"The secret to success is being smart enough to play the game well but not so smart you figure the game out." I've heard many variations on that saying. The mo

"The secret to success is being smart enough to play the game well but not so smart you figure the game out." I've heard many variations on that saying. The most popular contexts I've heard it with are Wall St. and the financial industry and politics. People like the Wolf of Wall St., Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, etc. would be people who were just smart enough but not too smart. People who are too smart make their money and leave or don't play at all. Stuff like this makes me wonder if it applies at the evolutionary scale. Add it to your queue of potential Fermi paradox answers. Maybe there aren't any super-intelligent aliens visiting other stars because super-intelligent aliens realize evolution is a meat grinder and opt out. Personally I don't buy it. For a long time I've incubated what I call the "uncanny valley hypothesis" about this kind of nihilism. The idea is that between the standard issue human intellect guided by myth (religion, political myth, etc.) and something beyond there is an uncanny valley of nihilism. This would also be called a fitness valley in evolutionary and learning theory terms. Local maxima in fitness landscapes are very often separated by valleys that must be crossed. Things have to get worse before they can reach the other peak. Secularism repeatedly fails at the civilizational scale because it gets stuck in this valley. Societies try abandoning religion but find themselves denuded of "why" and "ought," eventually retreating back to mythology as a virtual motivator. What's beyond the uncanny valley? Perhaps something rational, logical, realistic, and with the positive motivation of an ecstatic religious guru. It would be a motivation rooted in some kind of understanding that eludes us, not in raw myth, though I suspect our myths contain little seeds of that understanding here and there. There have been notions like "extropianism" in the fringe sci-fi space that have attempted to construct such a thing, but they always devolve into woo woo fluff or culty stuff. Makes me think this fitness valley is tougher and deeper than merely recasting myth in terms of science. There is either a missing fundamental understanding or a missing cognitive ability. There's something we don't have that religious and other myths sort of act as brain hacks to lend us or simulate. I also think Nietzsche saw this but I think he was wrong about how to overcome it. It's not a matter of mere will. Will without "why" and "ought" devolves into robotic non-sentience or psychopathy. Edit: going back to the Fermi paradox I suppose this fitness valley could be one of the "great filters."