Smart people can afford to be more novelty seeking. They are more likley to avoid catastrophic failure trying the same novelties compared to ordinary or stupid people. Defection by someone smarter than you is harder to detect or predict. And it may have much worse results. Catastrophic results you may not be able to undo or repair because you are outmatched. Evolution takes into account that you are hackable by the very rare much more intelligent person.
I elaborated on the analysis of this scenario here.
Try playing a popular board game with someone of average or below average intelligence. Try proposing before the game a set of rule changes. The response will be "no lets keep the default rules to keep it fair", even if the game is broken or imbalanced and even if you can explain to them why this is so. Is this an irrational position for them to take?
If you observed a game in a parallel world where everyone is smarter by one or two standard deviations, I think their response would basically be the same. But if you just raise your and their IQ in this universe I think their response may well differ. Can anyone see why I think this is so?
This is thread where I'm trying to figure out a few things about signalling on LessWrong and need some information, so please immediately after reading about the two individuals please answer the poll. The two individuals:
A. Sees that an interpretation of reality shared by others is not correct, but tries to pretend otherwise for personal gain and/or safety.
B. Fails to see that an interpretation of reality is shared by others is flawed. He is therefore perfectly honest in sharing the interpretation of reality with others. The reward regime for outward behaviour is the same as with A.
To add a trivial inconvenience that matches the inconvenience of answering the poll before reading on, comments on what I think the two individuals signal,what the trade off is and what I speculate the results might be here versus the general population, is behind this link.