What Are The Moral Obligations of Brilliant People

Fellow 145+, and those 120-145 who all your friends call brilliant because you have other cognitive skills that compensate not being 3SD higher and you still output amazing stuff: What is our moral obligation to our fellow Men?

In humans there is a great level of correlation between goodness and intelligence. Although I have met some very intelligent people who are not moral, Alice, Ellie, Derrida, Foulcault, Rousseau, Trotsky? and many others, the overwhelming majority of us is genuinely good, and invested in making the world a better place at least a little bit, or at least to some people.

It is surely morally permissible for most humans, most of the time, to attempt to do good actions, as long as we follow the Jordan Peterson Locality principle, which states that the lower your cognitive range, the more important for you to clean and organize your real and abstract personal spaces, such as cleaning your room.

A very substantial number of us has one of two major mental illness conditions which change our moral permissions when it comes to goodness especially non-locally as well as obligations.

Aspies have stronger moral permissions, ADHD people have lower moral permissions. ADHDs have stronger moral obligations and Aspies have weaker moral obligations. Let’s break that down.
(there’s also some ASPDs amongst us, they have a moral obligation to reduce their impact maximally and to defer as much as possible to non ASPD people and work under them. They have active disregard for moral obligations though, so they won’t do it)

In our internet-heavy society, we risk not thinking outside the box enough for fear of social apprehension, cancellation and a sunken heart. Aspies are both less affected and less attacked for this, so they should abide by the Elon Musk Speech Delivery principle. Deliver impossible things to the minds of normies, do what no normie is cognitively capable of doing in your do-goodery, and always remember to tell people who should go fuck themselves to go fuck themselves, if you have the fuck you money for it. Without the aspies clearing the forest, the rest of us cannot easily advance progress, science, philosophy, and so on. Aspies are the explorers of the moral landscape, with machetes cutting the dense jungle of judgement by others.
Aspies are permitted bigger cognitive arcs, like Michael Arc (formerly Vassar), Curt Doolittle, or many others. Only the aspies can provide us landscape stochastic jumps in the moral landscape, so please, feel free to guys. We need you.

My crowd, the ADHD folk, we are not permitted to do some things. We are not good at cleaning our room and dealing with the micro-local, and we are not particularly excellent at long term execution either. So we have the permission and endorsement to try and hire people below and above us in timescale. Cleaners, secretaries, organizers below, and great executes above who can bring our infinite fountain of creative and brilliant ideas to fruition, as well as filter what gets or not to the public. Every Bostrom needs a Sandberg. Every Tate needs a Tristan (I’ve been guilty of not having this, and my output, though looming ultra-large in lives saved, has surely been less than ideal in other terms like, books published, compilations of my ideas organized and so on, because I have failed to secure someone in this position, which has significantly hindered the world counterfactual to what I could have done)

Aspies don’t need to partake in some moral obligations like explaining their morals to normies or dressing in normie ways, they are generally exonerated from most of the bio-regulatory moral mechanisms through which humans usually monitor each other, including the scapegoating mechanism (Girard 2006)

What do all of us bright people share in terms of moral obligations then?

A commitment to scaleable transparency seems to me a big one. While the Sam Altman strategy of partial information transfer can lead you pretty high in life, I contend that the brilliant have the obligation of going the Beast Elon route, deliver deliver deliver deliver in public, be distressingly transparent, and act as if 1 million people have cameras on you, because one day, if you do it right, they will.

10 million may sound like a big number, but there is only 10 million of us (and that’s making some assumptions that are all but guaranteed about the sensitivity to testosterone of East Asians, and maybe giving more statistical credit to Africans and Arabs than their due, it could be 6million)

We’re one relatively large city. That’s it.

We are as smart as a 6 foot 6 person, or 198 cm.

There are very few of us. I remember all the people taller than 198 I ever hung out with thrice or more.

If Basketball saved lives, tall people would have a moral obligation, not just a financial incentive, to play basketball. This is the situation we find ourselves in with regard to intelligence. We have capabilities that most people can’t even fathom, and those capabilities can literally save lives. I suggest that we have the moral obligation at least when the cost is relatively low to save a fraction of the lives we can save, be it through improving utility, making the world safer, coordinating and leading other humans, etc…

Abundance: North Korea notwithstanding most of us can obtain resource abundance (especially those without ADHD or aspies) but perhaps most importantly most of us end up meeting lots of others along the way, and perhaps we should try to provide them with abundance in such a way they don’t feel pressured to make money themselves and can dedicate more time and attention to others, I chose the do what you love route, philosophy, psychology, anthropology. But upon arriving at the very high echelons of academia, the wealthy folk around me have always gifted me with some of their wealth, in the form of invitations to trips, to their mansion parties, their island orgies, their houses with no rent where no one seems to work, their chef’s cake, and so on. Only some of us will be wealthy, I contend we have the moral obligation of helping the other brilliant people to choose giving to the world over getting rich by being systematically and categorically generous with our resources. Every single billionaire I have ever met was unequivocally and categorically generous to those around them, around their families, and those they perceived to be doing good in the world. And for us mere rich people, we can still help those young and brilliant who have not accumulated their own resources. The good 145+ people should have our own trickle-down gift economy. Billionaires giving to centimillionaires to decamillionaires to adventurous Brazilians who decided to pursue what they love in a country of max Gini index 🙂 I am grateful to my predecessors, and as I continue to get richer in the next 10 years of Bitcoin, I will continue to enlarge my already very significant amount of donations, whether in time, attention, money, or whatever resources I muster along the way.

The normie obligations. For those of us gifted who are also normies (couldn’t be me) you have some tough additional obligations. Take Vivek and Yang, both distinctively above 145, of different political philosophies, but able to keep the chatter going on what would it be like if an intelligent person commanded the world’s strongest country. Just like they sacrificed their millionaire do gooder life to try to do even gooderer, in a realm dominated by midwit normies, if you can ascend the social scales in ways that us ADHD and aspie smartfolk can’t, you have an obligation of keeping at least a moderate level of societal cohesion and function in the corporate and political worlds, as well as in the top charity world, EA, etc…

Reproduction: By far the hardest discussion when it comes to our tribe. Dutton found that only a third of historical geniuses have babies, and this was before condoms and pills. Fewer predictions about human behavior are stronger than that geniuses don’t choose children, with predictable Darwinian consequences. I say if you do end up choosing to reproduce, try assortative mating to decrease the odds or “return to the mean” (exapted term from math, I’m aware it took new meaning in bio).
If you’re able to, donate gametes, start early, do it often and widely. As you know, so much is genetic, and 10 million can make quite a genetic ripple in the world if we put our minds and gametes to it.
You can also surrogate if you don’t want to go old-school ape style.
If you are truly stellar, like the other 145+ all look at you and go “WOAH” then it depends on whether you’re a public or private person. Public people need to go the Elon route and have 10 kids to incentivize more of the 115+crowd to have kids. If you’re a private person, then go Tesla Newton and use all your precious brain cycles to improve the world fast.
I’ve seen many of us burnout over the years for not doing what they wanted with regards to kids, so don’t not have kids because you’re extremely smart, and don’t have kids because you’re extremely smart.
But math is math, so please, donate your sperm and eggs, that’s by far the least costly contribution you can have in our pleitropic, plurisemantic genetic world.

Solzhenitsyn: If the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart starts to tilt to the evil side, you have a moral obligation of tell people as quickly as possible, people with power to control you if you keep ascening. in the words of past
@sama
“the board can fire me, i think that’s important” past sama was a wise cookie.
Many of us get tempted by evil on our way to power, some because power itself corrupts. Most because we are betrayed along the way, often betrayed precisely because we did good. “Remember the real game is above” as someone told Katniss in the hunger games 3. Although it seems like the local status dispute and betrayal are a massive deal at the time, specially for the ADHD RSD gifted, we must keep in mind that resentment is what made bad people bad, lack of gratitude is the hallmark of the evil Man or Woman, and above all that the real game is much bigger than our ape and mating trifles. The game will carry on for centuries if not trillenia, and if AGI is possible, the biggest lever of history is relatively close to us in reach. Don’t let your personal betrayal as an ape harm the quadrillions of people yet to come. This isn’t our fight, this is their fight. We are here for them. Our obligation is towards them, for they outnumber us as the grains of the Sahara outnumber the number 1.
Let’s make sure those tears are tears of joy.

We are born with a gift that doubles as a curse. Everything is and always will be easier for us.
But because it is easier (especially those without ADHD) it is incumbent upon us to do our very best for the other 7 billion, and for the quadrillions that shall come.

We are thrown in the world, and stand in no full moral obligation to it. But if you read this deep than in the past you have already made a personal commitment to being good. Don’t forget the commitment, and use guidelines to see what you’re permitted, required, obligated or incentivized to do, from this position of privilege in which we happen to be born.

Whether you feel, like Elon, that our condition is a curse, or you feel, like me, that it is a blessing with some contractual responsibilities, the fact is that you have the intelligence. So go ahead and use it 🙂