I'm not convinced a race that is vastly more intelligent at an individual-level than humans is necessarily a consummately more advanced race. It would seem lik

I'm not convinced a race that is vastly more intelligent at an individual-level than humans is necessarily a consummately more advanced race. It would seem like the age of a civilization and the size of its population (i.e. overall "human" capital) could mitigate a relative weakness in individual intelligence. Or perhaps another race's willingness to cooperate in large numbers. Or perhaps the motivation of civilizations to advance (e.g. a civilization that faces many existential threats may advance faster assuming it survives relatively unscathed; or maybe some other intelligent beings would be more inclined or less inclined to pursue civilizational advancement). I wonder if the relationship between societal/technological advancement and individual intelligence is not linear or even logarithmic; rather, it's important to have "enough" intelligence to engage in abstract inductive/deductive reasoning (maybe the ability to do mathematics beyond basic arithmetic), and after that level other factors such as those mentioned above are bigger contributors to civilizational advancement. We humans have far surpassed what a single individual can achieve by breaking problems into smaller and more intellectually manageable parts, which should be particularly evident to those us on HN working on software. It seems possible that the biological (biophysical?) limit for intelligence is far outstripped by the amount of complexity in the universe, making the civilizational utility obtained for marginal gains in individual intelligence rather low (i.e. since heavy abstraction will always be needed, the size of the "abstraction chunks" is just one of many other factors). On the other hand, we on HN are also well-positioned to observe the efficiency lost when systems progress to the point where no single human understands them, so I see the counterargument to my own points as well. It would be fascinating to live in a time where the answer to this question would be knowable, but I don't have my hopes up :)