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...
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...