https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics > If we compare the smartest people in the world now like Terence Tao to the smarte

https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics > If we compare the smartest people in the world now like Terence Tao to the smartest people of more than half a century ago like John von Neumann, there seems to be little difference. Eliezer Yudkowsky expands the thought out in his essay “Algernon’s Law”, stating it as: >> Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage. ... > COSTS Intelligence is an almost unalloyed good when we look at correlations in the real-world for income, longevity, happiness, contributions to science or medicine, criminality, favoring of free speech etc18. Why is it, then, that we can find quotes like “the rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then”19 or “In effect, all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with”20? Why does so much psychological research, especially heuristics & biases, seem to boil down to a dichotomy of a slow accurate way of thinking and a fast less-accurate way of thinking (“system I” vs “system II” being just one of the innumerable pairs coined by researchers21)? Because thinking is expensive and slow, and while it may be an unalloyed good, it is subject to diminishing returns like anything else (if it is profitable at all in a particular niche: no bacteria needs sophisticated cognitive skills, nor most mammals) and other things become more valuable. Just another tradeoff.