L. : While obviously being rational is good, LW as a community seems to be promoting elitism and entitlement.
s: Rationality can be scary that way. But it is about seeking truth, and the community does happen to consist of smart people. Denying that is false humility. Similarly, a lot of ideas many people support just happen to be false. It’s not our fault that our society got it wrong on so many issues. We’re just after truth.
L. : How does it serve truth to label people which aren’t smart as mentally ill?
s: That’s terrible, of course. But that’s not a flaw of rationality, nothing about rationality dictates “you have to be cruel to other people”. In fact if you think about this really hard you’ll see that rationality usually dictates being nice.
L: Then how come this post on LessWrong is the most upvoted thing of the last 20 submissions?
s: …
s: I can’t defend that.
L. : Oh, okay. So I’m right and Yudkowsky’s site does promote entitlement and sexism.
s: wait, sexism?
L. : Yeah. The last thing I saw from LW was two men talking about what a woman needs to do to fit the role they want her to have in society.
s: Okay, but that’s not Yudkowsky’s fault! He is not responsible for everyone on LW! The sequences don’t promote sexism-
L. : I heard HPMoR is sexist, too.
s: That’s not remotely true. It actually promotes feminism. Hermione is-
L. : I’m sorry, but I think I value the thoughts of other people who are more knowledgeable about sexism over yours. At least you condemn this article, but you still hang out on this site.
Scott Alexander has said that it’s society’s biggest mistake to turn away from intelligence (can’t find the article). Even minor increases of intelligence correlate meaningfully with all sorts of things (a negative correlation with crime being one of them afaik). Intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe. A few intelligence points on the people working on Friendly AI right now could determine the fate of our entire species. I want to make it extra clear that I think intelligence is ultra-important and almost universally good.
None of this excuses this article. None of it suggests that it’s somehow okay to label stupid people as mentally ill. Rationality is about winning, and this article is losing in every sense of the word. It won’t be good for the reputation of LW, it won’t be good for our agenda, and it won’t be good for the pursuit of truth. The only expected positive effect is making people who read it feel good. It essentially says “being intelligent is good. Being stupid is bad. Other people are stupid. They are the problem. We are better than them.” Which is largely true, but as helpful as making an IQ test, and emailing a friend saying “look here I am verifiable smarter than you and being smart is the most important thing in our society!”
Okay, but that’s not a content critique. I just said I think this is bad and went from there. If the article was actually making a strong case, well then it could still be bad for having an unnecessarily insulting and harmful framing that is bad for our cause, but it might be defend-able on other grounds. Maybe. We want to do both; to win and to pursue truth, and those aren’t the same thing. But I strongly feel the article doesn’t succeed on that front, either. Let’s take a look.
It’s great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong.
sure.
The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:
seems to be true.
“Stupidity,” like “depression,” is a sloppy “common-sense” word that we apply to different conditions, which may be caused by genetics (for instance, mutations in the M1 or M3 pathways, or two copies of Thr92Ala), deep subconscious conditioning (e.g., religion), general health issues (like not getting enough sleep), environment (ignorance, lack of reward for intelligent behavior), or bad habits of thought.
There is an implicit assumption here that being stupid requires some kind of explanation, but nothing at all in the article provides a reason of why this would be the case. Stupidity is not depression. The reason why it makes sense to label depression as a mental illness is (I assume) that it corresponds to an anomaly in the territory. Suppose we had a function, depressedness(human, time) which displayed how depressed each person on earth has been for, say, the past 10 years. I would expect to see weird behavior of that function, strange peaks over intervals of time on various people, many of whom don’t have unusually high values most of the time. This would suggest that it is something to be treated.
If you did the same for intelligence, I’d expect relatively low change on the time axis (aside from an increase at young age and a decrease in the case of actual mental illnesses) and some kind of mathematically typical distribution among the person axis ranging from 60 to dunno 170 or something. I feel really strange about having to make this argument, but this is really the crux of the problem here. The article doesn’t argue “here and here are stats suggesting that there are anomalies with this function, therefore there is a thing which we could sensibly describe as a mental illness” it just says “some people are dumb, here are some dumb things they do, let’s label that mental illness.” To sum the fallacy committed here up in one sentence, it talks about a thing without explaining why that thing should exist.
It is implied that people being ashamed of admitting to depression is a problem, and I infer that the intention is to make being stupid feel less bad by labeling their condition a “mental illness.” But it clearly fails in this regard, and is almost certainly more likely to do the opposite.. It’s sort of a Lose-Lose dynamic: it implies that there is some specific thing influencing a natural distribution of intelligence, some special condition that covers “stupid “people which explains why they are stupid – which likely isn’t the case, in that way having low IQ is probably worse than the article was meant to imply, since there is no special condition, you just got the lower end of the stick – while also being framed in such a way that it will make unintelligent people feel worse than before, not better.
And where is the reverse causation of believing in religion causing stupidity coming from? Postulating an idea like this ought to require evidence.
The article goes on to say that we should do something to make people smarter. I totally, completely, whole-heartedly agree. But saying high IQ is better than low IQ is something that can and has been done without all of the other stuff attached to it. And research in that direction is being done already. If you wanted to make a case for why we should have more of that, then you could do that so much more effectively without all the negativity attached to it.
Here are the accusations I am making. I accuse this article of not making a good case for anything that is both true and non-obvious, on top of being offensive and harmful for our reputation, and consequently our agenda. (Even if it is correct and there is an irregularity in the intelligence function, it doesn’t make a good case.) I believe that if arguments of the same quality were brought forth on any other topic, the article would be treated the same way most articles with weak content are treated: with indifference, few upvotes, and perhaps one or two comments pointing out some flaws in it (if Omega appeared before me, I would bet a lot of money on that theory with a pretty poor ratio). I’ll go as far as to accuse upvoting this as a failure of rationality. I agree with Pimgd on everything they said, but I feel like it is important to point out how awful this article is, rather than treating it as a simple point of disagreement. The fact that this has 12 upvotes is really, really really bad, and a symptom of a much larger problem.
This is not how you are being nice. This is not how you promote rationality. This is not how you win.
It essentially says “being intelligent is good. Being stupid is bad. Other people are stupid. They are the problem. We are better than them.”
I don’t think that’s all what the article is about.
There’s also the fact that our society only allows people to take drugs to fix illnesses. If you redefine what happens to be an illness you redefine what can be treated with drugs. You redefine what drugs get developed by Big Pharma. You redefine what our insurance system pays for.
There’s a reason about why we care about whether the FDA sees aging as a disease.
It might be that the present administration completely deregulated the FDA so that we can treat things that aren’t illnesses with drugs, but that’s not where we are at the moment.
I might be able to easily buy coffee because of its tradition but I can’t buy modafinil as easily.
A company that wants to develop a proper drug that raises the IQ of a person from 90 to 100 likely wouldn’t get FDA approval for that if they couldn’t argue that it cures a proper illness.
Well, there are these words and expression sprinkled throughout your comment:
… promoting elitism and entitlement … and sexism … value the thoughts of other people who are more knowledgeable about sexism over yours … being offensive and harmful …
All of this seems to go deeper than “mannerisms”.
Your basic beef with the post seems to be that it is mean and insensitive and I think such an approach missed the post’s main point. It seems that you think the main point is to stigmatize stupid people, label them sub-human, and, possibly, subject them to mandatory treatments with drugs and such. I think the main point is to stress that stupidity is not an unchanging natural condition (“sky is blue, water is wet, some people are stupid”) but something that could be changed.
No, I fully acknowledge that the post tries to do those things, see the second half of my reply. I argue that it fails at doing so but is harmful for our reputation etc.
So if both you and me clearly understand the main point, and if the main point seems reasonably uncontroversial (everyone agrees that it’s better to be smart than to be dumb, right?), then why do you describe this post as an epic fail? I’m sure that it makes some people’s undergarments undergo interesting topological transformations, but that’s hardly unusual or cause for such a.. forceful rejection.
I feel like I am repeating myself. Here is the chain of arguments
1) A normal person seeing this article and its upvote count will walk away having a very negative view of LessWrong (reasons in my original reply)
2) Making the valid points of this article is in no way dependent on the negative consequences of 1). You could do the same (in fact, a better job at the same) without offending anyone.
3) LessWrong can be a gateway for people to care about existential risk and AI safety.
4) AI safety is arguably the biggest problem in the world right now and extremely low efforts go into solving it, globally speaking.
5) Due to 4) getting people to care about AI safety is extrmely important. Due to that and 3), harming the reputation of LessWrong is really bad
6) Therefore, this article is awful, harmful, and should be resented by everyone.
A normal person seeing this article and its upvote count will walk away having a very negative view of LessWrong
I feel it very much depends on your idea of a “normal person”.
Someone I consider a “normal person” would zone out after the first couple of paragraphs and go do something else. People who are sufficiently abnormal to finish that post (but still someone I’d consider “close to normal”) would NOT walk away with a very negative view of LW.
Clearly we have a different idea of what’s normal or close-to-normal.
LessWrong can be a gateway for people to care about existential risk and AI safety.
Citation needed. Especially in 2017. I think you’re mistaken about the direction of causality.
Due to 4) getting people to care about AI safety is extrmely important. Due to 3), harming the reputation of LessWrong is really bad
Oh, boy.
First let me point out that people who I would consider as close-to-normal, on hearing that chain of logic would make an rude gesture (physically or mentally, depending on how polite they are) and classify you as a crank they should probably keep away from. What did you call it? ah! “harming the reputation of LW”.
Second, do you really believe that the best way to attract people to LW is to be as… milquetoast as possible?
Third, let’s look at me. Here I am, snarking at everyone and generally unwilling to give out gold stars and express benevolence and empathy towards clueless newbies (and not only newbies). Doesn’t it follow that I’m a great threat to the safety of humanity? Something must be done! Think of the children!
I’m not sure where you’re from, or what the composition of your social circle is, Lumifer—but I think you should find as many people as you can (or use whatever reasonable metric you have for determining a “normal person”) and say: “Being stupid is a disease. The first step to destigmatizing this disease is to stop making fun of stupid people; I too am guilty of this,” and then observe the reaction you get.
Personally, I’m baffled as to how you could think that this wouldn’t engender a negative response from someone who’s never been on LW before.
That being said, simply changing the theme from “anti-stupidity” to “pro-intelligence” would change the post dramatically.
I expect most of my social circle to agree that stupidity is a pathological condition (“disease” is too much associated with infections and contagion for me), albeit very widespread. I don’t know why would you want to destigmatize is, though—incentives matter.
We can have the idea that something is changeable about people (e.g. fitness levels) without having to label its lack an illness.
I can see where silver is coming from. The language in this article is probably harmful. Imagine a bunch of body builders calling a nerds inability to bench press 50KG an illness, which can be fixed by steroids.
We can have the idea that something is changeable about people (e.g. fitness levels) without having to label its lack an illness.
True
The language in this article is probably harmful
I don’t understand what that means.
Imagine a bunch of body builders calling a nerds inability to bench press 50KG an illness, which can be fixed by steroids.
Not a very good metaphor, I think, because inability to bench press is, generally speaking, fixable by practice (that is, weightlifting). Low IQ is not fixable by practice. Moreover, I don’t think that the OP advocates specifically drugs—he advocates something-anything which works. At the moment we have nothing that works.
I don’t believe you, and I’m especially skeptical of IQ—and a lot of other fetishizations of overly confident attempts to exactly quantify hugely abstract and fluffy concepts like intelligence.
You don’t have to believe me: there is a LOT of literature on the subject. IQ research—precisely because it’s so controversial—is one of the more robust parts of psychology. It does not suffer from a replication crisis and its basic conclusions have been re-confirmed over and over again.
Me: We could be more successful at increasing general human intelligence if we looked at low intelligence as something that people didn’t have to be ashamed of, and that could be remedied, much as how we now try to look at depression and other mental illness as illness—a condition which can often be treated and which people don’t need to be ashamed of.
You: YOU MONSTER! You want to call stupidity “mental illness”, and mental illness is a bad and shameful thing!
I think this whole problem is a bit more nuanced than you seem to suggest here. I can’t help but at least tentatively give some credit to the assertion that LW is, for lack of a better term, mildly elitist. To be sure, for perhaps roughly the right reasons, but being elitist in whatever measure tends to be detrimental to the chances of getting your point across, especially if it needs to be elucidated to the very folks you’re elitist towards ;) Not many behaviors are judged more repulsive than being made to feel a lesser person… I’d say it’s pretty close to a cultural universal.
It’s not right to assert that if one does not agree with your suggestion that stupidity is to be seen as a type of affliction of the same type or category as mental illness, one therefore is disparaging mental illness as shameful; This is a false dichotomy. One can disagree with you for other reasons, not in the least for reasons as remote from shame as evolution… it is nowhere close to a given that nature cares even a single bit about whatever might end up being called intelligence. You will note that most creatures seem to have just the right CPU for their “lifestyle”, and while it might be easy for us to imagine how, say, a dog might benefit from being smarter, I’d sooner call that a round-about way of anthropomorphizing than a probable truth.
Exhibit B seems to be the most convincing observation that, by the look of things, wanting to “go for max IQ” is hardly on evolution’s To-Do list… us, primates, dolphins and a handful of birds aside, most creatures seem perfectly content with being fairly dim and instinct-driven, if the behaviours and habits exhibited by animals are a reliable indication ;) I’ll be quiet about the elephant in the room that the vast majority of our important motivations are emotional and non-rational, too...
What’s more—and I am actually curious what you will respond to this… it could be said that animals, all animals, are more rational than human beings; after all, they don’t waste “CPU cycles” on beliefs, vague whataboutery, or theories about how to “deal” with the less intellectually gifted among their kind ;) So while humans might be walking around with a Dual 12-core Xeon in their heads, at any given moment 8 cores are basically wasting cycles on barely productive nonsense; a chicken might just have a Pentium MMX, but it is 100% dedicated to the task of fetching the next worm and ensuring the right location to drop that egg without cracking it...
a thought/idea can only go so far before they fall on deaf ears.
Does not matter how “rational” a thought is...if you cannot convey it to people...you just have an idea that is in your head.
L. : While obviously being rational is good, LW as a community seems to be promoting elitism and entitlement.
s: Rationality can be scary that way. But it is about seeking truth, and the community does happen to consist of smart people. Denying that is false humility. Similarly, a lot of ideas many people support just happen to be false. It’s not our fault that our society got it wrong on so many issues. We’re just after truth.
L. : How does it serve truth to label people which aren’t smart as mentally ill?
s: That’s terrible, of course. But that’s not a flaw of rationality, nothing about rationality dictates “you have to be cruel to other people”. In fact if you think about this really hard you’ll see that rationality usually dictates being nice.
L: Then how come this post on LessWrong is the most upvoted thing of the last 20 submissions?
s: …
s: I can’t defend that.
L. : Oh, okay. So I’m right and Yudkowsky’s site does promote entitlement and sexism.
s: wait, sexism?
L. : Yeah. The last thing I saw from LW was two men talking about what a woman needs to do to fit the role they want her to have in society.
s: Okay, but that’s not Yudkowsky’s fault! He is not responsible for everyone on LW! The sequences don’t promote sexism-
L. : I heard HPMoR is sexist, too.
s: That’s not remotely true. It actually promotes feminism. Hermione is-
L. : I’m sorry, but I think I value the thoughts of other people who are more knowledgeable about sexism over yours. At least you condemn this article, but you still hang out on this site.
Scott Alexander has said that it’s society’s biggest mistake to turn away from intelligence (can’t find the article). Even minor increases of intelligence correlate meaningfully with all sorts of things (a negative correlation with crime being one of them afaik). Intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe. A few intelligence points on the people working on Friendly AI right now could determine the fate of our entire species. I want to make it extra clear that I think intelligence is ultra-important and almost universally good.
None of this excuses this article. None of it suggests that it’s somehow okay to label stupid people as mentally ill. Rationality is about winning, and this article is losing in every sense of the word. It won’t be good for the reputation of LW, it won’t be good for our agenda, and it won’t be good for the pursuit of truth. The only expected positive effect is making people who read it feel good. It essentially says “being intelligent is good. Being stupid is bad. Other people are stupid. They are the problem. We are better than them.” Which is largely true, but as helpful as making an IQ test, and emailing a friend saying “look here I am verifiable smarter than you and being smart is the most important thing in our society!”
Okay, but that’s not a content critique. I just said I think this is bad and went from there. If the article was actually making a strong case, well then it could still be bad for having an unnecessarily insulting and harmful framing that is bad for our cause, but it might be defend-able on other grounds. Maybe. We want to do both; to win and to pursue truth, and those aren’t the same thing. But I strongly feel the article doesn’t succeed on that front, either. Let’s take a look.
sure.
seems to be true.
There is an implicit assumption here that being stupid requires some kind of explanation, but nothing at all in the article provides a reason of why this would be the case. Stupidity is not depression. The reason why it makes sense to label depression as a mental illness is (I assume) that it corresponds to an anomaly in the territory. Suppose we had a function, depressedness(human, time) which displayed how depressed each person on earth has been for, say, the past 10 years. I would expect to see weird behavior of that function, strange peaks over intervals of time on various people, many of whom don’t have unusually high values most of the time. This would suggest that it is something to be treated.
If you did the same for intelligence, I’d expect relatively low change on the time axis (aside from an increase at young age and a decrease in the case of actual mental illnesses) and some kind of mathematically typical distribution among the person axis ranging from 60 to dunno 170 or something. I feel really strange about having to make this argument, but this is really the crux of the problem here. The article doesn’t argue “here and here are stats suggesting that there are anomalies with this function, therefore there is a thing which we could sensibly describe as a mental illness” it just says “some people are dumb, here are some dumb things they do, let’s label that mental illness.” To sum the fallacy committed here up in one sentence, it talks about a thing without explaining why that thing should exist.
It is implied that people being ashamed of admitting to depression is a problem, and I infer that the intention is to make being stupid feel less bad by labeling their condition a “mental illness.” But it clearly fails in this regard, and is almost certainly more likely to do the opposite.. It’s sort of a Lose-Lose dynamic: it implies that there is some specific thing influencing a natural distribution of intelligence, some special condition that covers “stupid “people which explains why they are stupid – which likely isn’t the case, in that way having low IQ is probably worse than the article was meant to imply, since there is no special condition, you just got the lower end of the stick – while also being framed in such a way that it will make unintelligent people feel worse than before, not better.
And where is the reverse causation of believing in religion causing stupidity coming from? Postulating an idea like this ought to require evidence.
The article goes on to say that we should do something to make people smarter. I totally, completely, whole-heartedly agree. But saying high IQ is better than low IQ is something that can and has been done without all of the other stuff attached to it. And research in that direction is being done already. If you wanted to make a case for why we should have more of that, then you could do that so much more effectively without all the negativity attached to it.
Here are the accusations I am making. I accuse this article of not making a good case for anything that is both true and non-obvious, on top of being offensive and harmful for our reputation, and consequently our agenda. (Even if it is correct and there is an irregularity in the intelligence function, it doesn’t make a good case.) I believe that if arguments of the same quality were brought forth on any other topic, the article would be treated the same way most articles with weak content are treated: with indifference, few upvotes, and perhaps one or two comments pointing out some flaws in it (if Omega appeared before me, I would bet a lot of money on that theory with a pretty poor ratio). I’ll go as far as to accuse upvoting this as a failure of rationality. I agree with Pimgd on everything they said, but I feel like it is important to point out how awful this article is, rather than treating it as a simple point of disagreement. The fact that this has 12 upvotes is really, really really bad, and a symptom of a much larger problem.
This is not how you are being nice. This is not how you promote rationality. This is not how you win.
I don’t think that’s all what the article is about.
There’s also the fact that our society only allows people to take drugs to fix illnesses. If you redefine what happens to be an illness you redefine what can be treated with drugs. You redefine what drugs get developed by Big Pharma. You redefine what our insurance system pays for.
There’s a reason about why we care about whether the FDA sees aging as a disease.
It might be that the present administration completely deregulated the FDA so that we can treat things that aren’t illnesses with drugs, but that’s not where we are at the moment.
Oh, really?
A better approach would be to notice that only the regulated bioactives are called “drugs”.
I might be able to easily buy coffee because of its tradition but I can’t buy modafinil as easily.
A company that wants to develop a proper drug that raises the IQ of a person from 90 to 100 likely wouldn’t get FDA approval for that if they couldn’t argue that it cures a proper illness.
I am a bit confused by this comment.
Is it, basically, a rant how LW is not woke enough?
It’s about a set of mannerisms which many people on LW have that are really bad. I don’t know what you mean by woke.
Well, there are these words and expression sprinkled throughout your comment:
All of this seems to go deeper than “mannerisms”.
Your basic beef with the post seems to be that it is mean and insensitive and I think such an approach missed the post’s main point. It seems that you think the main point is to stigmatize stupid people, label them sub-human, and, possibly, subject them to mandatory treatments with drugs and such. I think the main point is to stress that stupidity is not an unchanging natural condition (“sky is blue, water is wet, some people are stupid”) but something that could be changed.
No, I fully acknowledge that the post tries to do those things, see the second half of my reply. I argue that it fails at doing so but is harmful for our reputation etc.
So if both you and me clearly understand the main point, and if the main point seems reasonably uncontroversial (everyone agrees that it’s better to be smart than to be dumb, right?), then why do you describe this post as an epic fail? I’m sure that it makes some people’s undergarments undergo interesting topological transformations, but that’s hardly unusual or cause for such a.. forceful rejection.
I feel like I am repeating myself. Here is the chain of arguments
1) A normal person seeing this article and its upvote count will walk away having a very negative view of LessWrong (reasons in my original reply)
2) Making the valid points of this article is in no way dependent on the negative consequences of 1). You could do the same (in fact, a better job at the same) without offending anyone.
3) LessWrong can be a gateway for people to care about existential risk and AI safety.
4) AI safety is arguably the biggest problem in the world right now and extremely low efforts go into solving it, globally speaking.
5) Due to 4) getting people to care about AI safety is extrmely important. Due to that and 3), harming the reputation of LessWrong is really bad
6) Therefore, this article is awful, harmful, and should be resented by everyone.
I feel it very much depends on your idea of a “normal person”.
Someone I consider a “normal person” would zone out after the first couple of paragraphs and go do something else. People who are sufficiently abnormal to finish that post (but still someone I’d consider “close to normal”) would NOT walk away with a very negative view of LW.
Clearly we have a different idea of what’s normal or close-to-normal.
Citation needed. Especially in 2017. I think you’re mistaken about the direction of causality.
Oh, boy.
First let me point out that people who I would consider as close-to-normal, on hearing that chain of logic would make an rude gesture (physically or mentally, depending on how polite they are) and classify you as a crank they should probably keep away from. What did you call it? ah! “harming the reputation of LW”.
Second, do you really believe that the best way to attract people to LW is to be as… milquetoast as possible?
Third, let’s look at me. Here I am, snarking at everyone and generally unwilling to give out gold stars and express benevolence and empathy towards clueless newbies (and not only newbies). Doesn’t it follow that I’m a great threat to the safety of humanity? Something must be done! Think of the children!
I’m not sure where you’re from, or what the composition of your social circle is, Lumifer—but I think you should find as many people as you can (or use whatever reasonable metric you have for determining a “normal person”) and say: “Being stupid is a disease. The first step to destigmatizing this disease is to stop making fun of stupid people; I too am guilty of this,” and then observe the reaction you get.
Personally, I’m baffled as to how you could think that this wouldn’t engender a negative response from someone who’s never been on LW before.
That being said, simply changing the theme from “anti-stupidity” to “pro-intelligence” would change the post dramatically.
I expect most of my social circle to agree that stupidity is a pathological condition (“disease” is too much associated with infections and contagion for me), albeit very widespread. I don’t know why would you want to destigmatize is, though—incentives matter.
We can have the idea that something is changeable about people (e.g. fitness levels) without having to label its lack an illness.
I can see where silver is coming from. The language in this article is probably harmful. Imagine a bunch of body builders calling a nerds inability to bench press 50KG an illness, which can be fixed by steroids.
True
I don’t understand what that means.
Not a very good metaphor, I think, because inability to bench press is, generally speaking, fixable by practice (that is, weightlifting). Low IQ is not fixable by practice. Moreover, I don’t think that the OP advocates specifically drugs—he advocates something-anything which works. At the moment we have nothing that works.
I don’t believe you, and I’m especially skeptical of IQ—and a lot of other fetishizations of overly confident attempts to exactly quantify hugely abstract and fluffy concepts like intelligence.
You don’t have to believe me: there is a LOT of literature on the subject. IQ research—precisely because it’s so controversial—is one of the more robust parts of psychology. It does not suffer from a replication crisis and its basic conclusions have been re-confirmed over and over again.
Me: We could be more successful at increasing general human intelligence if we looked at low intelligence as something that people didn’t have to be ashamed of, and that could be remedied, much as how we now try to look at depression and other mental illness as illness—a condition which can often be treated and which people don’t need to be ashamed of.
You: YOU MONSTER! You want to call stupidity “mental illness”, and mental illness is a bad and shameful thing!
I think this whole problem is a bit more nuanced than you seem to suggest here. I can’t help but at least tentatively give some credit to the assertion that LW is, for lack of a better term, mildly elitist. To be sure, for perhaps roughly the right reasons, but being elitist in whatever measure tends to be detrimental to the chances of getting your point across, especially if it needs to be elucidated to the very folks you’re elitist towards ;) Not many behaviors are judged more repulsive than being made to feel a lesser person… I’d say it’s pretty close to a cultural universal.
It’s not right to assert that if one does not agree with your suggestion that stupidity is to be seen as a type of affliction of the same type or category as mental illness, one therefore is disparaging mental illness as shameful; This is a false dichotomy. One can disagree with you for other reasons, not in the least for reasons as remote from shame as evolution… it is nowhere close to a given that nature cares even a single bit about whatever might end up being called intelligence. You will note that most creatures seem to have just the right CPU for their “lifestyle”, and while it might be easy for us to imagine how, say, a dog might benefit from being smarter, I’d sooner call that a round-about way of anthropomorphizing than a probable truth.
Exhibit B seems to be the most convincing observation that, by the look of things, wanting to “go for max IQ” is hardly on evolution’s To-Do list… us, primates, dolphins and a handful of birds aside, most creatures seem perfectly content with being fairly dim and instinct-driven, if the behaviours and habits exhibited by animals are a reliable indication ;) I’ll be quiet about the elephant in the room that the vast majority of our important motivations are emotional and non-rational, too...
What’s more—and I am actually curious what you will respond to this… it could be said that animals, all animals, are more rational than human beings; after all, they don’t waste “CPU cycles” on beliefs, vague whataboutery, or theories about how to “deal” with the less intellectually gifted among their kind ;) So while humans might be walking around with a Dual 12-core Xeon in their heads, at any given moment 8 cores are basically wasting cycles on barely productive nonsense; a chicken might just have a Pentium MMX, but it is 100% dedicated to the task of fetching the next worm and ensuring the right location to drop that egg without cracking it...
Well said!
a thought/idea can only go so far before they fall on deaf ears. Does not matter how “rational” a thought is...if you cannot convey it to people...you just have an idea that is in your head.
I agree it isn’t nice. I upvoted it anyway, because it is a very original idea that merits a discussion with not entirely predictable outcomes.
This isn’t just the most-upvoted submission in a while, it is also the most-discussed in an even longer while.