> So, if American society 'increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth' and 'as recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory', why are the more intelligent, if anything, less likely to be successful when we go from 1920 to 2000?
Because gwern, we're in a technological stagnation and have been for many decades. The end of world war II temporarily gave America a boost, and the end of Communism temporarily gave the West a boost, but we're all being dragged down by a decline in meaningful technological progress (ex-Computation). This could be because US/West looked good in comparison and/or because a threat to the existing order evoked a competitive response that resulted in artificial rubber, jet engines etc.
I'm not claiming conflict is a good idea. I'm claiming that the above overshadowed a pattern that would have otherwise been much more obvious to us.
When circumstances diminish prospects, what use is there in higher intelligence? That would only be adaptive to express were the environment suitable. This is true whether we're on a timescale of decades (culture) or centuries (biology).
Note I do not claim we're zerohedged into oblivion. Just that the rate of technological change has changed to slower speed. It's a long term secular stagnation that has received relatively little attention until relatively recently because we are biased to notice things when they affect us and not before.
My pet hypothesis is that modern education, which became prevalent in that period you mention, is at least partially responsible for this. That modern education has a failure mode that reduces our prospects while demanding that we endorse more of it is suggestive to me of a bad memetic parasite that has infected the host and makes it do maladaptive things. Like how religion invariably starts with some transcendent quality but ends with the Inquisition and the One True Way.
In truth I think we all recognize that 'education' and education are not the same thing but one has gone from a proxy for the other into a masquerade for the other. If I'm right, then the evidence should be that a new form of education, perhaps as yet unrealized, will be able to dramatically supersede the existing institution. It is at least interesting that Silicon Valley is the only place that I know of that is successful and that takes the traditional education system much less seriously than other places. To overcome the inertia generated by the extant education system with its credentialing must take a powerful force.
.jpg){kind=link}