Would they have all still fought against him?
Isaac Asimov, a very intelligent person, wrote a lengthy essay to the effect that he had no idea what intelligence was. He talked about how society would generally consider him more intelligent than the nearly illiterate man who repaired his car, and yet whenever something went wrong with his car he would go to his mechanic and listen to his advice as if it was being handed down from the mountaintop by Moses himself, because Isaac Asimov knew fuck all about car repair. He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent. Isaac Asimov, who has been published in literally every section of the Dewey Decimal System, concluded that he had no firm idea as to what exactly “intelligence” even was.
In short, how could one even define “the dumbest 50%”?
And that’s why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.
The definition for intelligence changed over the last 2 centuries because we keep discovering how an animal can fit the definition, and intelligence was used to separate humans from animals. Now it’s even worse because people are trying to separate AI from humans.
I like the concept laid out by Delany: in a novel he describe 3 levels of intelligence based on the understanding of various point of views, but it’s not a ranking.
The first stage is simplex: people don’t understand the science of the world, so everything is kind of magical but this concept of magic make the world hold itself and they can grasp everything and use everything with this conception of magic.
Second stage is complex: people have an understanding of science and they can explain many things, but not everything. And when they can’t explain something, they can’t cope with it, because they don’t have the conceptual tools for it. Thus they will either deny this thing existence of plug it into their existing concepts by ignoring the feature that can’t fit.
Third and last stage is multiplex : people can accept that there are theories different than the ones they know, ideas also. Point of views can shape the way you see the world, and even the scientific theories you have to explain the world can be seen as a point of view on the world, so changing this point of view can bring a new or different understanding of a phenomenon or thing or person. These points of view all coexist at the same time, none of them is more true than the other. Like the concept of magic, this allows to grasp, use or accept even the ununderstandable and the unknown, but with a better ability to understand than the simplex stage.
I like this model. But it’s more a model for open-mindedness than intelligence. But maybe that’s the thing.
I love the entire story, then your very solid and succinct answer
I think the whole 50% depopulation is a flawed premise, of the hundred of thousands of years modern humans have existed that would throw total population back to… 1970
There is an addendum to his plan that might have made it make sense. If he had said something like “I’m giving the universe the chance to make better decisions”, suddenly having half as many people means (probably a little more than) half resource consumption, half the carbon emission, and more time to figure out and implement solutions to these problems. I’m not sure how the housing crisis would pan out, I expect it would get worse. It also makes more sense that he destroys the stones after “I gave the universe its chance, now the ball is in its court”.
This also solves the doubling resource problem. His motives are to pressure people to change their ways. Giving them more stuff might cut hunger, but you’ll just have that hunger again in 50 years and we’d probably increase carbon output to boot, and destroy more environment to get these doubled resources.
I don’t know enough about the stones to say whether “infinite resources” or whatever cheat code would have worked, but they certainly could have dropped a line that it wasn’t possible, or that it would cause more problems than it solved (how does chemistry even work in this universe? If nothing ever gets used in reactions then the chemistry that makes our bodies work is borked)
But anyway, as the Russos did not put this line in, the premise was flawed
Maybe the classic: “Impossible to create something out of nothing”, even with the magical stones
Yeah, because it’s so morally defensible to eliminate all of the developmentally disabled and republicans.
I’d bet good money that most republicans are smarter than AOC
