In the end, it's a bit like playing roulette. A small edge and many bets will make you rich.
> I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.
It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb. Better brains means better weapons, which means conquering and annihilating stupider tribes. It's the history of Mankind.
Charisma helps uniting tribes. But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.
Yeah, but I don't think intelligent people are better at predicting things (weighted by impact). Again, look at the current US president; or at stock traders.
> It was not charisma that cracked Enigma and built the A-bomb.
No, but arguably neither would have been done when they were done if it weren't for a war that started largely due to charisma.
> But united tribes of many hunter-gatherers can be slaughtered by a handful of machine guns produced by boring industrialized societies.
But it's not high relative intelligence that brought us industrialization. Those same people who were later industrialized had had hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering.
How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? All humans are pretty bad at flying, yet airplanes are pretty useful. All of technology is spending on the respective meaning of "educating morons." Military R&D is a great example. A weakling with a gun can easily beat a strong sword-wielding knight. In fact, the difference between a strong fighter with a sword and a weakling with a sword is pretty much erased by guns.
> Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck?
I meant Hitler. Napoleon was a different story, but WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism.
> you outed yourself as a non-European
Well, I'm Jewish.
> You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits.
Traits? Have we already established that natural selection in the past ~10000 years since the agricultural revolution has had any significant impact in shaping human society? (To be clear, that was a rhetorical question; no, we have not established that).
By the way, my great grandparents weren't elites so much as they were poor tradesmen, except maybe in the addled minds of the followers of ignorant "great men," armed with a romantic ideology of an imagined past and pseudo-science -- and, of course, guns -- who brutally murdered them. Apparently, my great-grandparent's "superior Ashkenazi cognition" wasn't enough to ensure their survival -- maybe because of some other "weaknesses associated with their race," but I think that the more plausible explanation is that it was because of racism, a force that seems to trump intelligence time and again.
I'm not so sure. There is a core problem here, and that is that intelligence is not all that it's made up to be. It takes no more than a glance at the current American president to see that. That intelligence (by which I mean relative intelligence) is some ultimate power is, itself, a myth perpetuated by people who consider themselves particularly intelligent. You'd hear similar things about beauty from beautiful people. Clearly, many great works were done by people who were not amazingly intelligent, and people who were amazingly intelligent have done some amazingly stupid things. Personally, I think charisma is far more important. I see no inherent reason why any discoveries regarding intelligence would have bigger consequences than discoveries about charisma.