One way to regard this is with the evolution theory tools. I hear that the intellect has developed in an arms race due to individual competition for high social ladder positions in human tribes. An idiot would not succeed in either keeping in mind the subtle status changes of everybody in his tribe that steadily grew in size or using the increasingly complex language to promote his own status. If this is the right picture, the "emotional intelligence", empathy and the ability to communicate are more important than IQ. One can observe that even today they are spread more widely than the abstract thinking ability or mathematical skills. IQ is then just a side effect, a chance and futile specialization of the machinery developed for another purpose. This leads me to a pessimistic outlook - in the modern society the reproductive success is hardly dependent on the IQ. Even the social status selective pressure is so much smaller, because the "tribes" are large and survival is virtually guaranteed. So smart people will be increasingly rarer
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Here, here. But you have too rosy a view of the "the nice Cro-Magnon hunter artists," most of which were doodling teens having nothing better to do http://www.livescience.com/history/060214_cave_art.html It is also news to me that ancient Greece and medieval England were "smart" societies. People living in those societies thought otherwise. Plato's story about search for wisdom among poets still gives me pause in asserting that art is the product of people that are smarter than the others. And the success on the tribal ladder seems uncorrelated with smarts. All evidence is that folly was as prevalent then as now. As for the surgeons and car-makers, do not be too upset about them. Today's surgeons will look to our descendants like medieval doctors "curing" their patients with gallons of calomel delivered per rectum followed by bleeding and today's car-makers will look like innovators of horse-driven carriages circa 1910. It is all folly and vanity of
Greece and England in their time have been leaders in "progress", that is adoption of advances in world view, morals, political structure, economy, sciences and so on. These societies were smart in that they provided environment for development or work of innovators and then were able to adopt some of their advances as their own. Of course, you may argue that you like satrapy better than Athenian "democracy" or music before Haendel / physics before Newton / literature before Shakespeare / politics before 1688 and so on. Yet I do not expect you to deny that the changes that originated in these countries at some periods have influenced our world disproportionately. Arguably, mostly to the better. I do not doubt that in todays Nigeria or Pakistan there are some talented people. The societies there do not encourage their development and are not receptive to their inventions, so their God-given gift is wasted (I hope I am wrong at least partially because this is really sad). Plato may have complained but at least Greece had a Plato and he
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Your notion of stupidity suffers from an excessive vesting in parlor games. The economic perspective pioneered in the seminal article by Carlo M. Cipolla referenced above, is an indispensable antidote to the Forrest Gump fallacy perpetuated by your approach. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to support the hypothesis that economic failures fail to attend upon grave mental deficiencies, with evidence more substantial than the consensus of your LJ coterie buttressed by badly digested sociobiological notions. To the contrary, your anecdotal examples tend to show, at the most, that standardized tests are bad at predicting palpable stupidity.
I've been following in the footsteps of divine Erasmus sitting on the shoulders of great Bacon... and then you suddenly appear and order me to climb down and seek support for someone else's hypothesis that reduces the magnificence of human folly to trivial and obscene notions of economic gain and loss? That's preposterous!
Nowhere did these two sages define folly or even "palpable stupidity" considering it self-evident that folly is a privation of wisdom that was created, like other privations of Good, by thy Lord, for His greater Glory. Folly, by diminution of wisdom, creates greater vistas on this everlasting Glory thereby constituting the unquestionable gain, whereas the increase in wisdom only reveals the gaping abyss of folly, constituting the regrettable loss.
Since you are relying on Lord Bacon, consider that scientia est potentia, whence by contraposition impotentia est stultitia, which coincides with Cipolla’s pragmatic definition of stupidity.
You should've known better than using this argument on me... Read Of Heresies and see for yourself whose knowledge Bacon was talking about:
...The third degree [of heretics] is, of those who abridge and restrain the former opinion only to those human actions which partake of sin, which actions they will have to depend substantively and originally, and without any sequel or subordination of causes upon the will, and make and set down and appoint larger limits of the knowledge of G-d than of His power, or rather of that part of G-d's power, (for knowledge itself is a power whereby He knoweth,) than of that by which He moveth and worketh, making Him foreknow some things idle, and as a looker on, which He doth not predestinate nor ordain : not unlike to that devise which Epicurus brought into Democritus' opinion, to take away destiny, and make way to fortune, to wit ; the start and slip of Attemus, which always of the wiser sort was rejected as a frivolous shift : but whatsoever depends not of G-d, as author and principle by inferior
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Не зафиксировал, кто цитировал(?)
anonymous
November 25 2008, 21:20:22 UTC
"Горький, например, с симпатией приводил свидетельства о том, что волжские булгары вешали на деревьях всех тех, в ком замечали необыкновенный ум и познания. Ключников же приводит высказывание Аристотеля о том, что «государству нужны лишь средние люди и что оно обязано изгонять - остракировать - не только слишком плохих, но и слишком хороших своих граждан»".
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http://www.livescience.com/history/060214_cave_art.html
It is also news to me that ancient Greece and medieval England were "smart" societies. People living in those societies thought otherwise. Plato's story about search for wisdom among poets still gives me pause in asserting that art is the product of people that are smarter than the others. And the success on the tribal ladder seems uncorrelated with smarts. All evidence is that folly was as prevalent then as now. As for the surgeons and car-makers, do not be too upset about them. Today's surgeons will look to our descendants like medieval doctors "curing" their patients with gallons of calomel delivered per rectum followed by bleeding and today's car-makers will look like innovators of horse-driven carriages circa 1910. It is all folly and vanity of
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Nowhere did these two sages define folly or even "palpable stupidity" considering it self-evident that folly is a privation of wisdom that was created, like other privations of Good, by thy Lord, for His greater Glory. Folly, by diminution of wisdom, creates greater vistas on this everlasting Glory thereby constituting the unquestionable gain, whereas the increase in wisdom only reveals the gaping abyss of folly, constituting the regrettable loss.
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...The third degree [of heretics] is, of those who abridge and restrain the former opinion only to those human actions which partake of sin, which actions they will have to depend substantively and originally, and without any sequel or subordination of causes upon the will, and make and set down and appoint larger limits of the knowledge of G-d than of His power, or rather of that part of G-d's power, (for knowledge itself is a power whereby He knoweth,) than of that by which He moveth and worketh, making Him foreknow some things idle, and as a looker on, which He doth not predestinate nor ordain : not unlike to that devise which Epicurus brought into Democritus' opinion, to take away destiny, and make way to fortune, to wit ; the start and slip of Attemus, which always of the wiser sort was rejected as a frivolous shift : but whatsoever depends not of G-d, as author and principle by inferior ( ... )
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Ключников же приводит высказывание Аристотеля о том, что «государству нужны лишь средние люди и что оно обязано изгонять - остракировать - не только слишком плохих, но и слишком хороших своих граждан»".
"Главный враг творчества - хороший вкус (Пикасо)"
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