Okay, from the title alone, when you see the extremes of both ends you see them suffering, but a balance seems to lend to a lack of hesitation and the means to act.
The question then becomes: What is the right amount of intelligence?
Okay, from the title alone, when you see the extremes of both ends you see them suffering, but a balance seems to lend to a lack of hesitation and the means to act. The question then becomes: What is the right amount of intelligence?
I think the fear of being "too intelligent" is pushed far beyond what the evidence would justify. The stereotype of the highly intelligent person becoming awkward, miserable, isolated, or incapable of acting makes intelligence sound like it carries an inherent penalty when those traits don't logically follow from cognitive ability.
There can also be a social incentive to discourage people from becoming too detached from conventional goals. Someone who questions inherited desires and expectations may become less willing to participate in them, while someone who remains vulnerable to those expectations is easier to direct toward socially preferred behavior. I wouldn't assume this requires a deliberate conspiracy. Social systems can reproduce those incentives without anyone consciously designing them. From a samsara perspective, that can simply amount to continued attachment to externally supplied desires and roles.
I also don't think there's necessarily an "ideal" level of intelligence where people function or "flow" more smoothly. That assumption seems more like a trope than an established reality, and even if there were some truth to it, it shouldn't distract from the larger reality. Everyone remains subject to suffering, uncertainty, biological limits, and death. All rivers lead to death regardless of how smoothly they flow.
If youre interested in mental heuristic without wanting to go through dry academic literature I highly recommend the book thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. It summarises much of the academic research into the type of things you seem to be recognizing here (though rhe book doesnt talk about it in terms of intelligence).
His findings in a nutshell is that certain heuristic biases stem from a lack of domain knowledge and that highly educated people have no more protection against common heuristic biases than the everyday person, despite the average correlation between higher education and, say, IQ (i.e. People who are are intelligent are more drawn on average to intellectual pursuits).
Example from the book:
Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.
Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?
If youre interested in mental heuristic without wanting to go through dry academic literature I highly recommend the book thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. It summarises much of the academic research into the type of things you seem to be recognizing here (though rhe book doesnt talk about it in terms of intelligence).
His findings in a nutshell is that certain heuristic biases stem from a lack of domain knowledge and that highly educated people have no more protection against common heuristic biases than the everyday person, despite the average correlation between higher education and, say, IQ (i.e. People who are are intelligent are more drawn on average to intellectual pursuits).
Example from the book:
Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.
Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?
No interest in reality, he's all fabulous and meek and tidy and all, and has a need for structure with a passion for detail.... With no interest in reality.
I think if everyone were like that our species would resemble docile cows, wandering off in different directions while everyone has a passion for their need for order and structure. It wouldn't be though. Nothing would get done, no progress, no cures, no solutions, just cattle with their heads in the clouds.
Not to sound like an ass, but that's what it seems like to me.
If youre interested in mental heuristic without wanting to go through dry academic literature I highly recommend the book thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman. It summarises much of the academic research into the type of things you seem to be recognizing here (though rhe book doesnt talk about it in terms of intelligence).
His findings in a nutshell is that certain heuristic biases stem from a lack of domain knowledge and that highly educated people have no more protection against common heuristic biases than the everyday person, despite the average correlation between higher education and, say, IQ (i.e. People who are are intelligent are more drawn on average to intellectual pursuits).
Example from the book:
Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.
Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?No interest in reality, he's all fabulous and meek and tidy and all, and has a need for structure with a passion for detail.... With no interest in reality.
I think if everyone were like that our species would resemble docile cows, wandering off in different directions while everyone has a passion for their need for order and structure. It wouldn't be though. Nothing would get done, no progress, no cures, no solutions, just cattle with their heads in the clouds.
Not to sound like an ass, but that's what it seems like to me.
This doesn't really address Jada's point. The Steve example is about heuristic bias and base rates, yet you focus on the personality description and turn it into a judgment about “docile cows,” people with their “heads in the clouds,” and nothing getting accomplished. You're responding to the imagery rather than the reasoning problem the example is meant to illustrate.
It's also strange to use “progress,” “cures,” and “solutions” as though they inherently require the kind of aggressive, dominant personality you're describing. Scientific and medical progress also depends on patience, specialization, careful observation, skepticism, cooperation, and willingness to revise beliefs. Being meek, orderly, introverted, or detail-oriented doesn't make someone unproductive.
That also seems inconsistent with some of your other positions. You praise wealth, hierarchy, and obedience while demanding those traits from other people, yet here you're suddenly treating “progress” as an obvious good that supposedly requires people to be more assertive and less docile. You also regularly react to disagreement with hostility, tirades, or ad hominem rather than demonstrating the kind of calm reasoning you're supposedly defending.
Your own rhetoric about intelligence and reasoning is especially ironic in a thread about heuristics. You repeatedly emphasize intelligence, judgment, and your ability to see through people, while Jada is specifically explaining that intelligence and education do not automatically protect someone from common cognitive biases. Instead of engaging with that, you turn the example into another hierarchy about what kinds of people are supposedly useful or worthless.
And invoking “cures” as proof of your worldview is especially odd given your hostility toward Fauci. You don't seem to have a consistent standard for what constitutes useful progress. It seems more like you are attaching your own preferred traits and values to the word “progress” and then treating that preference as self-evident.
The result is another example of the pattern I've been talking about: an empirical discussion about reasoning gets redirected into your preferred hierarchy of strong versus weak, productive versus useless, and intelligent versus inferior, while the actual cognitive bias being discussed goes largely unaddressed.
It had nothing to do in regard to the subject either.
Steve is what progressives call progress, nothing but vanity and setting oneself up to be conflicted with the world around them.
You're still projecting your own idea of “progress” onto the example. Steve isn't a symbol of progressivism. He's a deliberately constructed example of a heuristic, and calling him vain or detached from reality doesn't address the reasoning problem Jada was explaining.
In fact, your definition of progress seems to assume that putting yourself out there, pursuing status, competing, reproducing, accumulating wealth, and accepting hierarchy are inherently productive. I don't see why those things should automatically qualify as progress. They can just as easily create dependency, exploitation, debt, conflict, or other forms of entanglement.
By your own logic, anything that doesn't actively push someone toward those goals can be dismissed as weakness or vanity. But choosing not to expose yourself to unnecessary risks or social competition can be a rational decision. Steve's traits could therefore be interpreted as caution, discipline, or self-preservation rather than some failure to “do something.” And that's where your use of “vanity” becomes ironic. Some of the things you glorify can themselves be vanity: pursuing status because society rewards it, accumulating wealth because it signals success, demanding obedience because hierarchy validates you, or reproducing simply because reproduction is treated as inherently meaningful. None of those become objectively progressive just because they're socially celebrated.
Progress can also mean moving away from unnecessary entanglement with systems that predictably produce suffering or economic traps. So no, Steve isn't necessarily “vain” for not putting his neck out there. He may simply be making a reasonable tradeoff that you happen to value less.
Legga came and spread butter on your nuts and it worked. You really have nothing to say to him.
You're reframing the conversation as though the problem is that I ignored Legga agreeing with me. I was addressing the actual argument in this thread, while you were the one derailing it into another judgmental rant about “docile cows,” “no progress, no cures, no solutions,” and what you think people should be like. I was responding to the nonsense you introduced, not obligated to respond to every person who happened to agree with me.
If anything, I was doing Jada a favor by actually dissecting your response, because it makes the bad logic and the leaps in your reasoning easier to see and probably easier to laugh at. I don't need to stop addressing your argument just because someone else agreed with me.
And the “spread butter on your nuts” remark is just an unnecessary sexualized insult. I could have added to or examined what Legga said, but your response was full of bad logic and bizarre claims, so I focused on debunking that instead. That doesn't mean I had nothing to say to Legga. I got distracted and forgot after taking out your ideological diapers, which I assumed Legga would enjoy witnessing anyways.
Legga came and spread butter on your nuts and it worked. You really have nothing to say to him.
You're reframing the conversation as though the problem is that I ignored Legga agreeing with me. I was addressing the actual argument in this thread, while you were the one derailing it into another judgmental rant about “docile cows,” “no progress, no cures, no solutions,” and what you think people should be like. I was responding to the nonsense you introduced, not obligated to respond to every person who happened to agree with me.
True. Though I don't see Legga agreeing with you. I see he spread butter on your balls and you chose not to say anything to him like you do everyone else. You have nothing to say to anyone who comes to you with support, cause you're here to argue and nothing more.
You asked if intelligence makes someone better at reasoning.
The answer is yes. Without intelligence we couldn't even begin to reason.
If anything, I was doing Jada a favor by actually dissecting your response, because it makes the bad logic and the leaps in your reasoning easier to see and probably easier to laugh at. I don't need to stop addressing your argument just because someone else agreed with me.
That's the thing. Legga came, offered a book and smeared butter on your balls, and you really don't have anything to say to him about it.
I did though.
Admiring a practice doesn't mean it's good for everyone to do. Steve in living in his own little bubble, and sure he's free to stay there, but things won't go smoothly for him. Something falls out of place in his little world and he could have a meltdown over reality itself.
And the “spread butter on your nuts” remark is just an unnecessary sexualized insult. I could have added to or examined what Legga said, but your response was full of bad logic and bizarre claims, so I focused on debunking that instead. That doesn't mean I had nothing to say to Legga. I got distracted and forgot after taking out your ideological diapers, which I assumed Legga would enjoy witnessing anyways.
Penile butter.
Just take a massive scoop and smear it all on there.
