Hey, you’re talking about a theoretical magical process to determine a hypothetical number that represents the total potential brainpower of infants.
What am I supposed to be using instead of my gut? Tarot cards? A ouija board?
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OH! Or a bunch of infant brains in jars running in parallel?
I would watch this movie.
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I’m glad we’re having fun because I forgot what we are arguing about.
Guess I ain’t so smuckin fart after all, ain I?
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Isn’t that what the Matrix was supposed to be before they made it dumb and turned humans into batteries instead of processors?
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Maybe? I just kind of assume Hollywood is stupid and roll with it. Less stressful that way!
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And…half of 'em are smarter, right? so that’s good, right?
(Well, technically I guess not fully half of all people would be on either side of that one “average” person, because otherwise it’d add up to slightly more than 100%, right?)
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The power of math compels you! 
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I want a Carlin quote that says if you believe every Carlin quote, you’re doing it wrong.
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[ETA - I had no other reason for posting that other than that I wanted to get in on the Zim action]
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A friend of mine assures me that if a writer describes another writer as “smart” it means they want to have sex with them.
This is a big part of what accounts for my imposter syndrome. I know for a fact that I spend more time slacking than I do working. But everyone keeps telling me I’m doing a great job. When I think about it another way, though, maybe I can’t do the 7 hours job in 2 hours. Maybe I actually need those 5 hours, I just don’t use them in a way that other people would typically think of as being useful.
No one ever believed me. They just kept saying things like, "You have so much potential. Tip: Do not say that to a child.
I have a theory that math is actually hard. I don’t know much about chip architectures in computers really, but we know that you can take the same amount of cycles per second and optimize it for solving different kinds of problems. Even though brains are made of the same physical stuff, their architecture could be organized to do different things better or worse. I can’t see a way there are actual exceptions and flukes, it pretty much has to be a bell curve (a whole lot of bell curves for different kinds of thinking) and those exceptions and flukes are just further out on it. And if you are super at something, you are almost certainly worse at something else.
Some in autistic communities developed the term “neurotypical” to talk about people who aren’t autistic. I am definitely not autistic, but I don’t think I’m neurotypical either, I’m on some kind of orthogonal axis. On one hand, I’m very superior at breaking down problems to simple pieces (or something kind of like that), but on another hand, there is something about society that I have never been able to fit in with to the point I have a mental illness usually associated with extreme childhood trauma (having experienced nothing that I could in good faith call trauma). You wouldn’t want a society full of me (or maybe you would, I have no idea what that would be like), but maybe I’m useful as an individual occurance (though recently I think maybe I’m not - maybe someone who is 1σ or 2σ out from the mean in my direction is useful but that has the awkward side effect of creating people like me who are 5σ or 6σ out and who are just kind of a mess).
Thumbs up. Gearing a society towards intelligence is just like gearing it towards strength (or wealth, or ability to command a gang of thugs, etc.). The most intelligent will be looked to to determine what intelligence is, and intelligence will become “people who are like me” and the power will consolidate itself. There’s not such thing as a “meritocracy” because there is no such thing as “merit” other than what people agree to call “merit.” Being exceptionally “intelligent” one thing I noticed is that it doesn’t make me better than anyone else (if that kind of “better” is even a thing), it just makes me more useful in some circumstances (though even when I’m in theory useful I mostly feel like I did back in highschool when I realized that me putting up my hand to answer the teacher’s questions every time wasn’t helping anyone else learn, and I decided to stop putting my hand up).
Oh my goodness. My first wouldn’t sit in your lap when she was 5 months old. My second is like 30 pounds now and still wants to be held all the time, and will just lie in your arms and give you a cute grin all day. I’m just enjoying it while it lasts, because it’s going to be a long wait for this to happen again.
Your baby is small, aren’t they? You know everything you think about how tweens behave - forming cliques, mean girls, rolling their eyes at your lameness? That starts at like three-and-a-half.
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I didn’t (necessarily) mean those kinds of fluids!
I agree. But where many seem to get hung up is that whatever tasks they pick as a benchmark for intelligence is, itself, arbitrary. One dog might be smart for demonstrating that it can fetch that stick. Another dog might be smart for refusing to concern itself with stick fetching. The social problem, I think, always comes down to people’s reluctance to admit that they don’t know what each other’s goals are - they cannot even discuss it any meaningful level, because the illusion of consensus will be dispelled.
This is a connotation people seem to infer about the term “neurotypical”, but it can be simply what it says. In a movement towards cognitive diversity, people become aware that mental health disciplines tend to be very normative. That, not unlike many health models, they are based upon identifying pathology and treating it in prescribed ways. So, to be normative, one first requires a measure of baseline functionality. This is what I think people mean by neurotypical. But since this term originates from the autism community, people often apply it only in those contexts, despite it’s more general meaning.
I think that what you outline here completely misses the point. Intellect seems to me to be about people devise models and solve problems. Like anything else, it is what it does. “Knowledge is power” involves one’s own native ability, which cannot be given nor taken away. It is not transactional, so there is no way to consolidate it. Each person simply does the work to which they are best suited. I think it is (as most things are) incompatible with political power.
This is basically the argument people have about whether cats or dogs are smarter. Cat people argue that cats are smarter because they won’t do what we say.
I think my point is that you take any way of ranking people and let it loose among the people it ranks, and it turns into political power in a hurry. There may be some underlying reality about whose brain is going to accomplish what task more quickly or more accurately, but if people start creating power structures around who is “smart” or “intelligent” then the people at the top of those structures - by virtue of being the most “intelligent” - will be regarded as the best arbiters of who is “intelligent” and the whole thing will turn into cronyism unrelated to any original underlying connection to reality. To an outsider who does have the ability that the system is supposedly based on, they may be aspirational-meaning-of-intelligent but they aren’t common-use-meaning-of-intelligent.
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You’re thinking of the median, not the average. Unnecessary Pedant, Away!
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Perhaps we shouldn’t even try to rank people individually.
Perhaps instead we should just rank the groups they dynamically form. A person who’s valuable in one might be useless in another.
There’s still room for categorization, but that way we’re actually focused on using our brains well collectively instead of being individually brilliant (however we’re defining that…which is of course wrong)
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Sure! It can also apply to humans. Who are smarter - those who strive to be recognized as smarter, or those who disregard it and simply do their own work?
I understood you. My point was - why - why do that? If your goal is intellection, knowledge as power, then political power is counterproductive.
That’s the problem of using intelligence as a metric instead of a process. A process works a certain way regardless of who uses it. Applying metrics to compare people to each other creates its own problems. If you do that, you get political problems regardless of what the criteria are. It basically amounts to dismissing individual abilities or goals in favor of administrative convenience. It seems smarter (more optimal, functional) to avoid exploiting intelligence in service of pre-programmed instinctive routines (hierarchies).
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That it’s a demon! A dancing demon, no, something isn’t right there.
Sorry, I had to.
Pretty much what I was saying, although “math is actually hard” seems to be a bit of a non sequitur - I don’t get how it follows from the rest of your theory.
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Thinking? Not me, no sir.
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They just kept saying things like, "You have so much potential. Tip: Do not say that to a child.
I wouldn’t be too hard on people for saying this, it’s certainly well meant. Problem is, people say this because they realize that their own limitations can’t help you do the things they’d do if they were smart as you and had their whole lives in front of them.
A little late in life did I realize that potential is only useful if through practice, you turn it into a skill.
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I’ve always found any talk about my own potential to be a bit annoying - there are things I find it easier than other people to do, but I’ve always envied people who are able to focus on one thing for enough time to get really good at it. Normal carrot and stick motivation methods don’t really work for me, even if I’d like them to. On the other hand, my older brother is both smart and focused, and managed to pass his PhD without needing to make any corrections - but I’m the one with a job.
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