Cannabis for Autism writes:
What I don’t get, notwithstanding the suggestion that crime is justice to those for whom law is injustice, why you think ‘criminals’ with an above-average IQ are any less dangerous than those with a lesser IQ?
You have two societies. One is a very high IQ society, say IQ = 113. They have a certain number of criminals running around in their country.
Then we have another society. This is a very low IQ society, say IQ = 90. Of course there will be lots of criminals running around here too, probably a lot more criminals per capita than in the high IQ society.
There will be bad people in both societies.
In the high IQ society, there will not be much street crime. Nerds are skinny and don’t like to get their hands dirty. There will be quite a bit of crime, but it will be financial and white collar. Scams, ripoffs, fraud, embezzlement, all sorts of financial crimes, lawyer crimes, doctor crimes, accountant crimes, shakedowns, blackmail, stock market crimes. They may be an Underworld with some Organized Crime. This may or may not be a problem for me. I figure if I stay away from Organized Crime types and scenes, I will probably be ok.
I will watch my money very carefully because there may well be a lot of financial crime in a high IQ society, but honestly lower IQ societies are flooded with fraud, ripoff, white collar crime and corruption too. As long I do not have a lot of money on me to play around with business-wise, I am not too worried. I will walk down the street at 3 AM and not worry about a thing. I will make friends with my neighbors and even total strangers. I might even give rides to hitchhikers if I felt daring.
Now I move to the low IQ society where the average IQ is 90.
The real problem here is that in the low IQ society, the nature of the criminals will change. I will be dealing with stupid criminals rather than smart criminals. Offered a choice, I would much rather deal with smart crooks than dumb crooks any day. Smart crooks tend to be a lot less violent because they think about their actions before they do them and often try not to be violent because this increases the chances of them going to prison. As long as they stick to their nonviolent financial crime, they stand a good chance of staying out of jail.
Now in the low IQ society, the criminals are just morons. They don’t care whether they are violent or not, and dumb people are more violent than smart people anyway. They don’t think about the consequences of anything they do because they can’t plan ahead and they don’t think about the future. They just live in the moment and commit whatever crimes they want to and figure they won’t get caught.
I will experience a lot more hotheadedness, idiots losing their temper, drunk and drugged out kooks, impetuousness, impulsiveness, etc. In general, physical and even emotional violence and aggression is going to be way higher in this society because people are not smart enough to control themselves. I will start experiencing some theft. They steal little things here and there. I have to start locking my car because if you don’t they steal out of your car. My hubcaps are gone. There will probably be street gangs which are a lot less predictable than the Organized Crime gangs in my other country that tried to limit violence to stay out of jail.
I will not walk down the street at 3 AM and probably not even after midnight. I am careful of who I hang out with and make friends with. Gunshots ring out 50 yards from my door. Some of my neighbors go to jail from time to time. The police come around looking for them sometimes. Little girls are being prostituted. Someone gutted three stray cats and hung them in a tree as part of a gang dispute. A street gang rules my neighborhood and considers it theirs. My friends are becoming crime victims. My friend suffers two attempted robberies while just walking about the neighborhood.
Sure, there are criminals in both cases, but in answer to your question, yes, I would prefer dealing with smart crooks over dumb crooks.