Maybe the terminology is a little sloppy. To “get things done”, the “things that work on a species level”, people who “achieve many of their goals” etc. these are vague references, vagueness on which the text relies. In addition, it’s not at all clear to me what being “generally incompetent” actually means (as opposed to “totally incompetent”?).
Be that as it may, the move from “all nazis are incompetent” and “they managed to take over x and do y” to “using something which we will tag as non-rationality might get you there even faster than using the opposite tag”, this move is plainly fallacious.
But even if we had sufficient data to support that argument, we would still be trapped in the meaning of “being nuts” (it’s the closest concept I found close to non-rationality in the text). How are we to understand “being nuts”?
“To “get things done”, the “things that work on a species level”, people who “achieve many of their goals” etc. these are vague references, vagueness on which the text relies.”
What I am calling on here, general ability to achieve stuff, is admittedly a fuzzy thing, but not any more fuzzy than Spearman’s g, and arguably less. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1LFWONlP_k is real, it’s something that actually happened, and there’s a strong correlation between your ability to pull it off and your ability to pull of other things that you might see as desirable, like military conquest, the evolutionary goal of having lots of offspring, pure hedonism, spreading your ideology to as many people as possible.
“How are we to understand “being nuts”?”
The belief in things which are blatantly obviously false, like huge nonexistent islands from which the “Aryan Race” was supposed to have originated?
Maybe the terminology is a little sloppy. To “get things done”, the “things that work on a species level”, people who “achieve many of their goals” etc. these are vague references, vagueness on which the text relies. In addition, it’s not at all clear to me what being “generally incompetent” actually means (as opposed to “totally incompetent”?).
Be that as it may, the move from “all nazis are incompetent” and “they managed to take over x and do y” to “using something which we will tag as non-rationality might get you there even faster than using the opposite tag”, this move is plainly fallacious.
But even if we had sufficient data to support that argument, we would still be trapped in the meaning of “being nuts” (it’s the closest concept I found close to non-rationality in the text). How are we to understand “being nuts”?
“To “get things done”, the “things that work on a species level”, people who “achieve many of their goals” etc. these are vague references, vagueness on which the text relies.”
What I am calling on here, general ability to achieve stuff, is admittedly a fuzzy thing, but not any more fuzzy than Spearman’s g, and arguably less. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1LFWONlP_k is real, it’s something that actually happened, and there’s a strong correlation between your ability to pull it off and your ability to pull of other things that you might see as desirable, like military conquest, the evolutionary goal of having lots of offspring, pure hedonism, spreading your ideology to as many people as possible.
“How are we to understand “being nuts”?”
The belief in things which are blatantly obviously false, like huge nonexistent islands from which the “Aryan Race” was supposed to have originated?