It's like arguing with a fart - a bunch of stinky hot air that only provides relief to the garter at the expense of others.
Not worth it. I've been so busy this last few months that I decided on this Canada Day holiday to see if anything has changed. it hasn't. Too bad the world has.
It's fun to tease the unevolved, but it got boring, and I don't have the spare time to look for any alternative (and don't really need one, so wtf). Bad enough that months after giving all the clients notice that they need to wear masks and they can't enter the building, half still show up unmasked. I discussed it with the younger workers and they aren't confident enough to enforce the rules, so I told them I'd be the mean cunt who enforced it. Half say "I forgot it in the car". One said "I can't wear a mask because I have a cough." Seriously, we're doomed.
But seeing all the Trumpers refusing to wear masks is great - get the libertarians out of the gene pool sooner rather than later. Will also raise the average IQ, so what's not to like?
-- SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:08AM
(2 children)
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:08AM (#1015299)
You may be disappointed to discover that both conscientiousness and a favorable attitude towards regulation have both been correlated quite strongly with lower IQs. Though you may be happy to discover that favorable attitudes towards social liberalism are also strongly correlated with higher IQs.
These are all fairly recent discoveries which confound previously works on 'conservative' vs 'liberal' studies. The reason being that contemporary liberal ideology tends to encompass social liberalism = high IQ as well as well as greater regulation = low IQ. And obviously vice versa for contemporary conservatism. This is likely a part of the reason that the results were so inconsistent. Incidentally libertarianism encompasses the values of social liberalism = high IQ, minimal regulation = high IQ, and freedom over conscientiousness = high IQ.
There's also an issue of age bias in older studies. In my life I've found one old saying to be unfortunately true: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." I expect you'd find a rather different distributions of cognitive abilities in looking at older vs younger conservatives and liberals. Views change over time - yet many studies are carried out primarily on college age volunteers in psychology departments.
IQ measures very little aside from how well you do on IQ tests. I've consistently placed from the low 140s to the low 150s...and so fucking what?
EQ and CQ, emotional and cultural intelligence, are at least as important. INT and WIS are separate dice in DnD for a reason. And someone with high IQ, low emotional intelligence, and low cultural competence is extremely dangerous to themselves and other people, because they lack a certain amount of what you may term "memetic immune response" *and* are super, super-good at fooling themselves, justifying their bad takes, and reinforcing them internally. After all, if all those chimp-brained commoners can't argue you out of X, X *must* be correct, riiiiiiiight? And there's no difference, as we know, between theory and practice. A-yup.
-- I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @06:19AM
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday July 03 2020, @06:19AM (#1015686)
I think this argument can be strongly challenged with a simple question. Why would somebody *want* to fool themselves? The answer is easy: because they have an *emotional* desire to reach some outcome that contradicts what logic tells them. If you do not let yourself be controlled by emotion you have no necessity to fool yourself. And while I think I can see the argument you're alluding to, I do not agree that that this is dangerous in the least.
Your argument I suspect is that if people consider, without compassion, that e.g. '6% of people commit 50% of violent crime' then that naturally trends towards 'okay get rid of the 6%, get rid of 50% of violent crime.' But I think that is both an emotional idea and an emotional conclusion. The idea itself is emotional since it makes no sense. Purge millions, many who have done nothing, for the sake of some percent that have? Would you yourself then not be guilty of far worse? And the conclusion itself is emotional since even if you want to achieve this end there are vastly better ways to do so. At the age of 18 each male is offered $10,000 to engage in an irreversible vasectomy. For the sake of gender equality we might extend the offer to females as well though that's probably unnecessary. There'd be absolutely no restrictions on angle shooting the law such as by freezing your sperm. The bias in who would opt in to such a procedure means you've effectively achieved your end while not only never engaging in one non-consensual action, but actually actively improving the lives of many millions of people. Same desired outcome but a vastly better path there. Emotion vs logic.
In many ways I think this is the difference between Jefferson and Lincoln. Jefferson in 1808, the first year it was constitutionally possible, ended the transatlantic slave trade. No new slaves were coming in and the system was only being perpetuated by the fact that children of slaves were also born into slavery. Jefferson wanted to phase out slavery in a peaceful and productive way. His idea was to take the children of existing slaves while providing compensation to their 'owners', train them up, and send them abroad to make a living as skilled freemen. He felt that freeing the slaves en mass in the US would cause issues due to discrimination and the inability of slaves lacking any meaningful skills trying to make their way in a deeply merit based society. Lincoln instead just went for an emotional solution. He forced the matter, started a war resulting in about 2% of Americans being killed (seriously imagine 1 in every 50 people you ever knew or saw suddenly being violently killed!), nearly destroyed the country and certainly did destroy its unity. And the freed slaves were left in exactly the situation Jefferson predicted. They faced immense discrimination and had difficulty making anything of their lives. Their descendants continue to argue, with some degree of merit, that these issues -now approaching 200 years ago- continue to affect them to this day. Jefferson was intelligent, Lincoln was emotional. And today we, as an entire society, continue to pay the price for such emotion. And indeed today we continue along an emotional trajectory.
It's only through consideration of things such as this that I'd ever frame conscientiousness in a negative way. Slavery was of course an absolutely awful institution that was inherently wrong and needed to be abolished. But solutions to problems must always be driven by logic. A man driven by emotion is like an animal on a leash led wherever its master fancies.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday July 02 2020, @03:37AM (3 children)
Not worth it. I've been so busy this last few months that I decided on this Canada Day holiday to see if anything has changed. it hasn't. Too bad the world has.
It's fun to tease the unevolved, but it got boring, and I don't have the spare time to look for any alternative (and don't really need one, so wtf). Bad enough that months after giving all the clients notice that they need to wear masks and they can't enter the building, half still show up unmasked. I discussed it with the younger workers and they aren't confident enough to enforce the rules, so I told them I'd be the mean cunt who enforced it. Half say "I forgot it in the car". One said "I can't wear a mask because I have a cough." Seriously, we're doomed.
But seeing all the Trumpers refusing to wear masks is great - get the libertarians out of the gene pool sooner rather than later. Will also raise the average IQ, so what's not to like?
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:08AM (2 children)
You may be disappointed to discover that both conscientiousness and a favorable attitude towards regulation have both been correlated quite strongly with lower IQs. Though you may be happy to discover that favorable attitudes towards social liberalism are also strongly correlated with higher IQs.
These are all fairly recent discoveries which confound previously works on 'conservative' vs 'liberal' studies. The reason being that contemporary liberal ideology tends to encompass social liberalism = high IQ as well as well as greater regulation = low IQ. And obviously vice versa for contemporary conservatism. This is likely a part of the reason that the results were so inconsistent. Incidentally libertarianism encompasses the values of social liberalism = high IQ, minimal regulation = high IQ, and freedom over conscientiousness = high IQ.
There's also an issue of age bias in older studies. In my life I've found one old saying to be unfortunately true: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." I expect you'd find a rather different distributions of cognitive abilities in looking at older vs younger conservatives and liberals. Views change over time - yet many studies are carried out primarily on college age volunteers in psychology departments.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:49PM (1 child)
IQ measures very little aside from how well you do on IQ tests. I've consistently placed from the low 140s to the low 150s...and so fucking what?
EQ and CQ, emotional and cultural intelligence, are at least as important. INT and WIS are separate dice in DnD for a reason. And someone with high IQ, low emotional intelligence, and low cultural competence is extremely dangerous to themselves and other people, because they lack a certain amount of what you may term "memetic immune response" *and* are super, super-good at fooling themselves, justifying their bad takes, and reinforcing them internally. After all, if all those chimp-brained commoners can't argue you out of X, X *must* be correct, riiiiiiiight? And there's no difference, as we know, between theory and practice. A-yup.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @06:19AM
I think this argument can be strongly challenged with a simple question. Why would somebody *want* to fool themselves? The answer is easy: because they have an *emotional* desire to reach some outcome that contradicts what logic tells them. If you do not let yourself be controlled by emotion you have no necessity to fool yourself. And while I think I can see the argument you're alluding to, I do not agree that that this is dangerous in the least.
Your argument I suspect is that if people consider, without compassion, that e.g. '6% of people commit 50% of violent crime' then that naturally trends towards 'okay get rid of the 6%, get rid of 50% of violent crime.' But I think that is both an emotional idea and an emotional conclusion. The idea itself is emotional since it makes no sense. Purge millions, many who have done nothing, for the sake of some percent that have? Would you yourself then not be guilty of far worse? And the conclusion itself is emotional since even if you want to achieve this end there are vastly better ways to do so. At the age of 18 each male is offered $10,000 to engage in an irreversible vasectomy. For the sake of gender equality we might extend the offer to females as well though that's probably unnecessary. There'd be absolutely no restrictions on angle shooting the law such as by freezing your sperm. The bias in who would opt in to such a procedure means you've effectively achieved your end while not only never engaging in one non-consensual action, but actually actively improving the lives of many millions of people. Same desired outcome but a vastly better path there. Emotion vs logic.
In many ways I think this is the difference between Jefferson and Lincoln. Jefferson in 1808, the first year it was constitutionally possible, ended the transatlantic slave trade. No new slaves were coming in and the system was only being perpetuated by the fact that children of slaves were also born into slavery. Jefferson wanted to phase out slavery in a peaceful and productive way. His idea was to take the children of existing slaves while providing compensation to their 'owners', train them up, and send them abroad to make a living as skilled freemen. He felt that freeing the slaves en mass in the US would cause issues due to discrimination and the inability of slaves lacking any meaningful skills trying to make their way in a deeply merit based society. Lincoln instead just went for an emotional solution. He forced the matter, started a war resulting in about 2% of Americans being killed (seriously imagine 1 in every 50 people you ever knew or saw suddenly being violently killed!), nearly destroyed the country and certainly did destroy its unity. And the freed slaves were left in exactly the situation Jefferson predicted. They faced immense discrimination and had difficulty making anything of their lives. Their descendants continue to argue, with some degree of merit, that these issues -now approaching 200 years ago- continue to affect them to this day. Jefferson was intelligent, Lincoln was emotional. And today we, as an entire society, continue to pay the price for such emotion. And indeed today we continue along an emotional trajectory.
It's only through consideration of things such as this that I'd ever frame conscientiousness in a negative way. Slavery was of course an absolutely awful institution that was inherently wrong and needed to be abolished. But solutions to problems must always be driven by logic. A man driven by emotion is like an animal on a leash led wherever its master fancies.