How can you get more intelligent, harder working people and end up worse?

Think about how much harm just one hard-working genus, Thomas Midgley, managed, and now imagine society had a hundred million of him.

Every awful invention was created by hard-working intelligent people.

• The bankers that came up with the complex financial plans and the sub-prime mortgage scams that almost collapsed the western economies in 2008 were hard-working, intelligent people.
• Intelligent, hard-working people re-created the 1918 Spanish Flu virus.
• Intelligent, hard-working people spent years collecting bat viruses and then breeding them using gain of function experiments to make them more deadly and more infectious to humans in the very city where, purely coincidentally I am sure, Covid first appeared.
• Intelligent, hard-working people invented the internet of shit. Some hard-working, intelligent person created a car and programmed it with the sentence “Road is too steep to start the installation” and thought "Job well done!".

I actually know people with IQs off the chart who are supposed to be really, really intelligent, and I'm not convinced that high intelligence is a survival trait.

High intelligence is a risk factor for many psychological and physiological disorders, including immune-system disorders and Aspergers/autism.

Very smart people tend to have much, much higher rates of mental illness, including anxiety, manic-depression, severe hypochondria, etc. Depression seems to be especially common. Often very smart people have severe personality flaws: one woman I know was used to calibrate the 200+ end of IQ scores, and she had literally no sense of humour at all. None. Could not understand the concept of "funny" at all.

It's hard to say whether sociopaths are more likely to be way above average intelligence, or whether the dumb psychopaths just get themselves killed or in jail very early. But either way, there does seem to be a correlation between being well above average in intelligence and being a sociopath/psychopath.

And of course, just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you won't act dumb. In some ways, intelligent people are the easiest to fool, or to fool themselves, because they are better at convincing themselves that what they want to be true is true even when it isn't.

only the top .1% of people actually do anything that advances society.

That's hilarious 😂 😂 😂

CC u/detty