I suspect that human beings, rather than being able to create a collective intelligence capable of mitigating existential risks (e.g. risks to high-level technological civilization), instead comprise a collective anti-intelligence – a species that uses the faculties that could contribute to a collective intelligence instead using them to increase its existential risk. Perhaps this could be a definition of stupidity.

I’m wondering if the mathematical tools exist to model human collective intelligence, compare this model (with all its distortions, lies, etc.) to an actual model of the Universe (obviously Earth mostly) including an estimate of the unknown complexity of the Universe and what risks such unknowns could entail, and, using various metrics, illustrate what I will predict to be a representation of the most “psychotic” kind of essentially suicidal behavior. I predict that if such a model is possible then by whatever metrics used to measure our collective intelligence, the fact that we do not model reality and instead behave with with respect to fantasy, and that we must converge to such a state of affairs (long argument that should show up in the model) means that we are hopeless on long time scales as a species, in and of ourselves. This means we’re in trouble because of our own behavior long before we have to worry about the sun growing more luminous, for example. Of course, when Yellowstone blows …