271–280 of 302 posts
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I look forward to when not everything is about that man. But we're not there yet, are we?
Ahh, yes. Ascendant fascism. Soooo boring.
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> Do you have a definition for hyper-intelligence? Trivially, anyone much much smarter than me. :) Hypothetically, take the top N% of the high end of the bell curve, where N is 0.1 or 0.001 or 0.000001 or whatever. But then you have the question of how to survey intelligence? Which brings me to my answer to your second point, > intelligence and impulse control are separable things. A quality called "intelligence" tha…
> A quality called "intelligence" that does not engender impulse control isn't actually intelligence, eh? I mean, that's pretty dependent on the definition of intelligence. Going off a dictionary definition: > the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. versus wisdom: > the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise. That to me sounds like every place you're sayin…
Wisdom, on the other hand, is much harder to define. The definition you quoted is circular, as are almost all dictionary definitions of "wisdom". I've heard it said "A fool never learns, a man learns from his mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others." Some would say that wisdom comes from loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. You say that they are different and that I'm "confusing intelligence with wisdom", but I say that wisdom and intelligence are on the same spectrum or continuum, that the former is the refinement and maturity of the latter.
In any event, my original point is that proponents of eugenics are not as intelligent as they think they are.
Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber. The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and…
My problem with Idiocracy is the assumption that working class and poor breed only more dumb people. This is untrue, as many of our brightest people came from humble backgrounds. The quote evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould is most know for is “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fi…
Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber. The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and…
The movie reminded me of the Despair. inc poster "Meetings: None of us is as dumb as All of Us"
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/meeting...
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The middle class is disappearing, but a larger proportion of the part that disappears every year becomes better off than worse off. The upper middle class and the working poor are both increasing in size at the expense of the middle class, but the upper middle class is growing more. The broadcast components of our culture which must appeal to the largest cross-section of society do indeed cater more to the lower end…
> larger proportion of the part that disappears every year becomes better off than worse off I would hardly disagree with that statement. Larger portion of the middle class gets downgraded not upgraded. Some parts of their life get better due to advancements we make in science, but all other aspects are worse and worse. An example can be “property ownership” - the amount of ppl that own property and are part of the m…
I encourage everyone to watch Don't Look Up . In many ways it struck me as the spiritual successor to Idiocracy. I needed to watch it in chunks, because of how viscerally real it is. It is funny, in that it's ostensibly comedy, and the actors all have great comedic timing...but it's also a very very honest appraisal of where we're at as a society.
The main difference from both is that Don’t Look Up is completely implausible. Also, it isn’t very funny. But I guess people are eager to overlook that if it validates their political biases.
Anyway, since Idiocracy couldn’t be made today due to the PC crowd yelling "eugenics", it is in a way a modern replacement, made straight for the woke crowd with pronouns in their Twitter bio.
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I have to disagree. It attempts to satirise today's mass media by exaggerating its influence on politics to the point at which it revolves around little else, succumbing to what it is supposed to be objecting to: the idea of politics and politicians as trivial. The plotline was so wildly implausible that it ended up saying little about the real world. Also, the asteroid threat is not a good analogy for climate change…
We do indeed disagree! I don't think it was saying that politics and politicians as trivial -- I think it was saying that they're not necessarily smart people, and they're certainly not necessarily acting in the best interests of the people they serve. I think they were also saying that the media serves to reinforce denial in the general population. The asteroid is just a plot device -- the message is that in the fac…
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>Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time Trump neither tried to hide the existence of COVID from the public nor thought it would topple civilization and kill him personally. He downplayed it and the risk it posed, but that is a different order of lying. Trump said exactly as much as he thought he could get away with, and no more. >There absolutely can be some fanatical base that wi…
You're right, it doesn't make sense. People do things that don't make sense. The president in Don't Look Up didn't think it would topple civilization and kill her personally. They thought the plan to break it up and mine it would work. They took a greedy gamble on the fate of the world and lost. In so doing, they took for granted all of the amazing technology that we have and disregarded expert opinions. Likewise wit…
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Malcolm Gladwell says it's often an accident of birth, circumstances and a system that provide fertile ground for achievement, a cultural belief system that encourages intellectual achievement or at least does not discourage it and most of all -- hard work Malcolm Gladwell at Microsoft Research: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcMKLwVlpJk
these things are absolutely important but they are at most half of the picture. intelligence is broadly heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp201185 and a representative piece of a very large body of evidence that intelligence is the strongest predictor of achievement: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
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I look forward to when not everything is about that man. But we're not there yet, are we?
We are if you want to be. Just stop talking about him and ignore people that do.
