Imagine monarchs and elites in the 1200s picturing what would happen if the commoners were educated and able to pursue intellectual pursuits en masse.

They'd have similar arguments. And I mean, they wouldn't be wrong: we're wasteful; we duplicate effort; things are scattershot and disorganized.

But we live in an amazing world of progress, creative expression, and wealth, too.

Imagine taking another small step in the direction towards developing and exploiting human talent and allowing for self-actualization.

Oh I don't disagree that we should allow as many humans as possible to do self-actualize. It is clearly the right thing to do just from a moral standpoint. I just think that most of the people who fully "self-actualize to their full potential" as, say, a lobbyist or a conspiracy theorist podcaster would not be of as much benefit to the world as some of the enlightenment era scientists.

That was what I was getting at in my previous post: having everyone at peak potential is great when everyone is aligned. If there is internal strife, peak potential just means bigger conflicts. Taken to the extreme, that means bigger wars and billions of dead people. Until we can figure out the coordination problem, human limitations are not the biggest problem IMO.

Yah-- I get you.

My counterpoint is that even without people being aligned, we're far outperforming the past and what people hundreds of years ago thought we might do with increased privilege. Indeed, we even have less strife overall, even if we have many more axes of disagreement and fewer shared values.