The bell curve part is fine. It’s the correlation between IQ and political orientation that is not. One of the biggest fallacies in life is that being smart automatically makes you a good person. It does not, and it also does not determine your political affiliation.

If true, then it would provide a way to redistribute wealth and measure the collective impact on IQ in a quantitative way, which would indeed make it a useful statistic

IMO the most pressing problem in the USA is that we have “consensus protocols” that can fail to achieve consensus. If the USA government was a software product, these would be considered massive bugs:

• The presence of both a House of Representatives and a Senate, and both bodies need to approve legislation with a majority in order for the legislation to become law. This is fundamentally broken, because there’s no guarantee that both houses will be controlled by the same party. Imagine if a database locked up because it had only 2 replicas, and if they ever became out of sync, all writes would stop, with no way to achieve a majority.
• The fact that the president can veto legislation. As above, this can result in a complete lockup of the government’s basic functionality, since there is no guarantee that Congress and the president are controlled by the same party.
• The electoral college. The fact that it is capable of installing as president the loser of the election is an obvious and massive flaw.

If we eliminated these bugs, then we would be able to achieve party-wise accountability; At the moment, when the House, Senate, and/or presidency are controlled by different parties, both parties can blame the other for inaction. In reality, the true problem is the fact that the Senate exists and that the President has veto power. If we had 1 democratic body (the House) and no Senate, then the party that controls the House would be directly accountable for its successes and failures, and I would expect American cynicism and apathy about “government not working” to decrease as a result.

That would be noble.

Mitochondrion*

Its all going to become more efficient enough you can run it all locally. Why are we trying to piss away zillions of dollars on data centers

The idea that the hardware we currently have is good enough for future applications hasn’t been true of software in general. As better hardware becomes available, software has improved to take advantage of it. Also, the improvements in software have allowed the development of even better hardware, in a virtuous cycle.

Also, regarding local vs cloud computing in general, datacenters provide an economy of scale that can’t be matched by local compute. Shared datacenters are also more efficient than everyone having expensive hardware that they only use a fraction of the time. This is why datacenters were expanding rapidly even before the recent advances in large language models.

Sounds expensive. Most nans weight a lot of pounds.

You don’t like the AI response at the top? It’s free and I find it super helpful. But you are welcome to ignore it.

You can still Google it for free. You only have to pay for AI if you use AI.

See no true scotsman.