there seems to be an implicit assumption here that smarter == more gooder but I don't know that that is necessarily always true. It's understandable to think that way, since we do have pretty impressive brains, but it might be a bit of a bias. I'm not saying that I think being dumber, as a species, is something to aim for but maybe this obsession with intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is maybe a bit misplaced wrt it's potential for solving all of our problems. One could argue that, in fact, most of our problems are the direct result of that same intellect and maybe we would be better served in figuring out how to responsibly use the thinkwots we've already got before we go rushing off in search of the proverbial Big Brain Elixir.
A guy that drives a minivan like a lunatic shouldn't be trying to buy a monster truck, is my point
I don't see this implied assumption anywhere: smarter simply means smarter.
But, I have to counter your claim anyway :)
Now, "good" is, IMHO, a derivation of smart behaviour that benefits survival of the largest population of humans — by definition. This is most evident when we compare natural, animal behaviour with what we consider moral and good (from females eating males after conception, territoriality fights, hoarding of female/male partners, different levels of promiscuity, eating of one's own children/eggs...).
As such, while the definition of "good" is also obviously transient in humans, I believe it has served us better to achieve the same survival goals as any other natural principle, and ultimately it depends on us being "smart" in how we define it. This is also why it's nowadays changing to include environmental awareness because that's threatening our survival — we can argue it's slow to get all the 8B people to act in a coordinated newly "good" manner, but it still is a symptom of smartness defining what's "good", and not evolutionary pressure.
My counter claim is my experience with dogs.
Over the past 50 years, I've a bunch of different dogs from mutts that showed up and never left to a dog that was 1/4 wolf and everything in between.
My favorite dog was a pug who was really dumb but super affectionate. He made everybody around him happy and I think his lack of anxiety and apparent commitment to chill had something to do with it. If the breed didn't have so many health issues, I'd get another in a heartbeat.
Would a summary of your statement be: brain power is orthogonal to altruism and ethics
It's more than that. Even if you take an extreme assumption that "Full" intelligence means being able to see ALL relevant facts to a "choice" and perfectly reliably make the objective "best" choice, that does not mean that being more intelligent than we currently are guarantees better choices than we currently make.
We make our choices using a subset of the total information. Getting a larger subset of that information could still push you to the wrong choice. Local maxima of choice accuracy is possible, and it could also be possible that the "function" for choice accuracy wrt info you have is constant at a terrible value right up until you get perfect info and suddenly make perfect choices.
Much more important however, is the reminder that the known biases in the human brain are largely subconscious. No amount of better conscious thought will change the existence of the Fundamental Attribution Error for example. Biases are not because we are "dumb", but because our brains do not process things rationally, like at all. We can consciously attempt to emulate a perfectly rational machine, but that takes immense effort, almost never works well, and is largely unavailable in moments of stress.
Statisticians still suffer from gambling fallacies. Doctors still experience the Placebo Effect. The scientific method works because it removes humans as the source of truth, because the smartest human still makes human errors.
I'd still counter it: someone can't be smart (have large brain power) if they also don't understand the value of altruism and ethics for their own well-being. While you can have "success" (in however you define it) by ignoring those, the risk of failure is greater. Though this does ignore the fact that you can be smart for a set of problems, but not really have any "general" smartness (I've seen one too many Uni math professors who lack any common sense).
Eg. as a simple example, as an adult, you can go and steal kids' lunch at school recess easily. What happens next? If you do that regularly, either kids will band together and beat the shit out of you if they are old enough, or a security person will be added, or parents' of those kids will set up a trap and perform their own justice.
In the long run, it's smart not to go and pester individuals weaker than you, and while we all turn to morality about it, all of them are actually smart principles for your own survival. Our entire society is a setup coming out of such realizations and not some innate need for "goodness".
>someone can't be smart (have large brain power) if they also don't understand the value of altruism and ethics for their own well-being
I would agree with this. And to borrow something that Daniel Dennett once said, no moral theory that exists seems to be computationally tractable. I wouldn't say I entirely agree, but I agree with like the vibe or the upshot of it, which is a certain amount of mapping out. The variables and consequences seems to be instrumental to moral insight, and the more capable of the brain, the more capable it would be of applying moral insight in increasingly complex situations.
hmm, I dunno if that simple example holds up very well. In the real world, folks do awful stuff that could be categorized as pestering individuals weaker than them than them, stuff much worse than stealing lunch money from little kids, and many of them never have to answer for any of it. Are we saying that someone who has successfully committed something really terrible like human trafficking without being caught is inherently not smart specifically because they are involved in human trafficking?
I would quote my original comment:
> ...risk of failure is greater.
Yes, some will succeed (I am not suggesting that crime doesn't pay at all, just that the risk of suffering consequences is bigger which discourages most people).
Seems more like brainpower is not inherently a 1:1 correlation for long term survival of a species.