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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

Because that's how a bell curve do. Half of humanity is so unintelligent that they have to work hard on that level of discourse, and they're very proud of it. This is also why people are very gullible, and thus easily accept narratives that blame other powerless people for their troubles.

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Gwen_Isilith OP wrote

And I am sure you have firmly situated yourself among the freethinkers and not the sheeple?

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

No, I'm wrong about shit all the time.

Dumb people need human rights, too. My comment wasn't "people suck" it was "the masses are brutally victimized, and can't be blamed for misunderstanding how it happens."

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Gwen_Isilith OP wrote

Ah okay, your comment come off much more as "people suck". I don't agree with this idea of a bell curve or that "intelligence" limits one from discourse or ideas, but nevertheless I do understand your point.

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[deleted] wrote

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

It really isn't, but I'm not going to claim I'm being anything but sloppy about how statistics work. Really the reason you see more stupid things than smart things is probably that most smart people seem to think of stupid people as problems more than as people. So, they don't talk to the intellectual have-nots except to manipulate them once they get too "smart" for ethics. Partisanship is like that.

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[deleted] wrote

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

I'm not saying that IQ is a hard fact; we aren't that good at measuring anything. Further, it should be obvious to anyone that whenever the establishment sorts people on any axis, they do terrible and stupid things with that data. People should only be sorting themselves. What I'm saying is that it's at least an honest attempt to measure something that does exist. People have different limitations.

To reject the concepts of intelligence or even that genetics can have an effect on it seems to me to be a mistake; these ideas lead to eugenics only because that's what eugenicists already wanted to do, and oversimplifying this topic in a way that satisfies the privileged is unfortunately pretty easy. I'm not an expert on either topic, or indeed on any topic, but I know enough about genetics to know that eugenics is stupid: there are few genes that directly encode traits without side effects, especially when it comes to the brain. Biodiversity is always the winning strategy.

Meanwhile, a proper understanding of intelligence must include that regardless of whatever a person's genetic limitations might be, cognitive development and function are profoundly affected by environmental factors. We know that financial stress impairs it, for example, and compulsory schooling under the Prussian model is designed to make the kids sorted into the lower bin stupider. With automation on the rise, the public school systems are basically being re-tuned to make all students dumber by the time they get out, so that the common people can be maximally exploited by the prison-industrial complex. This wouldn't work if intelligence weren't real, however good or bad we are at measuring it.

On a deeper philosophical level, it should also be obvious to anyone that a lack of raw processing power does not hide the most important things about life from anyone. We all experience consciousness and connection, and develop insight from that experience that doesn't have anything to do with how good you are at rotating shapes in your head. That kind of knowledge is what makes life worth protecting, and you don't need to have wetware nearly as fancy as any human's to have that.

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