Towards the pseudo-formalization of a bad attitude Part 2/???
Dragonsphere Report
I very recently came to the realization that most people don't think. At least, not in any sort of conscious, deductive, and deliberate way. I came to this conclusion by reflecting on past life experiences and looking at the way people use language, and their responses to having that language use probed logically. The average person is instead a sort of stochastic meme-emitter, in adaptive cases finely tuned by social processes to emit memes at the proper frequencies in the proper contexts, and in maladaptive cases literally going off at random. The appearance of any deliberate logic is mostly a gestalt effect, and when people try to explain themselves logically they are generally applying ex post facto rationalizations without realizing it. It's bad enough that you can tell another person what their logic is in some cases and they will subsequently adopt that as their actual logic. This is the trick behind psychoanalysis as well as religious or occult reasoning regarding human nature. If you can explain someone's reasoning to them more convincingly than they can explain it themselves, and you're not untrustworthy to them, they'll frequently believe you.
It's wildly politically incorrect to suggest that there are different tiers of people, even though this hypothesis is one of the oldest known ideas on record. The gnostic division of hylics, psychics, and pneumatics shows that people were thinking about fundamental differences in human character and functionality long before the slow sorting hat of history conferred its small advantages to intelligence, making possible (but not necessitating) the disenfranchisement and destruction of the unintelligent. The murdering of the mentally handicapped under Nazi Germany is contrasted with the murdering of the intellectuals under Pol Pot. It doesn't make sense to caste either the intelligent or the unintelligent or average as oppressed or oppressors in any absolute sense. Rather, they form an ecosystem that can sometimes become dysfunctional in various ways.
At any rate, modern academics have no problem proposing different typological divisions in the human race, even in terms of intelligence. Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory divides people along 9 different axes: Naturalist (nature smart), Musical (sound smart), Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart), Existential (life smart), Interpersonal (people smart), Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart), Linguistic (word smart), Intra-personal (self smart), and Spatial (picture smart). The ontological commitment required to propose an ennea-modal model of intelligence is probably greater than in the gnostic commitment to three different rigid types, and a modern explanation of either must ultimately resort to the same sort of appeals to causal and probably biological processes, so the only real reason one type of reasoning proliferates while another is frowned upon is fashion.
It took so long for me to realize that most people are merely stochastically emitting memes because I was always capable of constructing logical explanations for their behavior, and because, on speaking these explanations out loud to these people, they often became incorporated into the person's subsequent activity. Conversely, the criticism I got most as a kid, besides "you're too smart for your own good", was "you have no common sense." Yet simultaneously, just as I was accused of having no common sense, I was also wrongly told "you know better." So the inability of people to construct a theory of mind for the other across an intelligence gap is bidirectional, but it is also human tendency to mistake the nature of intelligence. A picture to illustrate:
I think that the reason congeniality is often more associated with average than intelligent people is because there is a narrower distance between social programming and subsequent behavior in the average person; you go through fewer layers of rational thought and abstraction to get to the desired result, to the extent that in an average person you are effectively programming their body through stimulus, whereas in an intelligent person you have to first program their mind and then hope that leads to a proper compiling into the lower level language of the nervous system. In some cases, like ADHD for example, the mind is programmable but lacks this dominion over the body. That our current education system has to try to program people of wildly different neurological types using a single set of approved techniques and memes designed mostly for people who don't actually (and can't actually) think, is of course preposterous, and it is not hard to find evidence of the utter carnage that results from this lunacy, but since these processes mostly work for most people they are resistant to change. Studies don't actually show any correlation between antisocial tendency and intelligence, but that's probably because intelligent people tend to congregate together and so evaluation of adult humans mostly takes place within the context of peers. Memes about dysfunctional intelligent people arise from social environments where intelligent people are forced to mingle with average people, like schools and churches.
If we used IQ tests to sort people into different groups at a very young age, all of this could be avoided, but the pathological belief in absolute equality of opportunity even for people who could never benefit from it prevents this, even though opportunity is easily recognizable as a scarce resource and should thus be allocated rationally according to its utility. As a result, society itself just ends up functioning as a less effective IQ test; in freer societies one with many opportunities to re-test, and in less free societies one with few.
If all of this sounds fascistic to you, I don't care. Going back to the metaphor of social experiments as bio-computational bitmasking procedures for different truths, it seems perfectly reasonable that even fascism contains certain truths. If not in its theory (which is generally willfully contradictory, incoherent, unfalsifiable, etc), then in its practice. Fascists staked everything on theories of human essentialism and built their societies around theories of human essentialism. Their systems were designed to murder anyone who could have contributed "non-essentialist" utility to their society. It should not be surprising that once everyone who could have held up society by means of economic fitness or higher level social functioning or rational thought was murdered, any remaining social functionality could only possibly reflect the actual existence of the sort of truth fascists actually cared about. That doesn't make that truth more important than other truth, and it certainly doesn't make it more valuable; it is probably of extremely marginal value; but that doesn't mean it isn't truth.
So how do smart people manage to establish dominion over average and unintelligent people? Well, religion provides great insight into this. There are very intelligent and very unintelligent religious people. Intelligent people tend to think of religion along either metaphorical or metaphysical lines, depending on their disposition: they either under commit to the religion relative to others, or construct elaborate philosophical systems to enable themselves to commit to it. Average people can't see any contradictions or problems in religion, so they are happy to adopt any position on it that they can understand. Stupid people take it entirely literally. Fortuitously, all of this works together. A Kierkegaard or a Dostoevsky can say what they like about religion, knowing that the average can't contest it and the stupid can't decode it and that it's therefore non-threatening to both. It took a lot of trial and error, of course, to figure out exactly which types of speech fulfilled these conditions, and a lot of people were burned at the stake in the process of discovery.
Characteristic of a smart person with deep influence is their ability to determine what range of meanings their speech might have and to deploy their speech in a way that it fulfils the needs of people at each level of intelligence. This is why successful influencers often use very broad and open speech, or even meaningless speech in some cases. This satisfies intelligent people, who would often rather think about something than understand it, average people, by being accessible and giving them a vector along which to interact with intelligent people, and stupid people, by exposure and stimulus. This could probably be formalized through interpretation matrices, somewhat like this maybe:
In effectIn effect, smart and deeply influential people operate vertically integrated, self-calibrating meme networks; meme Zaibatsus, if you will. The phrase "Milk for babes, meat for strong men" comes to mind, only in this case these magical meme networks transform appropriately into milk or meat as needed. Less influential intelligent people play other games: intellectualism is basically a competition to construct high-res, narrow band memes. Dysfunctional intellectualism is a competition to encode the obvious in ways that require specialized knowledge or extended mental effort to decode, and happens in environment where proving ability is more important than pursuing truth. It is a great irony therefore that dysfunctional intellectualism, which focuses on measuring individual differences rather than on external metrics of performance, is so often associated with highly liberal fields that strongly disavow the importance or existence of individual and especially innate differences.
This is not to say that obfuscation and signaling are unique to high IQ or liberal people. But interestingly, low IQ, uneducated, and right wing individuals tend to create opacity through minimalism, by using simplistic speech in a highly context sensitive way, and by saying meaningless things to see who agrees with them as a loyalty test. The meme range of right wing influencers more traditionally extends to the unintelligent, while the left for whatever reason has focused more on high-res, narrow band memes. This seems elitist to the right, but it might also reflect the left's belief in the inherent permeability and mutability of human characteristics; IE, the left doesn't think it's wrong to communicate in this way because they erroneously believe everyone could potentially understand them.
One last thought: Regardless of whether they are a persecuted minority or not, the intelligent are, factually, a minority. Dynamics of intelligence have to take this into account. If intelligence is correlated with genes, as it shows every indication of being, then the intelligent are a genetic minority as well as a social minority. I know that this is an off-the-wall hypothesis, but if the less intelligent didn't put extreme pressure (far beyond that placed on the average person) on the intelligent to be socially useful, then the unchecked advantages of the intelligent would lead to the non-competitiveness of the unintelligent as well as the propagation of a much narrower range of genes. Therefore, social pressure on the intelligent to be socially useful not only preserves biodiversity but prevents the obsolescence of the less intelligent or even the speciation of the intelligent.
None of this should be taken to support "race realism", which is retarded. While differences in statistical intelligence exist between different racial groups, this can be explained almost entirely by simple factors such as the presence of lead and the absence of salt. Anyone who wants to begin a conversation about human biodiversity without first acknowledging (and addressing) these facts, can only be said to be operating in bad faith.
I guess I lied, because I want to say one other thing: The ability to construct high-res models does not ensure the accuracy of those models, and so, returning to the model of human evolution as iterative biological computation, there are advantages to the bell curve distribution of intelligence. When one builds something, one begins with the simplest components and only then proceeds to build more complex components, and then preferably in a modular capacity out of the simpler components. The intelligence of a population is like the working memory set of a program. An optimal working memory set is neither too small nor too large. Smart people are vulnerable to gestalt effects too: see astrology, occultism etc. By limiting the number and complexity of memes that the species is able to process at any given time, each iteration of the computation process ensures that environmental truths are bit-masked for in a highly incremental capacity that proceeds from smallest to largest appropriately. I think part of the reason everyone is insane today even though things are objectively better than they've ever been before is because the complexity of society has started to outrun the ratchet effect of human cognitive capacity.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report