> While there's probably an argument that problem solving is selected for it's not clear to me how far this goes at all. There's little evidence that smarter pe

> While there's probably an argument that problem solving is selected for it's not clear to me how far this goes at all. There's little evidence that smarter people end up in more powerful positions for example. Evolution hasn't had enough time to adapt us to our new fangled lifestyle of last few hundred years, or few thousand for that matter, and anyways in the modern world people are not generally competing on things affecting survival, but rather on cultural factors that affect number of children we have. Humans and most (all?) intelligent animals are generalists, which is why we need a big brain and intelligence - to rapidly adapt to a wide variety of ever changing circumstances. Non-generalists such as herbivores, crocodiles don't need intelligence and therefore don't have it. The main thing that we need to survive & thrive as generalists - and what evolution has evidentially selected for - is ability to predict so that we can plan ahead and utilize past experience. Where will the food be, where will the water be in a drought, etc. I think active reasoning (not just LLM-like prediction/recall) would also play a large role in survival, and presumably parts of our brain have evolved specifically to support that, even if the CEO probably got his job based more on height/looks and golf handicap.