Should countries be ran by smart people?

People should be able to decide their own fate and the fate we want is dictatorship of the incestariat (yes I represent all people, everyone claiming I dont is not)

@Commit_Crime do you think this meme is accurate? I've made this meme some time ago.

People should be able to decide their own fate, so yes they should be able to elect an idiot if that's what they want.

I think we should elect them by their optimal features.


Edit: (on the serious note) I noticed that the White House head representative has a replacement, and she is a straight white woman/mother and decent-looking, an unusual turn.

@Commit_Crime, you visiting your sister or taking a break from her?

@Exhumatika
Not answering that directly
I really need to work but unfortunately the apartment I am in rn doesnt have internet so I am here with my 2 gbs of mobile data posting emojis on MAL because everything else would use up all my internets.

What about cafeterias? They usually have internet, although it's not very safe to use public internet.

@Exhumatika
Im gonna get internet tomorrow if everything goes alright. I dont like cafes for internet because I always guilt trip myself into buying something every hour when Im staying there for long. I avoid them ever since I have spent more money on coffee in Montenegro than on everything else combined

Trade off of setting the threshold too high is that you'd be taking high intelligence people from other roles where they'd likely be more productive. :p But fair point.

I'd say IQ tests are a pretty good but not perfect indicator. And as such if they are used as part of a criteria, we'd expect on average more intelligent people in office by whatever metric we take to be the even better metric that we don't have access to.

Also I don't believe we wouldn't become not a democracy by doing this. We'd just be a less pure one. But sometimes that's perfectly fine to do. There's many restraints on pure democracy, like the U.S. bill of rights.

Not really central, but is this really the case that it's been independently confirmed? What I'm finding is that he had an ABC 20/20 appearance where he was subjected to testing, and it was said he performed so well they couldn't measure it, but that previously it was measured to be 195. Which means we'd have to trace the claim that he has the highest IQ to a different source.

Anyway, I'd go for what we should expect on the averages rather than look at any particular person. There are other factors that are important besides intelligence, but you couldn't quantify these qualities as well. If we took for instance standard psychological personality tests, personality tests are much easier to game, as they are self reported.

@Freshell IQ testing is on a gaussian distribution. You cannot accurately test his IQ because we do not have a big enough population. A standard deviation is 15, so for a population of 7.8 billion people you cannot reliably go above 160+ without guessing (And alternatively you cannot go 4 standard deviations either).

A score of above that translates to "He would score higher than this number of people if those people existed". I see no reason to question his IQ, because there are countless example of smart men and women being stupid because they were too arrogant or petty. More than that, I want to criticize the heart of this idea. Keep in mind I am a very left-leaning person, but in the last few weeks I have seen many who voted for Kamala Harris try to make excuses such as "Trump voters are bigots", and yes, I do agree many of them are bigots.

At the same time, this excuse of "I lost by being a better and kinder and smarter person", be it in this election or the next, is just cope. Sure, we can bitch about how our candidate should have won, but this serves to only make us feel better. The problem is not IQ, and probably far from it. The problem is selfishness, short-sightedness, etc. Everyone has those in spades.

I don't think IQ would go so far as to adequately address this. At all. We'd just elect smarter assholes. The problem is that we are electing assholes and that we are raising kids to be assholes. I do agree with age and cognitive decline measures, though, but a person is so much more than their "IQ score" that it is basically irrelevant outside of highly fringe cases.

Voters and candidates should have sufficient accountability, so people like kids and demented elders should be kept out of the game.

@Zarutaku

Right, so voters should have restrictions on their candidates to hold them accountable from voting in demented elders, but not a moron? Why?

As far as I can see, you have 2 outs:

1) You trust people enough not to vote in morons, but don't trust them enough not to vote in 80 year olds.

This seems unsubstantiated to me that they're meaningfully more reliable in avoiding former.

2) You respect their will to have a moronic president, but not their will to have an 80 year old prssident.

Again, you fail to lay out the symmetry breaker. The reason why a sufficiently old prssident would be bad is because they could be cognitively compromised (they may also not, very lucid 80 year olds out there). The reason why a sufficiently low IQ president would be bad is because they will be cognitively compromised.

You do not care about maximal democracy as you would respect their wish to elect really old people if so, but you favor restricting their ability to do so. So the reason why the other restriction is wrong cannot come from democracy alone.

Eh, that's not really very democratic. In the US we already have sufficient term limits.

Limits that I hope Trump intends to respect *cough cough*

If he doesn't then he's a Kim Jung Ill level dictator.

Because morons are still accountable, unless they have a disorder that puts them under legal guardianship.

@Zarutaku

Either person is accountable if they have branches of government, independent bodies, political appointees, or cabinet members who stop their unwise actions from coming to pass, and not accountable if they do not have that.

@PeripheralVision

Measuring IQ at extreme ends being difficult is something I was also aware of, although I am just pointing out that trying to track back where this claim of an independently measured IQ score of 195 comes from, I only found that he was tested for ABC and they themselves didn't give an estimate. That's all.

Also, I don't have this in mind for any partisan reason. I'd take the guess that with respect to a population that is 30 years old or so, Joe Biden and Donald Trump would both not score a standard deviation above the mean. But I could be incorrect with Trump who seems less cognitively declined (and I did not vote for him in any election, so clearly I do not view intelligence as some sole determinate factor.)

All I would say is, all other factors held equal, more intelligent people tend to make better decisions. Higher IQ results in childhood predict better test results in academic exams pretty robustly, predicts job performance to varying degrees depending on the occupation, predict social mobility, and predict better health and longevity. One study also gives evidence that the far right tail of the distribution tends to have very productive people: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-16937-005

That’s exactly my point. People are not “equal” because they are not indistinguishable and homogenous; there is no real reason to rely on IQ when you have things such as impulsivity, temperament, policy issues, and so forth. The obsession with IQ only distracts from the discussion of the ideals that potential leaders can have, or their histories. Intelligence is ultimately subjective.

Of what practical use is IQ in the real world in this context when everything we get more than enough from everything else? A greater deference to numbers I argue only makes us more short-sighted in really discussing issues of governance and policy. You cannot quantify sense and morality, you cannot prove whether or not an action is morally good or morally bad.

So…What qualifies as a “better” decision, and how does this differ in the context of governance? IQ does not help answer these questions, they only further obscure them. I personally think Henry Kissinger was a very intelligent man, but his actions are morally bankrupt. That’s my opinion, I cannot prove that, I cannot prove Hitler or Bundy was evil. IQ to me is a loser way of thinking about Kissinger, about Mao, about Clinton and Trump.

@xMizu_
Dont compare my hero to American presidents please ^_^