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Who should rule- Normalman or Brainy Brian?
So, let's say that we could vote for someone to rule the entire world. The two leading canidates are Normalman, who is an accurate, fair representitive of all humanity on average. He is running against Brainy Brian, the smartest person to ever live. Who gets your vote and why?




This is a great question!
I think it is important, as in all philosophical inquiry, to demarcate our concepts in a way that makes our argument most clear.
Let us start with Normalman. It seems difficult to say what race, gender, nationality, political leanings, socio-economics this individual would have. What counts as a fair representation given these unknowns? I suspect no such individual could truly embody an average.
This being said, I do feel like the underlying prompting of the original question was to bring something out about individuals who rule; those of the common man/woman "common-sense" or that of the hyper-logical, rational, brainy individual.
This being said I think we should pick apart two 'common' tropes for intelligent individuals. That of the 'rationalist' and that of the 'wise'. These are rough and quite general pictures of intelligent individuals, but I think the characterization will be helpful for this discuss.
The 'Rationalist' follows rigidly to systems. These systems include mathematics, logic, physics, etc. If a bit of reasoning doesn't follow systematically, the Rationalist says 'that is false, untrue, unsupported'. And this is true...given the narrow perspective of that given system. When physicists say something is "impossible"...it is only impossible given the system for which they are working in. The problem with Rationalist thinking, is that it only is as good as it system is. As we have seen in physics, the system can be flawed, which leads to reality becoming misaligned with the system/theory. Having a leader who is a systematic Rationalist would be dangerous in my opinion, because if there system was flawed, it could cause unforseen disasters. Kant framed a sort of 'rationalist system following' called deontology.
The 'wise' individual, is someone I'm characterizing as viewing things in a much more consequentialist light. This simply means that the wise person tries to cope with the situation at hand, with no rigid system to decide the events for them. The consequentalist looks at the consequences of a given action, and then tries to make an informed decision from there. I feel that this sort of person in charge would be hugely beneficial.
Great question! What do you think?