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Sortition[1] (randomly selecting from the population for government positions) combined with direct democracy where possible would fundamentally address problems of inequality regardless of their source. Meritocracy, plutocracy, nepotism--you'll end up with a small group of people in power in any system unless the system is carefully designed to prevent it. Put another way, the article mentions several possible measu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an economy where work is increasingly automated, those humans who can do things which machines can't are finding themselves more valued. That seems expected, and I am not convinced it is indicative of any problem or unfairness.
The unfairness component comes from your genetics and upbringing, both outside your control - some combinations are better suited to navigate this economy than others. So what do we as a society do with those at a disadvantage, sometimes severe (eg IQ below 90?) we can move toward finding ways to include them, or we can move toward excluding them. The problem from the article is a societal one trend toward exclusion,…
A just society judges and rewards people based on what they contribute. Racism, sexism, ageism, and the like are unfair not because they select based on something "outside your control", but because they deprive a person of the opportunity to succeed or fail based on merit.
Intelligence is a direct factor (though not the only factor) in a person's success at performing just about any job. If it is not a fair criteria by which to judge, then there are no fair criteria.
American society worships financial success and the mythology of supermen and superwomen to the exclusion of nearly everything else and this extracts a huge price in the individual and social sense of well being. Since capitalism will rarely allow more than 20-30% 'success' that leaves a huge percentage of your population feeling inadequate. Sometimes it feels the focus on individual brilliance without context of soc…
There's also the larger concern over foreign competition. I know that social well-being is important, but when faced against countries who don't value social well-being, it feels as if America is at a significant disadvantage. After all, who could have competed against China's manufacturing prowess when the Green Movement was unique to the West? If America enacts strong protections for unintelligent people, will we see intelligence be outsourced?
I know that my fears are selfish and childish and irrational, but I don't know how else to be. On one hand, I know how absurd it is to believe that intelligence is the solution to all of my problems. But if being smart can't solve my problems, what can? It seems equally absurd that being compassionate is the answer.
I don't know. I'm sure none of this makes sense, but it's how I feel. Sorry about the rant.
I'm a huge fan of Mike Rowe. He's done some amazing journalism with "Dirty Jobs" and his mikeroweWORKS foundation is terrific. He claims that unconditional encouragement toward intellectual dreams does not help most people, and argues that more kids should be pursuing professional trades. This overlaps with one of the better suggestions from this article. In general I think these are hit or miss, and maybe too academ…
Even supposedly technically superior well paying work usually treats the workers like tools. Management which is often staffed by not the most intelligent has the most power in an organization. They stress coerce and harass people in order to get work out of them, work which is often earning the company multiples of what they are paying people. And that's how the whole economy is structured. It is still not is possible to be a technical person who is well paid yet still not feeling happy, pleasant, or even healthy. It can still be a somewhat miserable way to live your life. Not as miserable as being not intelligent and employable, but still can be problematic.
The economy is general is not a healthy place for mental health or physical health, especially things like getting fired or layed off. You have to go out of your way already exhausted by work to find that.
Uhm, STFU. Geniuses = good. Sexism = bad.
The civility rule here doesn't switch off just because someone else is wrong. Please don't do this again. Instead, please (re)-read the following, which describe what we're looking for in comments on this site—the idea is to post civilly and substantively, or not at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11926598 and marked it off-topic.
Uhm, STFU. Geniuses = good. Sexism = bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linking Breitbart and the Dailymail is... well, exactly the sort of thing I expected you would do.
Not sure if that is relevant. Source should not be important if the facts match reality. Some social scientists observed that women tend to choose lower-risk decisions compared to men that are pressured to take higher risks with immense payouts (rare) or complete disasters (frequent). So these two strategies yield different results - women have a smaller variance, i.e. there are less women at the top and less at the…
A lot of these men have supernatural mental abilities. They can envision things working in their minds in all 4 dimensions. This is called the visual-spatial intelligence type, and it is most common among genius men. These are the men, ones who excel in super-natural visual-spatial reasoning, which results or is the result of super-natural quantitative reasoning ability, but don't excel so much in linguistics or verbal reasoning as much, that are being "talked out" or shouldered out of some executive positions and Ivy League schools, especially at younger ages (verbal reasoning maxes out around age 50-60).
These men are much more suited for positions such as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and other high administrative positions. During the Obama presidency, a woman was appointed as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and she was propped up through San Francisco liberal networks. I don't doubt that she is a very smart person, even a genius, but I do have very serious doubts that she should be leading women to that end of society. The men that she is shouldering out are very civilized, very unlikely to speak up for themselves, and they have been carried by the rest of the patriarch for centuries, even since the beginning of time. In times of trouble, these visual-spatial geniuses, such as Alan Greenspan, Richard Feynmann or Albert Einstein, are who we all lean on for making great decisions in driving our civilization. American civilization is currently in a steady decline, and we should be leaning on them rather than making them into the enemy and shouldering them out of the positions they should inherit.
The very intelligent traditional men are the ones under attack in America. The stupid are not directly under attack. The stupid are under attack indirectly, because the true leaders of society are under attack. The evidence of this can be seen in all of the crumbling cities in America. Even Noam Chomsky, a renowned liberal, admits that America is in a decline. Understanding the reason can start with understanding tha…
I think we banned your previous account for doing this as well. If you don't want to be banned on HN, it needs to stop. If you want to commit to keeping this sort of comment off HN, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look into unbanning your original account.
Behold, the most Hacker News post on Hacker News.