The problem with trait selection is always in the second-order effects—for example, kind people are easy to exploit by the less kind, and happy people are not as driven to change things through their dissatisfaction. A population of kind and happy people are not going to tend towards climbing any social ladder, and will rapidly be ousted by less kind and less happy people. The blind idiot god doesn’t just control genetic change, but societal change, and we’re even worse at controlling or predicting the latter.
This is why I don’t like the meme of a ‘blind idiot god’, it’s really easy to read it in a way, if you actually understand the implications, which also implies that humans, on average, are even lesser, somehow even worse then a ‘blind idiot’.
Of course most potential writers aren’t exactly super geniuses nor willing to spend days thinking about a single phrase so it’s probably unfair to expect them to evaluate any metric such as intelligence along more then 2 or 3 dimensions simultaneously, hence they never would have caught the potentially self-defeating nature of the phrase.
The comedic effect also probably is quite unreliable among large portions of the population, as any mention of the word ‘god’ taken in vain would be quite serious to them.
The problem with trait selection is always in the second-order effects—for example, kind people are easy to exploit by the less kind, and happy people are not as driven to change things through their dissatisfaction. A population of kind and happy people are not going to tend towards climbing any social ladder, and will rapidly be ousted by less kind and less happy people. The blind idiot god doesn’t just control genetic change, but societal change, and we’re even worse at controlling or predicting the latter.
This is why I don’t like the meme of a ‘blind idiot god’, it’s really easy to read it in a way, if you actually understand the implications, which also implies that humans, on average, are even lesser, somehow even worse then a ‘blind idiot’.
Of course most potential writers aren’t exactly super geniuses nor willing to spend days thinking about a single phrase so it’s probably unfair to expect them to evaluate any metric such as intelligence along more then 2 or 3 dimensions simultaneously, hence they never would have caught the potentially self-defeating nature of the phrase.
The comedic effect also probably is quite unreliable among large portions of the population, as any mention of the word ‘god’ taken in vain would be quite serious to them.