My views on the probable nature of a person having a 400 IQ are as follows…a peace-maker at all levels, (human/human; human/animal; human/environment)…Why do I conceive of this being as so benign? The wisest sages through-out history have all emphasized the oneness and connectedness of all of creation. A truly aware person would see this…
__Member of Prometheus Society, imaging a creature with a 400 IQ
While no human in history has had a deviation IQ much beyond 200, Oprah’s 2,029 cc estimated brain size is arguably around what you would statistically expect from a 400 IQ being, and so was the wisdom she displayed in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It’s hard to think of a more disastrous decision for America than the 2003 U.S.-lead invasion to remove Saddam Hussein, which cost America an incalculable amount of blood, treasure, security, and political capital, and continues to wreak havoc today, so those who had the intellect, courage, and integrity to oppose the war before it began deserve a large amount of credit, particularly if they did so publicly; and it’s hard to think of anyone who did so more publicly than Oprah, who did so repeatedly.
Of course Oprah was not publicly opposed to the Iraq war from the start. After being bombarded with hate mail for doing a 2001 show asking whether war with Afghanistan was the only answer, she was not eager to appear anti-war when it came to Iraq too. Indeed in October 2002 she did an Iraq show that was largely pro-war, and where Oprah was dismissive of an anti-war audience member.
But by November 2002, Oprah had suddenly jumped off the media’s pro-war bandwagon. In his book Dude where’s my country? anti-war advocate Michael Moore praised her for being the only mainstream media at the time to show footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in the 1980s.
However the most significant anti-war show Oprah would do was a two-day special that aired the day after Colin Powell’s pivotal February 2003 U.N. speech making the case for war, which was credited with shifting public opinion in favor of regime change. Winfrey recruited reporters from CNN to gather clips from people from countries as diverse as Britain, France, South Africa, Iraq, and Pakistan all trying to persuade America not to go to war, along with anti-war luminaries like Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II. Here’s a brief clip from that show.
Buzzflash.com claimed there was a deliberate attempt to stop the show from airing in some markets:
Bush pre-empted Oprah for no reason other than to stop her broadcast regarding Iraq and insert his own propaganda!…In the middle of the show a “Special News Report” notice came up, then Peter Jennings announced Bush would be making a MAJOR announcement on Iraq. Then Bush and Powell came in and Bush summarized what Powell had said yesterday at the UN. He spent about 20 minutes in all…The Administration would have known the content and timing of today’s show because it is broadcast live and/or in the morning in many markets such as Oprah’s home base in Chicago. This was in such bad form I couldn’t believe it! I called Harpo Studios in Chicago to let them know and they said they had received a lot of phone calls. I said Oprah should tell her audience what happened and that I thought Bush was purposely interfering with her show. They commented they didn’t know what the reason was and in any case there was no way to prove anything
Academics for Justice made the same assertion:
Today, Oprah Winfrey started a two-part series focusing on the impending U.S. war on Iraq. About halfway through the show the broadcast was pre-empted by coverage of Pres. George Bush, with Colin Powell at his side, reading a prepared statement on Iraq. The coincidental timing of this pre-emptive press statement raised immediate questions about the motives of the White House war strategists. Students of the Civil Rights Movement will recall an incident in 1964 when activist Fannie Lou Hamer sat before a live television audience and gave a riveting account of the oppression she and other Blacks faced in the South. President Lyndon Johnson was so convinced of the power of her appeal to undermine his own political/racial agenda, that he hastily called a press conference to pull cameras away from Hamer’s impassioned revelations…The pre-emption of Winfrey’s show today should be seen in the same light. Oprah’s audience is a vast and powerful—but largely apolitical—force of middle-class white women. It is likely that most did not watch Colin Powell’s live testimony at the U.N. yesterday. In fact, it is likely that this huge audience was being oriented to the issues of the Iraq war for the first time…The first 30 minutes of the show was decidedly anti-war and highlighted not only worldwide unanimity in opposition to the war but presented many of the heretofore unheard voices of ordinary people speaking forcefully against Bush’s motives
Undeterred by the alleged attempt to stop part of her February 2003 anti-war shows from airing, Oprah made one last ditch attempt to stop the war in March 2003. Just 48 hours before the war the began, Oprah aired an anti-war show that included Michael Moore and the following shocking video:
Shortly after the show aired, Harvard Law grad Ben Shapiro condemned the show, calling Oprah a dangerously powerful political force, shaping the views of millions with her ignorant views and wacky reasoning. However Canada’s most respected media critic, John Doyle of the Globe and Mail, praised the show as “an act of extraordinary intelligence from Oprah”
Doyle wrote:
At a time when the consensus in American television is that everybody should pull together and support the men and women in the U.S. military, what Oprah Winfrey did was outright subversion. In the last week, Clear Channel, Worldwide Inc., America’s largest radio conglomerate (and a company looking for a break from the U.S. government), has been organizing pro-Bush and pro-war rallies and then reporting on them. A Nashville TV station has been charging local advertisers to take part in an on-air, support the military campaign and gloating about the profits. That’s just the tip of it…In normal circumstances, the perspectives [Oprah] presented would not be notable, but in the contemporary context, they were amazing.
The decision to invade or not invade Iraq was arguably the most important test of the courage, integrity, and yes, intelligence, that America’s leadership has faced in the last half century. Thus it seems marvelously symbolic that Oprah, arguably the biggest brained member of America’s elite ultimately passed that test with such flying colours, and got on the right side of history.
Pumpkin Person 
Obama did promise peace and reconcilliation with the world. Since he became president and saw the whole picture he’s changed, not retoric so much but what he does. Some say he pursues the interests of xxxx more ruthlessly than Bush.
The thing is, it’s easy to say the Iraq war was a mistake, and ignore the great liberation it brought to the kurds for instance. It is easy when don’t have the whole picture, and don’t know how the alternative would have played out.
Lol it really wasn’t that hard of a call. Most experts disagreed. Oprah, being smart, probably understood that the experts disagreed and knew that acting without consensus was foolhardy.
BUT SERIOUSLY….
you really have a thing for Oprah….
Jonathan Franzen wrote me an e-mail. He said this blog is crap.
Most of the people the media considered experts on the war got it wrong
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/17/stop_treating_war_crazy_buffoons_as_experts_they_got_it_wrong_remember/
Just as most of the people the media considered experts on IQ got IQ wrong
Those aren’t “most of the people.” Those are neo-con talking heads, lol. The ACTUAL EXPERTS disagreed.
And I don’t think Flynn, Nisbett, etc. have got ‘IQ wrong.’ That’s just your opinion against consensus.
Neocon talking heads are who the media annointed as the experts & continues to, to a large unjustified degree
‘Neocon talking heads are who the media annointed as the experts & continues to, to a large unjustified degree’
….and?
Has no bearing on the point. It’s very easy to find who actual experts are versus “talking heads.” I’m sure the average yokel believes that Bill O’Reilly is an expert on whatever subject he decides to speak about, too.
Of course, it’s not just a function of “expertise,” as I’ve said. Experts who work in the scientific method and subject their opinions to peer review have the highest credibility. That is why scientific consensus is important.
Speaking of peer review, let’s see how the Pioneer Fund doles out grant money:
“Although the fund typically gives away more than half a million dollars per year, there is no application form or set of guidelines. Instead, according to Weyher, an applicant merely submits “a letter containing a brief description of the nature of the research and the amount of the grant requested.” There is no requirement for peer review of any kind; Pioneer’s board of directors—two attorneys, two engineers, and an investment broker—decides, sometimes within a day, whether a particular research proposal merits funding. Once the grant has been made, there is no requirement for an interim or final report or even for an acknowledgment by a grantee that Pioneer has been the source of support, all atypical practices in comparison to other organizations that support scientific research”
lol.
The point is you can find experts on virtually every side of virtually every issue, but the ones given the most credibility by the media, academia & peer reviewed publications tend to be those who are palatable to the powerful . That’s why it’s extremely naive to take expert consensus as gospel; you must judge the evidence & arguments on their own merits. Christopher Langan said much the same about academia. People are allowed to make little incremental changes here & there but they’re not really allowed to do anything too radical
‘The point is you can find experts on virtually every side of virtually every issue, but the ones given the most credibility by the media, academia & peer reviewed publications tend to be those who are palatable to the powerful’
You can find particular experts on any side of the issue. But it is very difficult, in fields with peer review, to gain consensus. Every expert has an interest in disproving any theory put forward. Experts who are “palatable to the powerful,” may gain disproportionate influence — but they will not gain consensus or represent the consensus in many cases.
‘That’s why it’s extremely naive to take expert consensus as gospel; you must judge the evidence & arguments on their own merits’
That’s nice in theory. But in real life, individuals simply are not literate in many fields. Even an individual with a bachelor’s degree will be out of his league when trying to discuss a topic with an individual in the same field who has a PhD. So your “ability to judge arguments on their own merits” is likely much less astute than you believe.
‘People are allowed to make little incremental changes here & there but they’re not really allowed to do anything too radical’
Another nice theory, but good arguments make waves in the literature. Special Relativity changed the world in 1905. By 1911 most theoretical physicists accepted the theory. Darwin’s theory of evolution changed the world in the late 1850’s. Depending on who you ask, between 5-30 years later, it was accepted by scientists. The only part that had trouble gaining acceptance was natural selection, and that was because sufficient data didn’t exist until the early 20th century to establish natural selection as the mechanism.
So, sure, don’t take expert consensus as gospel. But is it overturned or even seriously questioned by blog posts that rehash selective data sets? No, AINEC.
langan like pp is a prole and a liar. he’s an idiot obviously, and knows nothing about natural science at all.
I do want to bring up the fact that actual eminent scientists, even in the field of psychology, are aware of and take seriously WMC’s criticism:
“Most studies estimate that the heritability of IQ is somewhere between .4 and .8 (and generally less for children), but it really makes no sense to talk about a single value for the heritability of intelligence. The heritability of a trait depends on the relative variances of the predictors, in this case genotype and environment. The concept of heritability has its origins in animal breeding, where variation in genotype and environment is under the control of the experimenter, and under these conditions the concept has some real-world applications. In freeranging humans, however, variability is uncontrolled, there is no “true” degree of variation to estimate, and heritability can take practically any value for any trait depending on the relative variability of genetic endowment and environment in the population being studied.”
HBDers discard and dismiss it. Yet another difference between scientists and HBDers….legitimate scientists acknowledge the limitations of their methods.
you’re too kind to hereditists.
it’s not that they ignore it, it’s that they are quite incapable of understanding it. even when they give it lip service as have Charles “the cross burner” Murray and Steve Shoe, it is clear by everything else they say that they don’t understand it.
and the above quote from a “Promethean” demonstrates how utterly stupid the people in these high IQ societies are.
the very idea of an IQ of 400 is totally meaningless.
real IQ tests don’t measure anything above 160. and IQ of 400 is +20 SDs. so there would have to be as many people as there are atoms in the universe for just one of them to have such an IQ. or something like that.
it’s retarded.
The 400 IQ being was just a science fiction thought experiment. No one was suggesting one will show up anytime soon
If Steve was smart enoug to be an assistant professor of theoretical physics at Yale, i think he understands heritability
I seriously doubt your critiques of heritability require more abstract reasoning than theoretical physics. More likely he’s just comfortable making assumptions you’re uncomfortable making.
‘If Steve was smart enoug to be an assistant professor of theoretical physics at Yale, i think he understands heritability
I seriously doubt your critiques of heritability require more abstract reasoning than theoretical physics. More likely he’s just comfortable making assumptions you’re uncomfortable making.’
This arrogance results from ‘smartness is an innate and that’s that’ thinking. An individual believes that if he or she possesses an IQ of say, 150, then that must mean he or she can — without training — analyze an issue better than the trained scientist with a 120 IQ. Not necessarily so. The scientist has years of accumulated knowledge. A group of scientists…even more.
When there wasn’t a lot of knowledge to accumulate, because many modern fields were new, maybe there was some truth to these notions. Renaissance men were plentiful in the 1600-1800’s. However, all of the fields have now become far more complex, which is why professions are becoming increasingly specialized.
There’s a lot more to learning a field than “because I’m an X, and doing X requires smarts, I must be able to understand Y intimately with a little bit of research.”
except my own thinking on this issue, so far as there was any, has evolved fairly recently. not too long ago i thought much more like Hsu with regard to IQ, though on other psychological traits i’ve always been a skeptic and scoffer.
my natsci background is math/actuarial science and chemistry, and like nearly all such natsci types
i regard psychology as a pseudoscience along with economics, sociology, political science, etc.
so naturally i attribute my apostasy to being even smarter than Shoe.
there are two kinds of smarts at least. this is exemplified by the positional vs tactical chess player. steve is like Tal. i’m like Petrosian.
the fox and hedgehog again.
there are prodigies of information but idiots of understanding.
Shoe lacks subtlety.
he and his ilk have yet to grasp Hegel’s dialectic.
so Suzuki can say in so many hysterical words…
that’s great. that’s really great…
for me to poop on.
Understanding heritability requires more subtlety than theoretical physics? Unlikely
When I was in HS I thought like an HBDer about IQ, etc. Although I didn’t know it by the name of “HBD.” And I also never drew ANY of the policy suggestions that HBDers do from these supposed truths. If anything, the next rational step was higher taxation and more redistribution because a lot of the supposed “meritocracy” was a sham — most of it was unearned.
‘Understanding heritability requires more subtlety than theoretical physics? Unlikely’
No. But viewing heritability properly does require familiarity with the paradigm. New insight rests on old knowledge.
Macaca and his butt buddy Swanky Pete aren’t interested in what’s true.
Steve Hsu understands heritability well, and he’s supported in his presentation of issues by people like the recently deceased James Crow and Razib Khan who work in genetics.
If geneticists like Crow and Khan can talk intelligently with non-geneticists like Hsu and Cochran, then Macaca and Swanky should keep their mouths shut. They’re plainly not smart enough to comment on it.
Khan has a degree in genetics or some bioscience but he is not a geneticist any more than i’m a mathematician or chemist, because he does NOT work as a scientist.
un-prole yourself for God’s sake.
natscis tend to be liberals, just not as much as social “scientists”, but of course Swank is right and echoes Buffett. a silver spoon in your mouth and high IQ genes, supposing there are such things, aren’t that different. at the same time the from each according to his ability…can be taken too far.
anyone who joins the US military voluntarily is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. and given that 85% of officers are registered Republicans…85% of officers are buttboys. the man is their top.
Khan is a graduate student getting his PhD in feline population genetics. He’s not quite an expert yet.
And HBD taken as true is the ultimate argument for the welfare state.
according to one June 2014 article Khan is completing a PhD in feline population genetics at UCD and is 37.
good luck finding a tenure track academic post Razib. 😉
i gave up in my early 20s at a much more prestigious institution. i always knew that academic science was a Ponzi scheme. but i thought i might still be able to win it when i started.
Khan is a geneticist. He works in the field, has a degree in the science, and keeps up with the literature. He’s a geneticist.
And I notice neither one of you buttboys mentioned Crow, despite the fact he’s a thousand times more prestigious in the field than either Suzuki or the guy Macaca likes because he appeared on Charlie Rose.
Swank,
you can ignore Jim Crow. as usual PM is lying. Crow never said what PM thinks he said.
Sure he did.
KHAN: “Last year the paper put forward by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending and Jason Hardy that argued high Ashkenazi IQ was due to recent natural selection also ignited a firestorm. It seems that we are entering a new era of human genetics as a great deal of data will soon be available for theorists to analyze (e.g. the HapMap and its successors). Are “controversial” questions still going to be off limits, or will the science compel the political and cultural taboos to step aside?”
CROW: ” I hope that such questions can be approached with the same objectivity as that when we study inheritance of bristle number in Drosophila, but I don’t expect it soon. There are too many strongly held opinions. I thought Lahn had a clever idea in thinking that the normal alleles of head-reducing mutants might be responsible for evolution of larger heads in human ancestry. Likewise, I think that Cochran et al. are fully entitled to consider the reasons for Jewish intelligence and I found their arguments interesting. In my view it is wrong to say that research in this area — assuming it is well done — is out of order. I feel srongly that we should not discourage a line of research because someone might not like a possible outcome.”
Strange how James Crow, one of the most eminent geneticists of the 20th century, finds “interesting” and “worthy of further research” what Macaca claims no geneticist takes seriously.
There’s much more at the link, too. Macaca as usual doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. (But of course he did see a geneticist once on the Charlie Rose show.)
yet more lies.
do you ever argue with real people or just with the straw men in your head.
Jim Crow has never said anything remotely controversial on the topic.
of course Cockring’s theory is “interesting”. irony…
of course it’s a legit subject of investigation.
but all the people who’ve made it their subject thus far are incompetent morons.
As I have said earlier, many IQ tests are bogus because of how superficial they are. To tackle a subject deeply and wrestle with the ‘why.’ That will make for a slower start but better performance and better understanding. Notice that attitude also makes a difference.
“researchers found that IQ does not predict new learning — in other words, intelligence as measured by the IQ test does not indicate how likely students are to pick up new concepts or accumulate new skills. While children with higher IQs did have higher test scores from the beginning of the study, how much new material the kids learned over the years was not related to how smart they were, at least not once demographic factors were taken into account.
“Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students with low IQ have low math achievement,” Murayama says. “But IQ does not predict any growth in math achievement. It determines the starting point.”
So the children who improved in math over the years were disproportionately those who said they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with statements such as, “When doing math, the harder I try, the better I perform,” or “I invest a lot of effort in math, because I am interested in the subject”– even if they had not started out as high-achieving students. In contrast, kids who said they were motivated purely by the desire to get good grades saw no greater improvement over the average. As for study strategies, those who said they tried to forge connections between mathematical ideas typically improved faster than kids who employed more cursory rote-learning techniques.”
http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/26/motivation-not-iq-matters-most-for-learning-new-math-skills/
Macaca in a flop sweat writes:
But of course Crow completely agrees that human behavioral traits are shaped by genes in predictable ways – something Macaca claims no self-respecting geneticist would ever do.
Second, Crow’s on record agreeing (with qualifications) with Arthur Jensen’s infamous public splash in the field of psychometrics in 1969.
Oh dear, what will poor Macaca say next?
what next?
there is no next?
i only have to say the same things
OVER
AND
OVER AGAIN
AND YOU STILL CAN’T UNDERSTAND THEM.
you can’t even understand those you think compatriots.
only a moron joins the US military voluntarily.
and so it is seen in flashing neon light that the HBD “debate” is really just the debate of white-trash vs decent people…but as i’ve cited before in maps…the white trash have out bred the decent people in the US. and I suppose Thatcher was just the tip of the ice berg in the Shit-nited Kingdom.
the English speaking countries of the developed world, with the exception of Ireland, are
THE FOCUS OF EVIL IN THE MODERN WORLD.
I’m trying to be polite, but this is facepalm worthy. Holding a view that in retrospect is wrong does not preclude high-IQ. Many High-IQ neocons supported the war, and many high-IQ liberals opposed it.
Not sure who you’re responding to, but you’re right that high IQ people can be wrong.
But the neocons were not wrong, in my opinion, they were dishonest & evil. But they were brilliant because they got exactly what they wanted simply by typing columns in newspapers & have adapted the world to their advantage.
why be polite? pp is low iq procuress.
BBO series continue 🙂
That is why non-violent Jains are so smart…
Excellent point about Jains who are indeed peace makers at all levels
PP is demonstrating what a slow decline into mental illness looks like,
never explain by madness what can be explained by stupidity.
Hbd gossips.
Remember the name your blog, PSYCHOLOGY HORRORS, and have FOCUS. I think very creative you use ”horror pop movies” to discuss about hbd issues.
You are the most determinist iq hbd blogger i see since 2009. You are not a ”iq expert”, you are a ”iq fanatic”, like a celebritch fan.
In fact, many times you write righteous and very interesting observations but inside a stupid and nonsense topic. Savant text stylish, island of near-giftedness but around of mediocrity.
Self awareness is a very important component and ”specie-cognitive-diferenciation” component of human intelligence (separate us directly from animals). But its emphasis on ”iq” suffocate the development of good topic to be debated. Sad. Indeed, completely independent of ”iq levels”, most evolved humans will extremely self aware and aware about its connection with totality or God.
Oprah can have higher iq, can have greater head or greater brain, but she was helped by many favorable environmental-cultural circunstances, like i said in other text, afroamericans are dependent people, because they are minority, because they aren’t capable to manage its communities efficiently. They need non-black people to manage your lives, unfortunately. Blacks is like amerindians, but living in western greater cities.
Oprah have enormous personal wealth and don’t use it for real empathetic investments (specially, when is related to help non-kin sistar). Greater majority of ”celebritches” are stupid or psychopathic, sorry. I do not have envy them, i have anger, because human world is tremendous unfair and primitive and they tend to be completely unaware about it (they participate of misery of majority with happiness and dissimulation)
Roddenberry and many others from the golden age of hard sci-fi seemed to all believe that the more advanced an intelligence becomes the more benevolent. I’m not convinced of this at all. My experience having met and grown up around people of top 2 percent intelligence and above has taught me that the bright vary widely in personality just as other people do. Some are effusive creative and weird, some are withdrawn and neurotic, and some are downright scary. Nothing leads me to think that increasing intelligence would necessarily increase someone’s perception of the oneness of the universe or make that person benevolent. No, what does interest me though is why so many smart people seem to think this is the case? It’s so common it feels like misplaced religious belief as if, having discarded traditional religion but still having some basal urge to place faith somewhere, the bright point to intelligence itself as their savior.
Well, by logic, if not we make a big selection for wisdom, which is recessive, we will have an intelligent population just as you described. But we’re talking about a quantum leap in human evolution. ”Logically”, the human being would walk to become extremely benevolent (but not, pathological altruistic or extreme empath-simpathetic). Here again we fall in the dichotomy IQ / eminence versus intelligence, in its purest concept.
If the intelligence is above all, the survival capacity, so it’s smart, search for a peaceful world than by a bio-belicist race worldwide.
It’s smarter disarm, than war or fight. It is smarter to understand, preserve and fit deeply the nature, than to destroy it.
The animals are nano adapted to their microenvironments. The human being is ceasing to be ”supporting actor” in macro-dynamics of nature, to become a manager of it.
The problem of its focus, my opinion, is that most likely, smart people lives in your social circle, have been selected for attributes that are related to utilitarian intelligence. But as I said above, the self awareness is the bio-cultural differentiation of human beings compared to other animals, its true soul.
And I believe that self awareness is therefore the cognitive component hierarchically superior to all others. It is as if our intelligence were divided into several spaceships, where self awareness is the mothership.
And I believe that self awareness is therefore the cognitive component hierarchically superior to all others. It is as if our intelligence were divided into several spaceships, where self awareness is the mothership.
What you’ve said here is absolutely brilliant. Seriously
Only metaphor, is called imagination. As i said sometimes, look for abstraction as mechanic dispositives, with structure, hierarchy etc…
It’s not the specific metaphor that impresses me, it’s the fact that you view intelligence as a hierarchy with self-awareness on top. This might indicate very advanced understanding on your part
Why is what separates us from animals. All animals are smart and do wonderful things, fantastic. But they can not think of themselves, just as we can. The great cognitive divergence of the human being is the extension of self-consciousness, probably caused by the reduction of the sexual instinct.
And self awareness related with self knowledge, very powerfull. Ordinary people need others to understand themselves.
Why is what separates us from animals. All animals are smart and do wonderful things, fantastic. But they can not think of themselves, just as we can.
And this gives us the capacity for meta-cognition. The ability to think about what we are thinking & think about what we want: goal directed behaviour
Perhaps even the dumbest biologically normal humans vastly exceeds animals in this regard
The great cognitive divergence of the human being is the extension of self-consciousness, probably caused by the reduction of the sexual instinct.
Or caused by the explosive increase in brain size.
Sisyphean, i think there is a correlation between intelligence & benovelence, but it’s weak enough to remain elusive until freakishly high extremes & freakishly high extremes are exactly what science fiction writers imagine.
But I also agree it gets exaggerated because most people intuitively agree with my favorite definition of intelligence : ability to adapt situations to your advantage. Since violence is ultimately maladaptive in the sense that it can lead to destruction of the species, it’s perfectly natural to assume a truly intelligent species would reject it
But the mistake is confusing the collective good with the individual good. Violence can be very advantageous & thus intelligent at the individual or tribal level, while ultimately suicidal for the species. Failing to make that distinction causes us to overestimate the benovelence of the hyper intelligent
“Since violence is ultimately maladaptive in the sense that it can lead to destruction of the species, it’s perfectly natural to assume a truly intelligent species would reject it”
Nature doesn’t select for what’s best for the species, it selects for what’s best for the individual. What’s best for the species as a whole is irrelevant to how individuals will behave. Violence is only ‘suicidal’ for the species if people are willing to wage wars in which everyone would or could be destroyed but that clearly conflicts with individual best interest, which is why I was never too worried about a giant nuclear exchange. In as much as I can worry at all, I am more worried about an accidental exchange than I ever was about someone ‘pushing the button’ and purposely carpet bombing the entire planet with nukes.
I’ve been thinking also that the greater introversion and lesser physicality of the hyper intelligent might contribute to their religious reverence of the concept that violence is ‘primitive’. If you grow up hating on those jocks who grunt and hoot and bump into each other and you in the halls it seems natural to harbor some resentment and begin to think of them as primitives. Of course that sentiment is both self serving and predictable.
No, I don’t doubt that our human future has a great deal of violence in it. We are children of nature and nature is very violent. We aren’t even the first species to wage large scale group warfare. Ants have been doing it for millions of years. We’re just the first species on this planet with brains big enough to moralize about it (that we know of).
Nature doesn’t select for what’s best for the species, it selects for what’s best for the individual
I agree 100% but as i said, failure to distinguish between adaptive for the individual & adaptive for the collective may explain the tendency to exaggerate how nonviolent the smart are
But your point about a lot of smart people being non physical nerds who grow up resenting jocks is an excellent explanation, and perhaps sci fi writers are even nerdier than most high IQ folks
”The great cognitive divergence of the human being is the extension of self-consciousness, probably caused by the reduction of the sexual instinct.
Or caused by the explosive increase in brain size.”
Pumpkin,
it can be related.
I think hard compares old hominids and modern humans because they aren’t same. Old hominids possibly have bigger brain without complexity. Complexity need neuronal density. In other words, old hominids had ”large empty heads”. We have more neuronal density and its more important than bigger heads.
“Nature doesn’t select for what’s best for the species, it selects for what’s best for the individual”
We are part of nature and do part of the selection. And don’t we secretly sacrifice ourselves for the collective?
“Nature doesn’t select for what’s best for the species, it selects for what’s best for the individual”
I do not know why, but I do not like this way of saying, which is common in evolutionary psychology. Nature does not select anything, because it is a abstract concept over a series of real phenomena. The species predominantly non-conscious are as they are, just because they have developed the ability to self-improvement.
The evolution of a phenomenon occurs to chaos (violence) for peace (pacification). The increase of human intelligence was given by a mixture of natural evolution (competition) and artificial evolution. The near future may be as violent as the past, but the distant future, if it still exists the human species, will be strongly marked by intense cooperation among humans.
“will be strongly marked by intense cooperation among humans”
Intense cooperation? How would that work? I find it easier to imagine the collapse of capitalism than to imagine intense cooperation. For what purpose?
Near future= war, violence, humancommonplace# macro-agression 😉
Distant future= intense cooperation, i think and i pray for.
intense cooperation? What is that? With what aims?
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Kudos to oprah here.
You can see how the jewish lebensraum policy meant that even the ‘protected minority blacks are your daughters teddy bears’ agenda got railroaded to protect jewish west bank settlers.
Haha. I often think the world in the dialectic plane is comically absurd. Kafkaesque they say right?
I genuinely wonder how a jewish gamma verbalates a black gang attacking a synagogue on pure anti semitic grounds. One social force field clashing with another. The river and the rock. Popcorn moment i think. I guess we fohnd out a bit from this episode with oprah.
StormFront is that away -> -> ->