governance takes intelligence. Recognizing the importance of things takes intelligence. Making existing resources available quickly takes intelligence. And so on. Even when things are constrained by physical processes or financial resources, making things less constrained by those physical processes and financial resources takes intelligence. It's all intelligence. Where our processes are slow and dumb, they are slow and dumb because the people managing those processes were not smart and fast enough in the ways that mattered to make them better.

Tangentially, I find this sloppiness kind of funny in the context of intelligence and bottlenecks, because it's also a bottleneck for communication.

The subject should have been "Intelligence _here_ is not the main bottleneck."

> Good governance takes intelligence.

True, but that doesn't mean intelligence is the bottleneck of good governance. Good governance also requires simple, plain brute force. You have to herd millions of cats, all of which have their own intelligence, and the richest of which are basically giant tigers. At our current level of individual intelligence, we have plenty of simple solutions to many of the problems that plague us, but the reality of the boiling ocean of society is that it tends to crush them faster than they can be built up.

When the problem is the coordination of intelligent agents with disparate interests, increasing everyone's intelligence isn't necessarily going to lead to a solution. Maybe if everyone operates in good faith with a compromising spirit. But if our best solution creates losers, they will fight to the bitter end, in which case we don't need intelligence as much as we need a bigger boot. That's governance.