Maybe smart people are the problem

[Sixup]

So I was thinking about how some people claim the Earth is overpopulated, so having kids is morally wrong.

I don't necessarily think the Earth is overpopulated, but for this thought I'll assume it actually is.

I then thought, well humans are most likely going to be here for a while, and those people are going to have kids, so you, being a smart-ish person (because dumb people wouldn't even think about this), need to have kids to counteract all the dumb in the world. So those smart kids can solve the future problems and make the world a better place.

But then I thought... Well wait a minute. Maybe it's actually the smart people who have caused the problems. Smart people created the cars which cause the pollution. Smart people created the bombs, the weapons, the drugs, etc. Smart people are creating all these things that are supposed to solve problems and only creates more problems for smart people to come along and solve, and then create more problems in loop until we either implode and reach extinction, or succeed and reach immortality.

So maybe smart people are the problem. Might humanity have been better off in the long term without innovation that ultimately causes more problems? Just a bunch of dumb, but happy people eating, fucking, and dying. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

 

[DrGregoryHouse]

I agree. Yet if 'unconscious' and/or evil would be permited to qualify your thought would it still make sense. I.e. perhaps 'enlightened' and 'benevolent' smart people are actually the solution?

Perhaps the position that unconscious and/or evil smart people are the root of all these problems youve cited is more correct?

 

[Sir Eus Lee]

Smart people create these things to help others, but the dumb people are the ones misusing it. If everybody was smart, then not only do we have innovation, but proper use of it.

The key is not to have only have dumb people, or have both smart and people, but to only have smart people.

 

[crippli]

There are no problems. Humans do what they are programmed to do.

 

[nanook]

by your math, we have been too 'smart' for this earth, ever since we stopped being monkeys of sorts, because our violent exploitation of the environment is very old, older as slavery, at least as old as our ability to partially digest animal products. destruction and violence used to be less effective, but it was just a matter of time until we would exhaust the resources. today you can hardly find a single person in a western society, among the working population, who is too stupid to fuck shit up.

but if you feel that smart people create nothing but problems, it might be a good occasion to over-think our definition of smart.

 

[DrGregoryHouse]

Smart people create these things to help others, but the dumb people are the ones misusing it. If everybody was smart, then not only do we have innovation, but proper use of it.

The key is not to have only have dumb people, or have both smart and people, but to only have smart people.

... it might be a good occasion to over-think our definition of smart.

Yes.

Semantics.

In my mind the dumb smart people ruining things are short term thinkers. This would be included in the concept of 'unconscious' and/or 'evil'.

I.E. Smart people are not necessarily the problem. Unconscious and/or evil and/or short term thinking smart people are the root of all the big, insurmountable problems.

 

[peoplesuck]

according to this study and a few others, its the dumb people causing the problem

Spoiler

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/women-high-iqs-moms-study-article-1.1421592

 

[onesteptwostep]

If you're into this line of thinking here is a site which you can partake membership in:

http://www.vhemt.org/

And on a more serious note, on the topic of overpopulation, Hans Rosling is a good person to listen to. There's this particular tedtalk of him saying that overpopulation will be curved (because most developed nations reach a population plateau while developing countries seem to go towards that trend), but I can't seem to find it atm.

 

[nanook]

we used to be integrated into the world, but not by free will, like angels, only by higher force: we were the slaves of circumstance.

then we became independet from many circumstances. we became independent from fruit trees, by partially thriving on starch and independent from temperature, by barely surviving on animal corpses.

[today you can buy bananas in winter, so zap out of it, you bloody savage.]

power and 'smartness', as our ego likes to define it, are only consequences of physical independence, or phenomenological separation.

i strategize independently, therefore I am/ego exists.

long term planning does not guarantee integration with the environment, because nobody lives long enough to suffer all consequences of his actions.

it's planing for and with others:

we have to learn to understand the 'strategies'/functionality/nature of everyone and everything around us, to become integrated with our environment, this time not by force, but by choice.

it will take some more evolution of intelligence to save us from our ignorance.


if you were to make plans for the next generation, the evolution of the next generation would either be crippled by the shortcomings of your old fashioned design choices, or it would simply abandon your plans.

so either you can't plan properly for the distant future or you can't plan at all.

it would probably not be too much of a mistake to not destroy nature. unless our survival requires a complete transformation of nature and we will have to learn how to mess with it by necessity. destroying your toys helped you to understand how they work. so will destroying earth.

also the avoidance of outcomes we might come to regret later is a horribly abstract goal to consider within all strategies that we pursue. usually our best strategies are expressions of our desires, not of our fears. if we are afraid of something, we will just shoot at it, run, look the other way.

it's just how we are. blaming us for our mistakes doesn't improve anything. we have to continue to be inventive.

 

[Vrecknidj]

More education leads to higher income.
Higher income leads to greater consumption.
Greater consumption leads to greater waste.
Greater waste is bad.
Therefore more education is bad.

 

[Hadoblado]

Overpopulation is a relative term, denoting that the number of people in an area is unsustainable. We are only able to sustain current numbers due to the innovations of smart people. Without them, overpopulation would have happened even earlier (though there would be far less people existent today). It's a drastic oversimplification (assuming growth rates would be parallel despite hypothetical stupid person world lacking our prosperity), but you get the point. Overpopulation is a function of a population's growth and the resources they consume. Increasing the number and efficiency of resources will increase the population over time, but also increases the overpopulation ceiling by a presumably proportionate amount.

 

[RaBind]

No, no, problems exist regardless of the existence of smart people. The existence of smart people allows people to perceive problems that were already there lying in wait to be discovered.

Most people can see the huge missing gaps in human knowledge as big problems, but it is smart people that come along and unveil these huge gaps as the sum of the countless complex and specific problems, which themselves are likely to be pandora's boxes ad infinitum.

Unit knowledge reaches the tipping point of 50%, new discoveries will always be more likely to branches out, spreading into new areas, rather then converge together, with other preexisting knowledge as parts of the same system.

 

[Haim]

Nope,smart people just do it a lot more effectively,as they are more effective human being.
Anyway I think "I don't want kids,the earth is overpopulated" is just an excuse for other reasons to not have kids.
There is "overpopulation" because it is possibly,and if it is possibly is it really overpopulation?otherwise people will just die.People tend to gather up in main areas(big city),there are a lot of places with small population.With true overpopulation you see countries fighting for resources because they must.

 

[Grayman]

More education leads to higher income.
Higher income leads to greater consumption.
Greater consumption leads to greater waste.
Greater waste is bad.
Therefore more education is bad.

Education only give you more money in something useful as seen by the wage payers standards. By converting evveryone to INTP's and teachers they will be educated while not making too much more than the average joe if not even less.

 

[ygnextend]

So I was thinking about how some people claim the Earth is overpopulated, so having kids is morally wrong.

I don't necessarily think the Earth is overpopulated, but for this thought I'll assume it actually is.

I then thought, well humans are most likely going to be here for a while, and those people are going to have kids, so you, being a smart-ish person (because dumb people wouldn't even think about this), need to have kids to counteract all the dumb in the world. So those smart kids can solve the future problems and make the world a better place.

But then I thought... Well wait a minute. Maybe it's actually the smart people who have caused the problems. Smart people created the cars which cause the pollution. Smart people created the bombs, the weapons, the drugs, etc. Smart people are creating all these things that are supposed to solve problems and only creates more problems for smart people to come along and solve, and then create more problems in loop until we either implode and reach extinction, or succeed and reach immortality.

So maybe smart people are the problem. Might humanity have been better off in the long term without innovation that ultimately causes more problems? Just a bunch of dumb, but happy people eating, fucking, and dying. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

You are half right. The smart people will always be innovative because they are data/results driven. And the more information the 'masses'give to them the more the masses ideology will be sold right back to them. The downside is the smart people will assume that the masses don't need teaching of the way things work because if they didn't need these 'things' they wouldn't consume them.

Smart people (for whati have experienced) don't feel the need to really teach the masses how things work because they assume that they will catch on,become aware : not so sheepish. Smart people more so hope that the masses see the light intuitively. They don't have the energy to hold their hands.

 

[StevenM]

Frig, I've been trying to untangle this length of yarn for who knows how long. The yarn doesn't have any ends as the knotted mess is contained in a continuous loop. I would no sooner loosen a tangle when another would form somewhere else. Sometimes, I'd swear there is even more knots now than when I first started.

 

[DakotaAllen]

I think it's wrong to say that dumb people can't even think about the overpopulation of Earth. They would definitely think about it if the were all bumping each other shoulder to shoulder lol. I don't think the absence of a group whether smart or dumb has to do with the amount of good or evil in the world. I've seen both good and evil dumb people and good and evil smart people. If you want to use extremely simplistic labels that is. Anyways maybe it's the fact that smart people have the insight to create complex systems that affect a lot of people, let's say the Atom Bomb? But they also created a lot of good things like medicine for instance. Would a world of dumb people be any better or have less of an impact on a widespread scale? Well in a dumb world you could have a dictatorship and the common man would just make clay and build huts all day as slaves so I would no. Plus if it was a dictator who had nice qualitys it would be easy to get overpopulated that way lol so the question is kind of flawed.