High Performing Assholes?
ETA didn’t cheat
1 Like
I don’t know where people got this idea that there are smart Trump supporters. That’s a pretty rare breed. For every Peter Thiel there are 20 normal smart people who hate Trump.
Generally speaking, Sklansky’s problem isn’t that he lacks smarts, it’s that he’s uneducated.
For 30 years I’ve tried to think of some viable, not democracy-killing approach to limiting voting to the informed, empathetic, intelligent, or whatever. I’ve never been able to come up with one, because even if they work (something like “college grad” would be a viable proxy, though obviously both over and under inclusive for the target group), they remove the “all in this together” aspect of society that is fundamental to mutual trust and cooperation, basic respect, and legitimacy. Democracy isn’t about finding the best form of government, it’s about having a legitimate form of government. A legitimate government chosen by not so bright people is preferable to a suspect government that reflects the current consensus of the well informed.
That said, I think the collision of stupidity and power reflected in things like the Trump (or Bush) administration and their supporters and enables is unsustainable in a high tech world where mistakens can have major consequences for the health and well being of everyone. I would expect that within 100 years people will be a good deal smarter because of designer babies and likely widespread biological enhancement. Hell, reduced air pollution and lead in the environment (at least in the US) is probably significant increasing average intelligence.
So, in my fantasy, we just need to hang with the morons for 100 years or so. After that it will be smart people who find a way to spread misery and destroy things, but they will at least do it with some style.
5 Likes
I used to go on thedailywtf.com every day back in like 2008, haha. The days of slashdot, Fark and digg. Haven’t been on it in so long.
Yeah, same here, also haven’t been on it for a few years. Speaking of booleans, remember this one? Classic.
1 Like
I’m not going to read this thread other than to say that it is peak Sklansky that he thinks it is ok to have sex with mentally disabled people but doesn’t think they should have the right to vote.
5 Likes
As I was reading this, the exact problem I have with what you’re saying (not that I disagree at all) is that the time scale involved in this process far exceeds our lifetimes, or maybe even the lifetime of a viable life sustaining planet. In fact, the collision of stupidity and power and its current manifestation may end up being so potent and destructive, that the world may not survive, at least in any recognizable form.
I’m aware the accelerationists believe on some level that this is a good thing, but the amount of human (and ecological) suffering involved will be so profound that I have a difficult time believing anyone who subscribes to that ethos is not a complete sociopath.
Basically, I believe we need to do something drastic to stop the stupidity RIGHT NOW. I don’t know what it is though. Definitely not by limiting voting rights. Maybe by investing in better education, but it seems we as a nation have long jumped off that wagon. Simply letting this play out and destroy itself does not seem like an option to me.
4 Likes
Well, it takes one to know one.
There’s a simple solution to this, actually. Just keep the current universal suffrage system and then slowly improve society using a systematic eugenics program. Easy!
1 Like
That was the dream in the 1920s, things just took a wrong turn. It turns out that “dumb people who shouldn’t breed” tends to look a whole lot like “people who don’t look like me.” It’s akin to picking the best college students by drawing from among members of elite campus fraternities
1 Like
Pretty sure Keed was being sarcastic. Right? Right?
1 Like
I know, and I actually wasn’t being serious, just saying that any kind of non-universal suffrage system shares disturbing parallels with the mindset of eugenics.
In 2016, someone commented to director Mike Judge on how prescient his 2006 film “Idiocracy” was. “It wasn’t that fucking prescient, we were off by 490 years”, he replied.
2 Likes
I know you were joking, and eugenics has the unfortunate consequence of very quickly sliding into human rights abuses and depriving people of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” among other things. That’s not only inherently bad, it’s socially unstable.
Maybe yea, but it is a good general predictor of a lot of different things, and since there is no other metric to really go off of re: intelligence, it’s the one we’ve got to work with.
There are a lot of different kinds of tests too that attempt to solve the issues with ones like the stanford binet.
For the record, I can’t think of a single person that posts regularly on this site that would score below 125. I firmly believe that.
As with any test, they are an imperfect measure, but they can give us a decent idea of where an individual falls on the curve.
We don’t count Sklansky as a regular poster?
1 Like
My wife’s an IT recruiter and a couple of her clients put candidates through CCAT tests (which I also sat when I went from contractor to permie at a company here a long time ago)…
…which are similar to IQ tests (I think - it’s a very long time since I sat one) but with more emphasis on verbal reasoning.
Don’t know if these are common or even used in the US.
1 Like
I believe in some respects that “intelligence” is a thing, but I don’t think it’s a neat or a unitary thing (or even an 8-factor multivariate thing). Measuring “intelligence” with IQ tests is like measuring max bench press by testing 100-meter times. There’s some genuine correlation, but it’s a pretty crude metric.
3 Likes
There is a thread on the front page of 2+2 politics right now where dude is arguing that the Earth is flat, and he’s not trolling. Should he get the same vote that you do?
Not directed at any specific poster, open question.