Intelligence as privilege

Interrogate yourselves and your approach here, as a thought exercise etc

my enormous brain is a curse

abstract intelligence is cobblers

smarty wears the pants

we let idiots run shit so who is the real moran

Quiet week at work?

abstract intelligence is cobblers

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 December 2020 13:51 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In a pure state, sure

Otherwise that's just a clever evasion

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, which might be me evading but might be you. I did think a bit about "intelligence" since you asked tho, and I feel like it's mostly used in sentences in that pure nonsense state, so how does thoughts about it merit much respect?

Now it might serve as a self-deluding shortcut for people when considering the way they interact with the broader social world around them, and if they don't interrogate those assumptions they might think that other people who relate differently to that broad social world are inferior by dint of birth or effort or education or something, but really if we're just gonna have koans as thread starters we're just gonna get koans as answers

dmac's just feeling guilty about reading all that le carre

I was just reading a brief history of eyeglasses and poor eyesight, and there are some theories that myopia has always been a thing but just didn't matter when you were working in the fields or shoveling holes, it only really came into play for scholars who were inside reading. And given that reading (and, for that matter, scholarship) was a pretty elite thing, eyeglasses became associated with intelligence.

(This was an interesting essay, regardless: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pop-psych/201706/why-do-so-many-humans-need-glasses_

Put differently: do dumb ppl exist?

I'm not like them
But I can pretend
The sun is gone
But I have a light
The day is done
But I'm having fun
I think I'm dumb
Maybe just happy

Put differently: do dumb ppl exist?

"i dont see intelligence

[Blocked. Tap to read.]

I clicked and I clicked and I clicked and nothing happened.

how is babby formed

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/c2/51/37c25183e37a4b7c4a92b5575d0802c2.jpg

Off to a good start here.

mute people exist & should prob be used as an insult less

whole intelligence vs stupidity thing reeks of eugenics

Fabulous execution tbh x

I don't think I've ever heard anyone use 'dumb' in the sense of 'mute' – that meaning has all but vanished ime.

Is it ok to call Donald Trump a moron?

'idiot' is from the Greek for 'one who does their own thing' so i'm proud to be an idiot tbph

Only if you really mean it.

I've no idea how or why user Left managed to shoe in 'mute' here, but eh

xp

xp did you know the swastika was actually way older and... etc

user pomenitul taking a 'taking a Trump' all over this thread imo

'idiot' is from the Greek for 'one who does their own thing' so i'm proud to be an idiot tbph

Indeed: idiots are idiomatic and idiosyncratic and they rule. #TeamIdiot

xps because 'mute' is synonymous with 'dumb'?

Seems to me that intelligence = privilege roughly to the extent that one's intelligence serves some sort of practical function. Although I suppose even if you squander The Smarts, you still have a leg up inasmuch as you possess a thing that could theoretically have been utilized toward some practical function.

never mind, I clearly can't read--I'm too dumb for this thread

haha idiot is the main intelligence-related pejorative i use, because i parse it as "private", a privilege indeed

Dostoevsky figured it out long ago.

there's diogenes and then there's just lumpen

Literally classist.

early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish’.

the modern etymology of moron is problematic but the classical seems fine. i say yay to moron

On an unrelated note, what's up with Talk Talk's 'Dum Dum Girl'?

Difficult to imagine a weirder evasion the thread couldve taken than to start running through the most acceptable epithets for those who could be surmised as lacking the privilege we may or may not admit exists

a dum dum girl is surely a hollow-tipped girl that explodes on contact

always wondered if Dum Dum Girls was a reference to Dum Dum Boys by Iggy

Ahhh, that does seem likely.

Difficult to imagine a weirder evasion the thread couldve taken than to start running through the most acceptable epithets for those who could be surmised as lacking the privilege we may or may not admit exists

15 years ago, the thread would have been flooded with jigglepanda GIFs

It might be argued that intelligence (of the kind valued by society-at-large) is often an artifact of preexisting privilege.

Stop djp, I'll be crying if you don't stop

And maybe one measure of like legit intelligence is the extent to which it penetrates an absence of preexisting privilege.

It might be argued that intelligence (of the kind valued by society-at-large) is often an artifact of preexisting privilege.

Tbf you can also be deemed 'too smart for your own good'. There comes a point where 'intelligence' turns into a liability so while it ranks fairly high in the pecking order, it falls short of the very top, where pure pragmatic power reigns supreme.

Wtf is 'intelligence' tho is the question we should be asking ourselves first and foremost. Surely we're not thinking of IQ tests and other such tools of oppression?

it's only oppression if you're bad at them

Hmmm.

Think we'd all agree OL that "intelligence", if you choose to define it at all, is always going to be so refracted through a contextual prism before it could even be imperfectly measured at all so while yeah the proof of any one pudding is in the eating if you will then nevertheless no one chef is measured by one pudding, before you even get to their personal journey to whatever kitchen they had to cook in or whatever ingredients were made available to them and all that

So, reject "legit" intelligence i think as the topic, theres no illegit intelligence if you want imo to engage with it as an attribute that may or may not be viewed as a privilege

Wtf is 'intelligence' tho is the question we should be asking ourselves first and foremost. Surely we're not thinking of IQ tests and other such tools of oppression?

― pomenitul, Thursday, 3 December 2020 15:24 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I dont mean to be waspish but of fuckin course not pls folks

Not much point in a thread where any one concept of "intelligence" doesnt come from the contributor in context, is there

Projection on the starter's definition so as not to bother, otoh, well nobody surprised me lets say

I feel like I would happily (sometimes) call myself intelligent and others (not all of them) stupid in private, or in certain contexts, but the politicisation of intelligence automatically makes it seem indefensible as a concept. No one wants to admit that it exists or that they have it. I thought about taking a different position early on itt and refuting the idea of a consistent definition and all of the conditions that enable/disable it, but that seemed dishonest. Maybe I'm just a terrible person, but if we're not being post-structuralist about it, it has a general flavour, no? Just stop me if I put 'sapiosexual' in my Twitter bio.

I'm not talking about degrees of intelligence or whether it's qualitatively better or worse than other things, but imo it has often felt like the only privilege I had growing up. A privilege in that a) I experienced it as a positive thing, and b) it benefitted me as leverage away from limited opportunities. Ofc everyone's experience isn't the same, but refuting the pleasure of it is really surprising.

My kneejerk instinct is to say 'oh no, I am not clever, I am horrible'. I'll happily tell people that my music taste is 100% correct, and yet being perceived as arrogant in this specific way seems indefensible. Oh well.

I think i agree with you but as the thread has shown its an elusive thing to nail down, but I think you get where i started from alright

does this help
https://i.redd.it/13do5n1wvum31.jpg

This is why you eat the balls.

The fact that Hitler only had one explains a lot.

I wanted to stay away from "intellectualism" as class and/or political signifier itt, because it's boring and I don't think it's a useful discussion. But right now in the U.S. as soon as you start talking about class at all it's p much impossible not to implicate political orientation and loyalties. Like if someone thinks Trump is a mastermind and dead people voted in Michigan and adrenochrome, I'm going to deeply question their ability to perceive and understand the world at the very least.

I'm not mad at that star witness lady though, she was hilarious and her accent is amazing.

class is relevant to the concept in general but what class are the people who think trump is a genius?

xp yeah i feel bad for somebody like that who is awesome and funny and i side with her madness - bar the obvious racism etc - against smartarse fuckers

Anti-intellectualism is reliably correlated with power in the US, more so than in the UK ime.

yes but only for certain definitions of "power"??

i.e. electoral game-playing sure but to what extent is that actual power

Pretty sure it went over with the Mayflower.

Had only a skim at some of what's here. I'd say intelligence doesn't matter, that whether you possess or not have whatever the definition of intelligence that this isn't used to deny people their basic necessities such as food, a roof, and also their ability to do things they want and develop whatever path they choose to take in life.

I'd say this is very much not the case; see for example how people interpret the resumes of people with schools and companies associated with "intelligence" fare in job searches over those who don't have those qualifications on their resumes. I used to work for a company based in Cambridge, UK that expressly forbade reading any resumes from candidates for US-based jobs who didn't have degrees from one of the top 100 universities in the country; at least half of the people I worked with at the time of acquisition, including the people who originally started the business, wouldn't have gotten an interview in the new venture. I had a coworker who was one of the better developers on the team who was targeted by upper management and laid off because he didn't have a college degree; the last I checked, he couldn't get another software job and was paying his bills by driving for Uber.

― DJP, Friday, 4 December 2020 14:45 (three hours ago) link

Sorry yes garbled that bit. Agree that academic credentials (one way that is used to define intelligence) are often used to downgrade people for roles that have material consequences. Or that the fact you have a piece of paper should upgrade you automatically.

Ideally we should not use these and whatever our capacities are should not deprive anyone of their basic needs.

Anti-intellectualism is reliably correlated with power in the US, more so than in the UK ime.

― pomenitul, Friday, December 4, 2020 6:00 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes but only for certain definitions of "power"??

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Friday, December 4, 2020 6:01 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's inextricable with the political right wing/populist project, for sure, and to some degree they've been accumulating power for--what--fifty years now?

oh yeah but their electoral power is arguably not the base of their power?

"not the base" is wrong but i hope you get me, i'm cynical about the extent of the power of government in itself

Hi epi

Hey dmac. Good seeing you again lately.

Ugh, I have spent so much time eyerolling at this thread and now I find I have a post I want to make in it. I still think i was right upthread but I also think that it has made me think, even inadvertently, about the subject.

My family have always valued ‘intelligence’ - both my parents are the cleverest children in their respective families, our house was always full of books, and I was their first child so they read to me, they helped me with homework, and they encouraged me in everything I took an interest in. When I was a very small child and was interested in dinosaurs, my father took time off work to bring me to Dublin’s natural history museum... which has no dinosaurs. Still, I never forgot that day out.

I was always very good in school, and fast too, which is a terrible combination because it makes you lazy, and that’s where the notion of ‘intelligence’ falls down, where application meets reality. Because once you have someone who realises they don’t need to put in so much effort to do well, and therefore does not, it produces a terrible terrible person. Do I wish I had worked harder at school and university? Definitely, because it took me a considerable amount of time in later life to build up anything approaching a work ethic, diligence, focus... things that people learn at an early age. This has carried through to work as well, and i think it has not really served me well either. I have never really known what I want to do with my life, and so I have done a series of jobs without any sense of where I should go in a long term sense or what I could do that would make use of ability that, tbh, I am not making a huge amount of use out of.

But kinds of intelligence are as important as application, because they are valuable in different ways but are not necessarily... valued. If you are the kind of person who can deliver a presentation oblivious to the audience you are delivering it to, without caring that their eyes are glazing over or they’re checking their phones, well, you’re a bit lacking in social intelligence at the very least. Am broadly unconvinced of the efficacy of presentations for most kinds of learning for this reason btw - there’s no point in being a very clever person delivering information if your presentation skills are causing the audience to think about what shopping they need, or how much they’d like to chuck that glass of water at you.

I mentioned briefly last night, but there are lots of jobs using skills that society undervalues that draw on intelligence that is undervalued by society. Or as I said, more pithily, “any cunt can work in an office.” Having worked, at various times, in retail, in a bookies and in a restaurant, that kind of work requires you to think and act fast, think on your feet, and read people. For this reason, if I am ever involved in hiring/sifting cvs for any reason I am always interested in people who’ve worked retail for example, because they are skills that will work well in an office environment. Especially if they have worked there for any length of time - give me someone who’s worked on a shopfloor over someone who’s got no idea how to interact with other people but went to the right university.

Of course the latter is the thing that will really get you in the door and it’s true, a lot of graduates are highly intelligent people, but it’s the application I return to time and time again. Does a degree matter if you don’t use it, or is it just a way of screening out the riff-raff? I know which one I believe.

I do genuinely enjoy talking to people from different backgrounds or work environments from myself, because I like to hear people talk about the context of their working lives and how they talk about the way they go about their business because it reveals something of themselves. I always talk to taxi drivers if they talk to me first* because I have no spatial ability at all, and I am interested in the kind of things you pick up travelling constantly talking to all kinds of people. It might be because I am a person who likes to do things and learn by doing that I find it so interesting, but I have learned so many interesting things over the years from talking to taxi drivers. For example: the thing on the wall outside my house is a boot-scraper and in this area they date back to (year).That this particular building was the scene of a highly controversial event in (year). The best places to see the sun rise and set. Being diaspora when someone is being bigoted without realising or caring who they are talking to.

My point is, besides the fact I love to shite on a lot, is that we can never hope to scratch the surface of the minds of other people, but it is sometimes so rewarding to try. And again driving a taxi is something that is considered to be unskilled but fuck me, I couldn’t do it. I can’t even drive.

Anyway, to try to address the notion in the first place: yes and no. Xyzzzz__ is really correct when he talks about material circumstances constraining a lot of bright or otherwise talented and able people from achieving their true potential. In that case, is their intelligence a privilege in the way that you are asking? Perhaps it helps them to make sense of their world, perhaps it causes them great anger at how fucking unfair it is, perhaps they take solace in writing or reading or their insight. There are lots of people who may not have formal education but who are autodidacts and have a huge reservoir of knowledge that they have accumulated for their own pleasure and understanding, but they are not recognised as such because they didn’t learn it the “right” way.

I guess if I had to say the thing I personally value about intelligence is always wanting to learn more, to do more, to build and build and grow. To not be lazy. I think my early jobs spending time where I had some of that part of my personality fairly bluntly knocked into order were pretty good for me.

I always like and fear ilx a bit because it is full of very bright people and it’s a place where you can always log on to feel stupid in comparison. That for me is good, because it reminds me not to be lazy, to seek out and to and think more, and to read different ways people think and construct arguments helps me with mine too. You know, when I’m not just being a cunt. It can also be intimidating, but for me that’s less of a problem maybe, because I have no problem admitting where i am ignorant and where I could know more - and the best life skill of all you can learn is to shut the fuck up occasionally and leave space for other people.

I’m going to take my own advice now and wind up this mess of a post which has gone from head to phone with nothing in between, but damn you, the subject interested me.

*childhood applied knowledge = learning that some people like to talk as they drive and some really really don’t.

Lol you caved

I've always been Mr Could Try Harder but I dunno, I don't feel like I could. Or should, even

Too much like hard work. That should be on my headstone. Not that I'll have one.

Important to remember that the work ethic is a force for evil

xxp you def should, you are very smart and insightful, just as long as you don’t use it to benefit your wsos or something

Lol I don't think there's any danger of our leaders or anybody else finding me smashable

'Fulfilling one's potential' is a phrase that scares the shit out of me and strikes me as the kind of phrase that brings the doctors running across the lawn. What would that look like? Or what metric do we use to measure it?

lol gyac, I didn't expect you to take the bait, but at least you did so with flying colours.

Its a lovely trick the whole of ilx has played on the two of ye

Having a thread, like.

smh

Yup. I've said this elsewhere, but:

When I was in my mid-twenties, I worked as a minimum-wage lunch recess monitor at a hippie school in Brentwood, California. My closest coworker was a sad-sack and incredibly brainy woman her late sixties, with THREE PhDs, a string of still-friendly ex-husbands she'd lived with all around the world, a purple streak in her hair, and a mammoth chip on her shoulder. One of her PhDs was in plastics engineering, one was in art history, and one was in psych (?). One of the ex-husbands was a B-list TV actor, and another ex-husband owned a hammam in Istanbul. She lived with a woman now. She grew a dozen strains of weed in her backyard and gave it away to hospice patients. She had two gorgeous daughters, one of whom was a touring dancer. For both off us, the recess-monitoring our only income, and we stuck with it because we were in debt and it was the recession. I talked with her about how I saw the job as a stop-over on my way to a brilliant career in TV writing; I assumed that this was just a day-to-day gig for my coworker. After working together for half a year, I finally asked her how she'd ended up in at a minimum-wage school job. She reacted poorly, and answered through a lot of tears "I was once very smart, but I kept going to school and I never found my calling." I think she might've even left the job early that day. It all made me very uncomfortable.

Throughout my twenties, while I was trying to "find myself" I'd think of her as a certified Tragic Figure, because she hadn't found herself, and that was somehow upsetting. But after a decade it occurred to me that the real tragedy wasn't that she hadn't found her calling, or whatever, but that she had gone to school three times, lived an amazing and rich life, and was for some reason upset about the inadequacy of her experience. I'd always thought of her as a brilliant figure, but I think that in retrospect she was kind of a self-centered moron.

^ The difference between wanting to be a good person and wanting to do great things.

Nothing wrong with ambition. Nor with a lack of ambition, for that matter.

*intelligence as privilege* settles down to read The Observer over a cup of Coffee on a cloudy Sunday mornibg

I've read 20 more posts in this thread, including the one that said I was otm.

🤣🤣🤣

Absolutely exceptional #struggle tweets here. pic.twitter.com/n0eehDvdR9

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) December 6, 2020

A life experience that may be related to the thread topic: My would-be egalitarian parents, who are both sort of intellectual snobs but also very politically lefty, decided that the "gifted students" program at my middle school was elitist. There wasn't a whole lot to the program, every few weeks a group of us would get to miss a regular class period and get together to work on various projects, puzzles, things to challenge us, I don't even remember. But my parents didn't like it. They didn't exactly forbid me from participating, but they did guilt me about it a bit to the extent that I didn't feel good taking part and dropped out. The teacher who ran the program was fairly baffled by this reaction but basically just shrugged and said OK. The consequence being that during those class periods I had to sit in my deathly dull English class and diagram sentences instead of doing fun stuff with my friends.

In subsequent years my parents have agreed with me that this was a pretty dumb reaction and we weren't exactly striking a blow against the empire by forcing me to sit in a boring class. That said, it instilled in me an awareness that being "smart" was neither something I should take for granted nor feel superior about.

(likewise, my parents actively discouraged me from applying to elite universities. I don't know that I would have anyway, or that I would have gotten in, but it's kind of hilarious for me to think about given the modern frenzy abut trying to get kids into top-tier programs)

Gifted programs can absolutely fuck off. I understand the value of giving kids an appropriate level of challenge, but the framing is harmful to kids in and out of the program.

My elementary school had a fucked up rule that only kids in the ‘smart’ English class (which comprised a quarter of the grade) could have speaking roles in class plays. Looking back I don’t know how that didn’t get ripped to pieces.

We also had a separate gifted program based on Iowa test scores where you had an after school meeting once every six weeks to do... stuff.

Heh, your parents sound like the exact opposite of immigrant parents from poorer nations.

2xp

Yeah, it was an odd kind of virtue signaling. They had gone to elite schools themselves and felt guilty about it as counterculture types, so I became a vehicle for that I guess.

Gifted programs can absolutely fuck off. I understand the value of giving kids an appropriate level of challenge, but the framing is harmful to kids in and out of the program.

Yeah the naming and framing of it is problematic for sure.

i attended elementary school before the mania for TAG programs emerged. The nearest analog was that in seventh grade I was given the chance to take a German language class, incompetently taught by a teacher who couldn't speak a word of German, and in eighth grade took an algebra class from a dour bad-tempered teacher nobody could stand.

otoh, I'm not sorry I missed out on TAG classes. There was already more than enough tracking of kids into 'bright' and 'dumb' categories.

there are ppl whom it's hard to be friends with because of a gap in [insert extended caveat] intelligence

i have a hard time getting along with my best friend's bf, a computer scientist who wrecks our asses at board-games and constantly zaps logical or factual gaps in my arguments on any topic of conversation. even though i admire him, it's intimidating. and he's not even condescending; i genuinely learn a lot from him! i have friends who are prob as smart (but are day-ones or compensate in other dimensions) but it's like i can feel the glare of his throbbing brain as a physical presence

about 7 years ago i went on a longish road-trip with some casual friends who i knew from the music scene; people whose company i had enjoyed for years in the context of chatting at shows and bars. after being stuck in a car with them for 5 days, i felt like i had uncovered a boundary between us. it's not that i think they're dumb, but the paths some of the long ~deep~ conversations took were so unsatisfying and frustrating to me. and it's not just a "you hate anyone after a road trip" thing, because i've gone on longer trips that created lasting bonds. it was mutual, too; i could tell they felt a similar way to me as i feel toward my friends' bf. it got a bit tense. we're still friends and i love to chat with them

It doesn't help that a lot of, and perhaps most, genuinely stupid people are as mean as snakes.

I have a phobia about appearing stupid, partially because my mother kept warning me about it. I tend to gray rock everyone because of this, which probably does make me look stupid. It's a vicious cycle.

even though i admire him, it's intimidating. and he's not even condescending

I would hope that lack of condescension is based on his knowledge that superiority at board games and a facility with logical argument are merely nice gifts to have, not transcendent talents or a sound basis for constructing a happy life. My unsolicited advice would be to just reconcile yourself to getting the tar beaten out of you at board games and enjoy his friendship in other ways.

it’s not intimidating because i think he has a transcendent talent or a sound basis for constructing a happy life, i just don’t like being the dumb guy in the group :)

his bf (my best friend) is a similar level of dumb as me, and they’re in love, so clearly it’s not impossible to transgress this boundary

I'm always the smart guy in the room/friend group, and I'm not here, I think that's what brings me always back to this dreadful place

My supervisor at my old job in a high tech company liked to refer to the place as a "sheltered workshop for the the very bright".

Ok, I’m a bit touchy when if comes to people bagging on gifted programming. It’s not about elitism but rather teaching within a different framework that serves certain kids better. I have two kids that we in no way pushed or coached to be identified as gifted, but who were tested by the schools and found to be unusual by those standards. We initially opted to have them just accommodated within the normal school setting, maybe just with some extra challenges, but they both (at different times) suffered, were ostracized by the other kids, and began to hide who they were and adopted bad habits. Their difference was a burden to them. We relented, accepted some inconvenience, and moved them to self contained programming where the change was stark and they began to thrive. I do notice that some parents actively strive to get their kids into the program, but I think they miss the true purpose, that it’s special education to address special needs. I do have some concerns about them having to reintegrate into the “normal” spectrum at high school level and beyond, but by then you can do more self selection of peers. Some of you might say you’re against such things, yet here you are, like, here.

My elementary school had a fucked up rule that only kids in the ‘smart’ English class (which comprised a quarter of the grade) could have speaking roles in class plays. Looking back I don’t know how that didn’t get ripped to pieces.

What the FUCK

my junior high featured teachers that would join in with the bullies in making fun of the intelligent kids, because really, who wants to do or talk about, much less grade homework? it's not like any of our families had enough money for our futures to matter