Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

Note that I never said "If a place doesn't have a racism problem then them doing racist acts is OK / it's not racist".

My argument is "Places with heavy racist history tend to look at all kind of non-racist acts as racist, either from guilt or to overcompensate, and then try to force their hyper-sensitivity on others".

Instead of getting sensitive about stereotypes like "Irish can hold a grudge", "the Italians like pasta", "Scots are tightwads", "Germans have no humor", "Greeks are fiscally irresponsible", "Asians do everything better" or whatever as "racism", better act on actual racism, like systemic racism, redlining, over-representation of blacks in what's the biggest prison population in the world, racist cop shootings, college admissions, under-funded districts, WASP domination, etc.

We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.

Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.

That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.

tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.

Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.

Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.

Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.

And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).

Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.

Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.

Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.

Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.

- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.

- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.

- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.

- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.

- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.

- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.

In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.