while i don’t ardently agree with all your rhetoric it makes me feel such a sense of solace to see some of these ideas expressed in the wild.
it’s absolutely confounding how even seemingly rational people begin to emotionally seethe when presented with the fact that shitposting and generally bullying people isn’t activism. seems to be a very human thing.
i think a big part of the issue generally is that people think of their intelligence as some sort of absolute and continuous character trait rather than a discrete aspect of your personality; i.e, the idea someone is a “stupid” or “intelligent” person is of itself, a stupid idea lol. sometimes you’re the biggest brain in the room, sometimes you’re an idiot.
i appreciate your focus on the emotional aspect of it because that is certainly the more pertinent part. imo all humans average around the same intellectual capability, sans extreme outliers. it’s more about how people choose to use what is available to them than an actual lacking of mental capabilities. these people are just as rational as anyone else, it just happens that the vast landscape of knowledge itself is full of many pangs and holes that lead to nowhere; they seem stupid because there exists a seemingly logical perspective that causes them to infinitesimally and continually spin around these holes, like a coin in a make-a-wish donation thing. not sure if i’m conveying my rationale very well but i have found that the stuff in the cracks between ideas like this is often where the calculus of the universe hides in life.
. these people are just as rational as anyone else
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.
while i don’t ardently agree with all your rhetoric it makes me feel such a sense of solace to see some of these ideas expressed in the wild.
it’s absolutely confounding how even seemingly rational people begin to emotionally seethe when presented with the fact that shitposting and generally bullying people isn’t activism. seems to be a very human thing.
i think a big part of the issue generally is that people think of their intelligence as some sort of absolute and continuous character trait rather than a discrete aspect of your personality; i.e, the idea someone is a “stupid” or “intelligent” person is of itself, a stupid idea lol. sometimes you’re the biggest brain in the room, sometimes you’re an idiot.
i appreciate your focus on the emotional aspect of it because that is certainly the more pertinent part. imo all humans average around the same intellectual capability, sans extreme outliers. it’s more about how people choose to use what is available to them than an actual lacking of mental capabilities. these people are just as rational as anyone else, it just happens that the vast landscape of knowledge itself is full of many pangs and holes that lead to nowhere; they seem stupid because there exists a seemingly logical perspective that causes them to infinitesimally and continually spin around these holes, like a coin in a make-a-wish donation thing. not sure if i’m conveying my rationale very well but i have found that the stuff in the cracks between ideas like this is often where the calculus of the universe hides in life.
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.