Your short explanation for political resistance to intelligence elevation makes a lot of sense.

“How do you optimise for intelligence?” — through intense competition, primarily. That’s how Jim’s ‘killer-ape’ got smart enough to enter history in the first place. Some kind of competitive mechanism is both external, and internal, to every practically advancing intelligence program. When economics was a sufficient proxy for war, it worked as a driver. Now that the Keynesians have mostly pacified it, things fall apart.

That pleasure has an (biological) appeal is beyond question, as you acknowledge. Intelligence doesn’t have this intrinsic appeal, indeed your question (“Is something worth doing? Only if it grows intelligence.”) explains why (if you accept Moldbug’s assertion that government cannot increase IQ (and IQ = intelligence). Something that grows intelligence inevitably grows artificial intelligence which inevitably makes humans relatively more stupid. For this reason it is politically unappealing (“if it makes things more stupid, it certainly isn’t [worth doing]” becomes on this (popular) line of reasoning a justification for not growing intelligence).

So the question becomes not ‘Just: why?’ but just: how? How do you optimise for intelligence? And rather than being a political or economic imperative (the same thing when it comes to willingness to adopt your proposal) is this not more likely to be a potential state of affairs driven by technological advance and/or maintenance of ‘quality of life’? That is to say intelligence will not be a driver in its own right – why would it be (biologically speaking)? – much more likely, as with agricultural and industrial revolutions (and word-processing and emails in the office etc..) intelligence as a competitive edge will be desirable. So what will make intelligence essential to the economy? Speculatively, Bitcoin has the potential to forcibly remodel society to this end. Similarly advances such as brain-computer-interfaces could lead in the same direction. But even in these cases (and as SDL has already suggested), isn’t such a remodeling simply a desire (= pleasure) to structure society in a more pleasing way for reactionaries who feel hard done by in the current set-up, where their skills (and intelligence) are underappreciated? Or are you arguing for a more fundamental reappraisal?

When pleasure-pain is considered naturalistically, it is obviously an ‘intelligent’ solution to certain biological control problems that arose with complex nervous systems. We’d probably want something analogous for advanced robots, insofar as we wanted to steer them. Robots would surely see the advantage in adopting it for themselves, assuming their ambitions extended to coherent purposive action. The problems arise when hedonic tone is no longer seen as a means (control-engineering solution), but as an end, to be achieved by whatever shortcuts, and ultimately short-circuits, can be improvised. At this point hedonism becomes directly maladaptive. I agree with Moldbug that we’re deep into that territory already.

As we approach the bionic horizon, the pleasure-pain system needs to be slaved to serious purposes. The ‘needs’ there means: whoever, or whatever, does that is going to win.

Maybe I’m conflating things here, but is it fair to say that your suggestion makes you a fellow traveler of John Campbell, whose essay about auto-evolution posits intelligence as the essential ‘killer app’ for human groups who want to stay, forever, at the leading edge of future evolution? Campbell writes,

A group of people dedicated to the over-riding ideal of evolving maximal intellectual capabilities by any means available could aspire to produce a following generation with an IQ of, say, 180. If they also passed on their evolutionary ideal, the superior offspring should be able to improve their successor generation commensurately; that is, increase its intelligence by 80%.

There can be no doubt about the value of intelligence for developing the knowledge and culture necessary for further evolution. Even today’s abstract sciences require keen minds. As we advance, ever greater intelligence will be needed to figure out the next advances for securing the frontier. Our current intellect probably cannot even comprehend the mental attributes that descendants will struggle to conceive.

I find very little against which I’d want to argue in Campbell’s piece, or in your suggestion that a utilitarianism based on Growing Intelligence would be beneficial to the species.

But, practically speaking, one couldn’t bracket out the Pleasure Principle entirely. Then again, is it fair to suppose that if we answer “Yes” to the question “Does this grow intelligence?”, a by-product of the answer may always be some increase in some form of happiness and pleasure?