Americans are rather stupid people, as is the norm among humans. This stupidity is manifest in a general lack of knowledge or understanding of the goings on in the rest of the world. And just as dull elementary school age children many think of Africa as one amorphous country, it seems quite often public policy pundits like to use Europe as one amorphous example, rest assured of the public’s ignorance of reality. Whether as a shining City on the Hill in the case of the Left, or as an object lesson in sclerotic decadence in much of the American Right, a dream Europe lives on in the imaginings of the American punditocracy. A few years ago I encountered total surprise when I mentioned to a conservative friend, who has a medical degree, that France is in fact a nation of immigrants, and has been since the demographic transition in the wake of the French Revolution. The logic behind the surprise was clear; Europe is the opposite of the United States (we are Good, they are Bad), and so it must not be a nation of immigration because we are a nation of immigration. Q.E.D.
But I come not to discuss the Right in this case, but rather the Left. In The American Prospect Dana Goldstein has a piece up, A “Uniquely American” Abortion Debate, which is part of what I like to term the “it’s better in Europe” genre. Goldstein describes her utopia of taxpayer funded abortion in Europe in naturally glowing terms. Fair enough. Let’s put aside the objections that large numbers of Americans have to abortion which is of the first moral order (objections I do not personally share, but which I do not feel it necessary to dismiss as beyond the pale in a democratic republic). This section of Goldstein’s piece caught my attention:
That’s not to say these other nations are utopias for reproductive rights. Reflecting fears of crashing birth rates, many European countries infantilize women by forcing them to undergo counseling before abortions, wait several days, or get two doctors to sign off on the procedure. Yet even those laws are less stringent abroad than they are in some American states, where doctors are required to deliver a scripted speech to women seeking abortions, sometimes including medical misinformation about supposed risks to the pregnant woman’s mental or physical health.
First, I think Goldstein is wrong about the point that stringency in Europe’s abortion laws are due to fears of their low birthrates. Those restrictions have long existed because of the power of the Catholic Church and Christian Democratic parties on the Continent, restrictions which have only been rolled back after the demographic collapse across Southern Europe. The historical sequence of facts simply falsifies the contention that current abortion regimes are as they are because of the context of pro-natalist hysteria (Communist abortion laws were strongly responsive to these concerns, and certainly demographics did matter in Western Europe in terms of attitudes toward contraception or eugenics, but in the post-World War II “Baby Boom” Europe this was not an issue and abortion laws were stricter than today). But the second part is also I think arguable. Europe is a diverse continent with many local regimes in regards to abortion, but it is simply the case that European constraints upon abortion on demand are more thorough than those in the United States, on average. This does not mean that women can not get abortions, but it does mean that the right to abortion is balanced against guardrails which disabuse anyone of the idea that the act is a pure autonomous individual act which has no relation to the political community in which an individual is embedded.
This is one of those “counterintuitive” facts which must confront Americans on the Left or Right who wish to use Europe as an object lesson. European abortion laws were influenced by the democratic process, and so they exhibit the same variation and complexity of attitudes of the populace as a whole, as opposed to the clean and hard rules imposed by judges from on high. One reason that Europeans are perhaps less agitated over their tax dollars going to fund abortion is that to a great extent their collective will shaped the legal availability of this morally fraught medical procedure (see the referendum in Portugal 2 years ago).
So here’s a solution which might allow for a path to public acceptance of taxpayer funded abortions: overturn Roe vs. Wade and allow for abortion laws to be hashed-out on a state-by-state basis through representative democracy in place of judicial fiat. Ah, but that’s not the lesson that Dana Goldstein wanted to take away from the reality of European taxpayer funded abortions, so the details on the ground had to be obscured so that the dream could live on….
a hill too steep to climb.
Interesting. I noticed that almost all of the EU countries limit abortion to the first trimester (12-13 weeks). Japan is similar to most of the E.U. countries that a woman seeking an abortion must do so in the first trimester and must claim financial “hardship” in order to get the abortion. However, the claiming of financial hardship is a rubberstamp formality as abortion in Japan is a big money maker for the OB/GYNs and no request for abortion is ever refused.
Its largely the same for most of the other East Asian countries as everything is about money and everyone has their price.
I agree with the Derb here that had Roe vs Wade never occurred, that abortion would have been liberalized state by state in the same manner as on-fault divorce. Wshington state (where I live) legalized abortion about a year before the Roe vs Wade decision. It is one of 17 states that had done so prior to the Roe vs Wade decision.
I think an overturn of Roe vs Wade is virtually impossible before, say, 2030 or 2040. Obama will get two, perhaps three bites, at the apple before he is out of office. He will, of course, replace liberals with liberals since it is the liberal justices that are the oldest. His successor will then replace conservatives with conservatives. Thus, the ideological composition of the Supreme court is unlikely change much over the next 20-30 years, making an overturn of Roe vs Wade highly unlikely.
An overturn of Roe vs Wade would simply hand the issue back to the state (like the repeal of the national speed limit in 1995) with most states choosing to keep abortion available with varying levels of restrictions. Only the most conservative states are likely to completely ban the procedure. It is worth noting that the South Dakota abortion ban was overturned by the state’s voters because it did not allow exception for cases of rape. South Dakota is one of the most conservative states in the union with regards to these issues.
kurt, i think roe vs. wade is probably a definite case where the activist organizations are really invested in keeping this issue alive.
By 2030 we will have ectogenesis.
Abortion will be over as a wedge issue.
Although we will have to buy our swell new Bene Tleilax host-wombs from the Japanese.
😉
David, I know that. However, I do believe that an overturning of Roe vs Wade would remove the issue from the national political scene. Once abortion became a state issue, the pro-life organizations would try to get it banned in every state possible. It is unlikely they would be successful in more than a dozen or so states. Attempts to get a federal ban on abortion are extremely unlikely to be successful, because the overturn itself is likely to be based on federalization (e.g. it is a states rights issue, not one of federal jurisdiction) which would make any federal ban be unconstitutional. Tactically it would not work either. The current situation makes the pro-life people the fellow travelers of all the other conservatives who seek to limit or reduce federal power. Once abortion becomes a state issue, attempts at a federal ban puts the pro-life people into the position where they are arguing for an increase in federal jurisdiction, a position decidedly the opposite of all other conservatives. They would not have much traction with the other conservatives and would not gain any traction with the liberal-left, who are all socially liberal. So, the overturn of Roe vs Wade would remove much of the social conservative politics from the national scene.
I believe that if Roe vs Wade had never happened, that if abortion had been legalized on a state by state basis in the same manner as no-fault divorce, there would be no such thing as a pro-life movement today.
For those of you unfamiliar with this, no fault divorce was first legalized by Ronald Reagan in California in 1969 and was legalized in all 50 states by 1974. Abortion was legal in 17 states at the time of Roe vs Wade, and would have been legalized in most other states by around 1976 or so, if Roe vs Wade had never occurred.
I believe it was the federalization of abortion by Roe vs Wade that galvanized the pro-life movement because it was perceived as another assault by the coastal and Yankee liberals on the more conservative South and heartland. It was the feeling of abortion being “imposed from above” rather than by “local consensus” as with no-fault divorce that alienated many people, who then created the pro-life movement. If abortion had never been made into a federal issue, I believe the opponents of abortion would have about the same amount of influence on the national level as, say, the advocates of covenant marriage. In other words, not much at all.
Kurt9, I think the rise of the pro-life movement in response to Roe v. Wade has a direct parallel in the rise of creationism in response to the Federal ban on school prayer. If you talk to people who went to elementary school before the prayer ban was instituted, they’ll all tell you that they learned evolution, and nary a word was mentioned about Adam and Eve and their pet stegosaurus in the Garden of Eden. There weren’t any loonies beating on classrooms doors demanding that geology and paleontology texts be replaced with Genesis.
I think creationism is a back-door attempt to get God back into the schools, just as the pro-life movement(for many of its proponents) is really about state’s rights. Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but the parallel between the two situations seems to me to be very vivid.
Susan, What you say makes sense to me, and I don’t think its off topic either.
No objection to the content of this post, but this:
Americans are rather stupid people, as is the norm among humans.
is simply beyond the pale. If one wishes to say that Americans are a rather stupid people – well, that’s wrong, but at least it could be right. Perhaps Americans are stupider on average than other peoples. But claiming that humans are a rather stupid people just doesn’t make sense at all. Compared to what? Ah, it must be compared to David Hume’s magnificent intellect. What does it take to get people to realize that when a person starts denigrating the intelligence of the entire human species that A) it makes them sound like a pretentious undergraduate and B) offers fairly sufficient evidence that the speaker isn’t actually all that clever after all?
andrew, you make a good point re: definitions. let me clarify and assert that most humans are stupid in relation to the self-image they have to their own intellectual abilities. the main exceptions to this i’ve met, or heard of, are the super-smart. e.g., john von neuman offering that the only truly brilliant mathematician he’d ever met or known of was david hilbert.
I was probably being a bit hard on you and I did appreciate the rest of the post and generally think your posts are pretty good. (Indeed, generally, you are considerably less smug than the rest of the contributors here.)
But the human species has put a man on the Moon, eradicated smallpox, built the Pyramids, etc., etc. There is no person so clever, not even David Hilbert, that he can point to the human race and say, “What a bunch of morons humans are.” So whenever I hear somebody do so, I say to myself, “Ah, there’s a man who is remarkably stupid in relation to the self-image he has of his own intellectual abilities.”
andrew, well, i subscribe to the smart fraction theory. my only point in alluding to the presumed stupidity of the american public was two-fold
1) in modern political discourse the acceptance of democracy as the default governmental state tends to bleed into the idea that “the people” are imbued with great wisdom. i disagree with the second. in any case, there’s no great shame in stupidity, it seems that all things equal the stupid live happier lives than the intelligent from all i can see (certainly less complicated).
2) it is the lack of human wisdom or knowledge which leaves an opening for pundits like dana goldstein to play shell games. because *both* liberals and conservative trade in cut-out depictions of european politics or society is the primary reason i believe they don’t correct each other’s mischaracterizations.
Yes, in fact Lisa Simpson found that happiness was inversely proportional to intelligence.
I have seen studies which show no correlation between intelligence and self-reports of well-being and I have seen studies which show positive correlations between intelligence and self-reported well-being. I have never seen a study which showed negative correlations (and believe me, I’ve looked), despite the popularity of the theory that “ignorance is bliss.”
When I meet smart, miserable people, I am always at a loss as to why this should be. (How smart can you be if you can’t make yourself happy?) Intelligence hasn’t made my life more complicated; it has made it vastly simpler. When I have a problem, my intellect allows me to solve it much faster and likely much better than the average person. This allows me to move on to the next problem or simply enjoy my life if there aren’t any problems left to solve at the moment. Intelligence is a blessing, not a curse, though not as significant as being good or wise or kind.
Of course, I suspect that it’s not intelligence that causes happiness, but practical wisdom. However, intelligence makes practical wisdom much easier to acquire, provided that one wishes to. So if there is no correlation between happiness and intelligence, perhaps it’s because intelligent people are less motivated to acquire practical wisdom than less intelligent people, negating their advantage in acquiring it? I think this is a plausible theory since a great many smart people I know seem to believe that, by virtue of their intelligence, they are already wise, even though any fool surveying the wreckage of their lives could tell them they aren’t.
It’s probably pointless to try to draw any kind of correlation between happiness and intelligence or happiness and stupidity, simply because there is no universal objective meaning to the term “happiness”. What I mean by “happiness” might be totally different from what you mean. A third person will have yet a third definition. And so on. I suspect that many people who describe themselves as “happy” have in fact reached a state of equilibrium or contentment–which is fine, and mature, but not necessarily “happy” if you think of happpiness as a continuing state of joy. Which some people do. It’s the same thing with love, another word that has no objective meaning. Some people use it to denote mild affection. For others, it’s not love unless it’s a full court press reenactment of Heloise and Abelard, only he gets to keep his equipment.
As a side note, there are studies that indicate a pretty high correlation between creativity (particularly for writers) and depression.
Susan: You may have noted that the studies rely on self-reported well-being. If your objection is that this is not equal to eudaimonia, then I agree, of course, but it’s good enough for our purposes. I think most people would be content with a high level of self-assessed well-being, even if you or I may not consider them to be truly happy.
As a side note, there are studies that indicate a pretty high correlation between creativity (particularly for writers) and depression.
I’m fine with this, but weren’t you just complaining about how happiness and love don’t have settled objective meanings, but you’re happy to let the people who did the study decide what creativity is? (Actually, I am satisfied with this, but I’m also satisfied with the proxy for happiness.) Writers and visual artists, by the way, both show higher rates of depression.
For what it’s worth, there is a definite negative correlation between IQ and depression. People with IQs under 85 are extremely prone to depression. (I freely grant that the causation might go the other way. It’s quite possible that great depression causes low IQs.) It is true that gifted adolescents are much more prone to existential anxiety than most, but in general there is a negative correlation between IQ and mental illness. Reis and Renzulli wrote in Current Research on the Social and Emotional Development of Gifted and Talented Students: Good News and Future Possibilities: “With the exception of creatively gifted adolescents who are talented in writing or the visual arts, studies do not confirm that gifted individuals manifest significantly higher or lower rates or severity of depression than those for the general population.”
Well, Andrew, I don’t think I was actually complaining so much as pointing out what seems, in my experience anyway, to be a truism–that happiness is subjective. But alas–there may be no objective definition for “complain,” either. 😀
For my purposes, and the purposes of those who’ve studied the subject, creativity DOES have an objective meaning. When I speak of a creative person, particularly a writer, I mean someone who produces books, articles, essays, poems, plays, short stories, etc. and is published. By published I mean by a legitimate commercial press who pays (or, in the case of small presses, otherwise rewards) the author for his or her endeavor and then prints it. I don’t mean some airy-fairy nitwit prancing around the landscape claiming to be creative who’s never produced a legitimate recognized work. They don’t count.
There’s an interesting book called “Unholy Ghost,” a collection of essays by professional writers dealing with depression, or spouses of writers such as Rose Styron who had to deal with a severely depressed spouse. If I listed all the professional writers who’ve suffered from depression, it would take up all the bandwidth.
This is not data, though (many, many, many creative writers do not suffer from depression), and is not how the studies determined creativity. Usually they used something like the Barron-Welsh Art Scale to measure creativity, so they definitely failed by your objective definition.
I’m not certain that your observations tell us much (though the studies do suggest that there may be such a link, granting that some of the people classified as creative were never going to be anything but airy-fairy nitwits). I doubt that the incidence of depression is very much higher in creative writers than it is in the general population, though it’s probably somewhat higher. (Depression is very common in the general population, principally among the unemployed, prisoners, and the homeless.) It is, however, noticeably higher among creative writers (and visual artists) than among successful people in other fields. So the observations you describe might simply tell us that depression is not so debilitating to creative writers and artists as it is to success in other endeavors.
(Parenthetically, there is no link between genius and madness. Mental illness and IQ are negatively correlated. The reason why there is a perceived link is simply because we notice famous geniuses who go mad and don’t pay too much attention to the many, many people of normal or lower intelligence who go mad. My father was mad, afflicted with schizophrenia, and no genius.)
If you end up blowing your brains out, like Hemingway, depression can be the ultimate debilitation, I suppose.
Does the Barron-Welsh Art Scale measure creativity only in the visual arts, or does it encompass verbal and musical creativity as well?
If you end up blowing your brains out, like Hemingway, depression can be the ultimate debilitation, I suppose.
Well, naturally. (By the by, Hemingway’s father, two of his siblings, and one of his grandchildren also committed suicide. None of them were great writers, though his granddaughter was a modestly well-known model and actress, but also dyslexic and had read very little of her grandfather’s work.) However, while still living, it is very reasonable to think that depression would interfere less with creative artists than with successful people in other fields. Creative artists can keep their own hours and don’t need to collaborate to be successful. Moreover, if the person suffers from bipolar disorder, there is good reason to think that a creative person could be unusually productive during low-level manic phases. Just to give some cold, hard numbers, a 2003 Princeton study showed that the incidence of manic-depression in artists was 10-20% higher than in the general population. Manic-depressives generally were not any more creative on average than the general population.
Does the Barron-Welsh Art Scale measure creativity only in the visual arts, or does it encompass verbal and musical creativity as well?
It’s definitely a visual art based test. I’m not sure if the claim is that all types of creativity are highly correlated (which wouldn’t shock me in the least) and that it therefore can be used as a broad measure for creativity generally or if they make no such claim and simply use it for visual creativity. But there are other tests for verbal and musical creativity which have been used in some studies.
It’s an interesting question whether all creative talents are correlated. Maybe creativity is all one generalized impulse/genetic factor/whatever that manifests itself in different ways in different people. On the maternal side, I’m descended from painters, but my artwork is kindergarten-level. On the other hand, I get paid to write, so I suppose I can do that.
But this is getting away from my original point, which was simply that the definition of happiness is too subjective for it to be useful in making any kind of concrete determination whether the stupid are happier than the smart or the smart are happier than the stupid. I suppose people are happy if they say they are. But the fact remains that one person’s idea of happiness may be another person’s idea of low-level misery.
We certainly have wandered a long way from the topic at the top of this thread.
Well, I began by agreeing with his original post. I’ve been telling people for years that most European countries have far stricter abortion laws than the U.S. does, but it never seems to make a dent because everybody (right or left) “knows” the opposite. In the same way that everybody “knows” that Sparta was terrible for women. (In fact, it was a great deal better for women than Athens.) I just took issue with the claim that “humans are stupid.” And then I had to take issue with the claim that “the stupid live happier lives,” since neither of these things is true. (The first cannot be true, since humans are by far the smartest species on earth, and the second has no empirical evidence to back it up since the evidence is either neutral or marginally toward the more intelligent being somewhat happier than the less intelligent.)
But the fact remains that one person’s idea of happiness may be another person’s idea of low-level misery.
This does raise the interesting point that self-awareness may have much to do with happiness. After all, we can all grant that some people are very happy as doctors and others would be miserable. But since intelligence and self-awareness really ought to be tightly linked, I am again surprised at the fairly low levels of correlation between intelligence and happiness. They really ought to be highly positively correlated. (Full disclosure: I am quite possibly the happiest man I know and I find the existence of smart, unhappy people to be very surprising since self-awareness and practical wisdom ought to come very easily to intelligent people.)
Check the GSS people. I checked WORDSUM vs HAPPY a few months ago and found out that my intuition (that happiness and intelligence are inversely related) was flat wrong. Very stupid people are more likely than pretty stupid people to be either a 1 or 3 (out of 3) in happiness, but otherwise the clear trend is more smarts == more happiness. Or more accurately, since the change is in fewer people reporting they are “not too happy,” more smarts == less unhappiness.
My new hypothesis is that being smart gives you multiple paths out of any problem, so you may not be very happy, but you’re less likely to be completely wretched. At any rate that is my experience. I’d welcome ideas on how to test it.
ethan, touché.
Ethan, I have been saying that every study I’ve ever seen shows that there is either no correlation or a slight positive correlation between happiness and intelligence. The GSS data supports this: the correlation is (possibly) positive, but very small. While the “Not too happy” numbers improve with greater vocabulary, it just adds to the “Pretty happy” response rather than to the “Very happy” response. Unlike you, Mr. Hume, and Susan, my pre-analytic intuition would have been for a high positive correlation and it still puzzles me why this isn’t the case. Or, if I may be so bold, why are so many smart people so foolish that they don’t know how to make themselves happy? If it were the case that greater intelligence is linked to greater problems with depression and other mental illnesses, that would explain it, but research indicates that this isn’t the case. Of course, this is quite a digression so I’ll say no more about the subject.
“The 1973 Roe versus Wade decision established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe versus Wade decision, or not?
30% Yes, overturn
68% No, not overturn”
Like so many such poll questions, the problem is the wording.
Roe v. Wade and the same day decision Doe v. Bolton, made abortion on demand legal through all 9 months of pregnancy. Much of the pro life legislation aims to add the types of restrictions that European nations have. The fact that a late term abortion doctor was recently murdered underscores the fact that abortion is in fact legal through all of pregnancy and even when states try to enforce restrictions in the 2nd and 3rd trimester, they are generally not successful. I understand that many support abortion through the entire pregnancy, but the poll question as presented is inherently biased toward garnering more support than genuinely exists for the true nature of the legal consequences of these two court decisions. The plaintiff in Roe v. Wade claims she lied about the circumstances of the case and has asked the court to overturn it. While we can see she may not grasp the inanity of her petition from a legal standpoint, it is not the court that is “infantilizing” her intellect and capacity for judgement.
Also, the court invented the constitutional right to abortion. States regulate all manner of human behavior and could have continued to deal with abortion as well. As Hume has pointed out the attempt at settling the issue certainly backfired. Even as he calls us a stupid lot, he concedes we fools would have been better at settling the issue ourselves at the state level. As for what is going on in has-been Europe or in never-was Africa, you can’t even blame the intelligent for lack of interest much less the proles. Margaret Sanger famously said “more from the fit, less from the unfit”. Seems Europe and her sister, Africa confused the two.
@Andrew Stevens
Only one of those things is even provisionally worthy of serving as evidence for humanity’s intelligence. The other two are excellent examples of human stupidity.
I’m more than smart enough to be able to say that. Not because I’m smarter than most humans, but because the level of intelligence necessary to recognize one’s own stupidity is very low.
In other words: it’s not about the intelligence, stupid.
IQ and conformism, however, are negatively correlated. Most people do not make a clear distinction between madness (deranged) and madness (not conforming to society’s expectations of normal behavior and opinions). One can be quite mad without being mad in the least. And vice versa.
But to say that it’s the American people’s fault for not knowing about the international scene is a very short-sighted thing to say. Though yes, most Americans seem disinterested in the matters of the rest of the world, however the media does a horrible job of including international coverage in their news. How can you understand something that you don’t have access to?
@Andrew Stevens
To which I respond, tongue perhaps in cheek, “What does it take to get people to realize that when a person starts denigrating the intelligence of the…” average human “… that A) it makes them sound like a pretentious undergraduate and B) offers fairly sufficient evidence that the speaker isn’t actually all that clever after all?”
As an American citizen and as a father of two american citizens, I feel offended by this “at hand” declaration
//Americans are rather stupid people, as is the norm among humans.//
Mr. David Hume does not provide a clarification, does he (or does he not) include himself into a category of stupid people. I know, I know, probably Dr. Razib Khan has IQ above 145, it is OK with me. Probably his IQ is higher than of anybody’s of living members of my family; it is OK; we are doing reasonably well. I do know that the median IQ is normalized to 100 in US. I do realize that most people in US (and in other places in the world) are overwhelmed by political and other kinds of propaganda.
But one must be a pig — to make public statements of that kind.
I’m surprised no one picked up on the howler in that Goldstein quote (edited down to make the point):
“many European countries infantilize women by forcing them to undergo counseling before abortions. . . Yet even those laws are less stringent abroad than they are in some American states, where doctors are required to deliver a scripted speech to women seeking abortions. . . ”
So, when it comes to abortion rights, America is far worse than Europe because in “some” American states doctors have to counsel women seeking abortions, while in “many” European countries doctors have to. . . COUNSEL WOMEN SEEKING ABORTIONS.
Ummm, yeah. Got it, thanks.
Rick Russell: In what way was I denigrating the average person? I was simply stating a fact: intelligence helps someone more intelligent than average solve problems faster and (likely) better than the average person. That’s what intelligence is. No implication that the average person is slow (by definition, the average person is average). I was, of course, also stating that my own IQ tests higher than average (which it does), but this is a very different thing from saying “I am surrounded by fools.”
Caledonian: You missed my distinction between intelligence (nous) and practical wisdom (phronesis). There is no question that landing a man on the Moon and building the Pyramids required a high level of intelligence to accomplish. We can debate whether it was wise to do these things at all, of course, but that’s something else entirely. As for your ability to say that “humans are stupid,” see my comments above. You still have not defined what level of intelligence is required to be “not-stupid” if humans don’t possess it.
No, I simply disagree with it. If having higher-than-average intelligence leads to better-than-average problem solving, then the more-intelligent should also be better at dealing with the problem of determining whether a given course of action is wise or not.
In reality, they are not.
The real distinction is between cognitive power, and the ability to effectively utilize that power; like your own distinction, but subtly and importantly different.
@sg
It is academic.
Like kurt9 said, you don’t get to take a whack at the apple until 2030, and by that time we will have full term human ectogenesis. The japanese have been have doing goat embryos to full term for 4 years now.
I am an XX, and I personally resent your efforts to make me a womb of the state.
It is engending enough enmity and resentment on the part of my psyche to render me a lifelong democrat.
Your party’s antipathy towards Roe is politically unwise, since you are unable to effect change.
😉
The real distinction is between cognitive power, and the ability to effectively utilize that power; like your own distinction, but subtly and importantly different.
I agree that this is a different distinction, but your distinction isn’t correct. The unwise can effectively utilize their cognitive power; they simply don’t use it on the right things, due to their lack of wisdom.
“I was, of course, also stating that my own IQ tests higher than average (which it does)…”
It’s unclear whether “IQ tests” even measure something of practical value, except in the broadest correlative sense.
I think that Mr. Caledonian’s concerns are on the money, and I daresay you walked right into them:
“The unwise can effectively utilize their cognitive power; they simply don’t use it on the right things”
What is the difference between “effective” and “use it on the right things”? Since you claim to solve problems faster _and_ better than average _and_ enjoy the benefits of improved life as result, you must be exceptionally wise, effective, and intelligent, yes?
You are quite certain that you are above average, and hence much of humanity is stupider than you. You do not hesitate to explain this to other people.
That’s why I was making fun of you with your own quote. 🙂
Rick R.
It’s unclear whether “IQ tests” even measure something of practical value, except in the broadest correlative sense.
Of course, IQ tests only measure the ability to take IQ tests, just as a reflex test only measures the ability to take a reflex test, etc. It is that “broadest correlative sense” which makes it useful information. If it correlated with no outcomes at all, it wouldn’t be interesting in the slightest.
What is the difference between “effective” and “use it on the right things”?
If, indeed, by “the ability to effectively utilize that power” Caledonian meant “use it on the right things,” then indeed I agree that he meant exactly what I did (i.e. he was identifying wisdom). But he was insisting that he was making a different distinction than I was. So I had to assume that when he said “the ability to effectively utilize that power,” that he meant to say that there are smart people who have the ability to solve problems, but do not do so. If that’s what he meant, then we have a genuine difference of opinion and if he didn’t, then we don’t.
Since you claim to solve problems faster _and_ better than average _and_ enjoy the benefits of improved life as result, you must be exceptionally wise, effective, and intelligent, yes?
Not once did I say exceptionally. But again, I am probably the happiest man I know. I absolutely do believe that this is because I was very fortunately blessed with an above average intelligence, yes, and that this allows me to solve problems more effectively, e.g. maintain a good relationship with my wife, be prudent with my finances, avoid debilitating vices, etc. Obviously, that particular advantage (intelligence) is of no particular moral worth; I did nothing to earn it and I claim no moral superiority because of it.
You are quite certain that you are above average, and hence much of humanity is stupider than you. You do not hesitate to explain this to other people.
Again, you have failed to see the difference between what I was criticizing Mr. Hume for and what I was saying. The fact that there are people less intelligent than I am is very different from saying that those people are stupid. The human species is remarkable in its intelligence, vastly more so than any other species, and humans differ one from another far less than dogs. You seem to have taken my remarks to mean, “You should never call yourself smarter than anybody else in the world.” On the contrary, it is the mass dismissal of all humans as stupid which is what I object to. Had Mr. Hume stated that he personally believed that he was more intelligent than 99% of all other humans, that would have been fine. There have to be some people in the top 1% and perhaps Mr. Hume is one of them. However, had he stated that everybody in that 99% is stupid, that would be something else entirely.
No. Determining the “right things” is a problem. If they were better at solving problems in general, they ought to be better at determining what the proper application of their mental skills is. Yet, they aren’t.
Having powerful hardware is of little use if you don’t have the right programs to take utilize that computational power. People with lots of cognitive power but little ability to direct that power usefully are in practice far stupider than people who are merely dim.
But now it’s not clear to me that we ever differed at all. “Determining what the proper application of their mental skills is” is exactly what I mean by practical wisdom and I stated many comments ago (before you ever commented) that intelligence ought to help one acquire practical wisdom (but often doesn’t seem to). However, you said, “The real distinction is between cognitive power, and the ability to effectively utilize that power; like your own distinction, but subtly and importantly different.” But now the difference has become too subtle for me to understand and I certainly don’t grasp the importance.
/sigh
Can you please stop talking about Roe NOW?
It’s boring.
The fact of France as an immigration destination is little known outside France. France is the only such major European nation (till the last 30 years or so). I was surprised when I learned it, and I’m a geography and history junkie.
It becomes more obvious when one remembers that there has never been a French immigrant community in the U.S. Irish, German, Swedish, Greek, Polish, Italian, Czech, Russian, Finnish, Serbian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Slovak, Romanian – but not French. If France wasn’t a source of migration, then it would likely be a destination.
BTW, it’s a bit strong to say “France is a nation of immigrants.” France has a large immigrant history compared to other European nations, but still far less than the U.S.
@Rich Rostrom — I agree with your statement of no French immigrant communities since the U.S. became the U.S. Before then, it’s not quite true.
I wonder what it was that changed the course of French immigration about that time?