About the post below, and just in general, I’ve been thinking about how intelligence is absolutely no armor against making absurdly moronic, counterproductive decisions.

Part of it is just the Peter Principle in action: people really do rise to their level of incompetence.

But it is more than that. Intelligence seems to coagulate and actually constrain thinking in many cases — increasing its rigidity and fixedness rather than expanding the ability to explore a larger problem space and find potential solutions there.

This can be seen of late with the Mozilla Foundation and the Democratic party. Loads of intelligent people work for both organizations, but the decisions which emerge just could not be more harmful even to their own stated goals and ideals.

In both cases please note that it is not lack of knowledge of what is likely to occur as a result these terrible decisions. The DNC and the Mozilla Foundation was warned well in advance by many knowledgeable people about likely outcomes, and both did chose and have chosen to ignore, minimize, shout down and blackball dissenters.

Lack of intelligence leads to many limited stupid decisions; with intelligence, however, one has the power to make large-scale doltish decisions that harm millions and millions of people.

It’s been a losing battle, and one I’m tired of fighting — when Mozilla/Firefox finally disallows XUL and XPCOM add-ons, I will stop using Firefox and switch to either Chromium or Chrome (haven’t decided yet).

When Firefox becomes a complete knock-off of Chrome without any ability to even customize it, what reason is there to use Firefox? The Mozilla Foundation simply does not possess the resources, the interest or the future of a company as large as Alphabet. All the things Firefox is attempting, Chrome always has and will continue to do better. I expect further mass abandonment of Firefox at that time, too, as all the power users jump ship with me.

I can control privacy with firewalling, mostly, keeping myself safe from Chrome’s data thieving.

Firefox has no future due to the parent organization’s own poor decisions. And I’m tired of fighting to customize it. When whatever version breaks XUL add-ons is released, that will be my last day using it.

The case for the adaptivity of consciousness is not open and shut because many extant phylogenetic traits are not in fact adaptive, but rather present for a whole host of other reasons not directly relevant to the narrow constraints that most people (even many scientists) consider to be evolution.

Also, it could be an emergent non-trait that is not strongly coupled to underlying instances of selection at the genetic level, perhaps reinforced now by sexual selection, and in which case instances of disruptive selection (or perhaps artificial self-selection in the future) could alter this temporary stability significantly.

Consciousness as an ephemeron of our lineage….