One reason I champion mediocrity is that alternative is obviously dystopian:
Upper class of exceptional superhumans
Middle class of robots
Lower class of broken, institutionalized people who failed to be exceptional, and regressed right past human mean to “driven crazy.”
Conversation
The polyannish hope is basically Lake Wobegon: almost everybody “above average” in some magical sense with maybe a few broken people in nice, humane 5-star mental institutions. This does not track with regression to the mean.
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Human basic material well-being floor can and does improve (everything from infant mortality to protein intake to height) but the amount of mediocrity in the system decreases much more slowly and I think has a hard lower limit.
Why?
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Dimensionality of human experience! Well-known statistics fact: high dimensional distributions have more “weight” at the extremes. You need more “ways to human” to move more people from mediocre to exceptional (if you want to do that at all).
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You can have Lake Wobegon if there’s as many ways to excel as people. Everybody gets humaning participation trophy for being best at something. The problem with this is a) there’s no grounding in survival/adaptation truth signal b) it’s not actually a fun human condition
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In case it isn’t obvious, everybody best at something = everybody worst at the same thing = no variation for natural selection = cultural evolution at a degenerate stall condition. In practice it means evolution proceeds via illegible selection pressures under overwrought order
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