@bajax
Part of the issue is that intelligence and wisdom aren't synonymous. If anything our modern society demonstrates that they are often negatively correlated.
Part of the issue is that intelligence and wisdom aren't synonymous. If anything our modern society demonstrates that they are often negatively correlated.
@bajax
> ...everything in our society is set up to reward high IQ activites...
Reading this again, I have to disagree. I'd say if anything it's the opposite. Particularly given how capitalism works. They want to cater to the broadest demographic of consumers possible. Smart people can understand stupid people things, but the reverse is not remotely true. So the consequence of that seems to me to be that by virtue of the media, people are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in the interests of corporate profit, or simply as a side-effect of that profit seeking behaviour.
Certainly when I go on YT or other websites and look at the trending or popular content listings, the vast majority seems to have an intellectual appeal equivalent to eating a tube of Elmer's glue. It's not surprising to me in the least that according to recent data 1 in 5 adults in the US are functionally illiterate, and that stat is not substantially different for children who've graduated from the public education system. So if you're talking about the USA, I'd say it's not that high IQ is rewarded, so much as it is that y'all are fucking dumb, and even below average intelligence in the rest of the world seems like PhD level competency by comparison.
In the words of George Carlin, "Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."
> ...everything in our society is set up to reward high IQ activites...
Reading this again, I have to disagree. I'd say if anything it's the opposite. Particularly given how capitalism works. They want to cater to the broadest demographic of consumers possible. Smart people can understand stupid people things, but the reverse is not remotely true. So the consequence of that seems to me to be that by virtue of the media, people are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in the interests of corporate profit, or simply as a side-effect of that profit seeking behaviour.
Certainly when I go on YT or other websites and look at the trending or popular content listings, the vast majority seems to have an intellectual appeal equivalent to eating a tube of Elmer's glue. It's not surprising to me in the least that according to recent data 1 in 5 adults in the US are functionally illiterate, and that stat is not substantially different for children who've graduated from the public education system. So if you're talking about the USA, I'd say it's not that high IQ is rewarded, so much as it is that y'all are fucking dumb, and even below average intelligence in the rest of the world seems like PhD level competency by comparison.
In the words of George Carlin, "Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."
Enlightenment rationality tells us to train our most intelligent people that the world is consistent and so if you find things that contradict each other and all things that matter can be flattened into believing one universal synthesis. This was an incredibly powerful worldview, because it helped us come up with Newtonian physics, which seemed to show a clockwork universe in line with enlightenment values.
In spite of being useful and intelligent, it is anti-wisdom, because to be rational and consistent is unwise in a world made at the quantum level of paradox.
Besides quantum mechanics at the very small level, we also come up with relativistic mechanics at the very large level which breaks Newtonian physics, which is quite unintuitive but I'm not going to talk about relativity right now.
What came next isn't necessarily any better, because instead of navigating all of the different things that are true at once, they just take one step into the fact that things can be contradictory and assume that nothing is true.
I mentioned the quantum level, and this is a good example where both of these views are wrong. At that level, things are true in ways that are sometimes contradictory, and we can't always know exactly what is true so we have to take our best guess at it, and in a lot of ways it's really difficult to pin anything down, but the important thing is in spite of that there are still rules that are followed, and so even though we might not be able to understand the objective truth it might not be knowable,it might not be measurable, it might not be intuitive, it might not be rational, might not be coherent, but it is absolutely true and by guiding ourselves towards what is true we can perform miracles.
In this case I'm talking about the stuff more like microchips than parting the Red Sea.
In spite of being useful and intelligent, it is anti-wisdom, because to be rational and consistent is unwise in a world made at the quantum level of paradox.
Besides quantum mechanics at the very small level, we also come up with relativistic mechanics at the very large level which breaks Newtonian physics, which is quite unintuitive but I'm not going to talk about relativity right now.
What came next isn't necessarily any better, because instead of navigating all of the different things that are true at once, they just take one step into the fact that things can be contradictory and assume that nothing is true.
I mentioned the quantum level, and this is a good example where both of these views are wrong. At that level, things are true in ways that are sometimes contradictory, and we can't always know exactly what is true so we have to take our best guess at it, and in a lot of ways it's really difficult to pin anything down, but the important thing is in spite of that there are still rules that are followed, and so even though we might not be able to understand the objective truth it might not be knowable,it might not be measurable, it might not be intuitive, it might not be rational, might not be coherent, but it is absolutely true and by guiding ourselves towards what is true we can perform miracles.
In this case I'm talking about the stuff more like microchips than parting the Red Sea.
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@sj_zero
*nods* Newton wasn't really approaching things from a pure rationalist perspective though. He was first and foremost a Hermetic alchemist. That's what informed his worldview primarily, together with a bunch of intellectual gymnastics involved in his attempts to decipher supposed biblical prophesies. People are given a false impression of Newton having a purely rational worldview simply because the subject of science originating from occultism is taboo in mainstream society. Given how superstitious most people continue to be, that bit of deception is probably wise. Otherwise unwitting scientists would constantly have to fend off ignorant nutjobs trying to burn them at the stake.
https://vimeo.com/274402759
In terms of quantum mechanics (which also has it's roots in occult science), I think the unintuitive part for most people is that it revolves around statistical methods of analysis rather than black and white 1+1=2 type logic. In the case of quanta, 1+1=2 only because that's the average obtained over thousands of attempts, not because it's true 100% of the time. One of the interesting tangents on this subject I came across recently was about how light doesn't travel in a straight line from A-Z, but actually takes every single path which conceivably exists between A-Z. It only appears to travel in a straight line because the aggregate of all the other paths creates an interference pattern which cancels out the effect. Nonetheless it can be trivially proven that this is true using an obstructed mirror, which nonetheless successfully reflects a laser beam in spite of there being no straight path between origin and destination.
https://youtu.be/qJZ1Ez28C-A
To this day though, a lot of our intuitions about scientific truth, such as Newton's laws of thermodynamics, and the absolute symmetry of physical systems, is firmly rooted in Hermetic doctrine related to the dichotomous balance of forces in nature (as above, so below. solve et coagula, etc). That in turn has it's roots in pre-Socratic physics of the ancient world, such as from Empedocles (harmony of love and strife) and the Pythagorean schools, going back arguably to ancient Mesopotamia, where for all but the last little more than half a century, science was considered a sacred art intimately entwined with religious philosophy.
Anyway, this is all a bit tangential from the OP, but maybe you'll find it interesting nonetheless.
*nods* Newton wasn't really approaching things from a pure rationalist perspective though. He was first and foremost a Hermetic alchemist. That's what informed his worldview primarily, together with a bunch of intellectual gymnastics involved in his attempts to decipher supposed biblical prophesies. People are given a false impression of Newton having a purely rational worldview simply because the subject of science originating from occultism is taboo in mainstream society. Given how superstitious most people continue to be, that bit of deception is probably wise. Otherwise unwitting scientists would constantly have to fend off ignorant nutjobs trying to burn them at the stake.
https://vimeo.com/274402759
In terms of quantum mechanics (which also has it's roots in occult science), I think the unintuitive part for most people is that it revolves around statistical methods of analysis rather than black and white 1+1=2 type logic. In the case of quanta, 1+1=2 only because that's the average obtained over thousands of attempts, not because it's true 100% of the time. One of the interesting tangents on this subject I came across recently was about how light doesn't travel in a straight line from A-Z, but actually takes every single path which conceivably exists between A-Z. It only appears to travel in a straight line because the aggregate of all the other paths creates an interference pattern which cancels out the effect. Nonetheless it can be trivially proven that this is true using an obstructed mirror, which nonetheless successfully reflects a laser beam in spite of there being no straight path between origin and destination.
https://youtu.be/qJZ1Ez28C-A
To this day though, a lot of our intuitions about scientific truth, such as Newton's laws of thermodynamics, and the absolute symmetry of physical systems, is firmly rooted in Hermetic doctrine related to the dichotomous balance of forces in nature (as above, so below. solve et coagula, etc). That in turn has it's roots in pre-Socratic physics of the ancient world, such as from Empedocles (harmony of love and strife) and the Pythagorean schools, going back arguably to ancient Mesopotamia, where for all but the last little more than half a century, science was considered a sacred art intimately entwined with religious philosophy.
Anyway, this is all a bit tangential from the OP, but maybe you'll find it interesting nonetheless.