Think Jerry Seinfeld

:meh: I don't watch tv.

All good, I don't really either. Uh...think...I don't know, I can't think of any more clever ways to suggest that intelligence is (ironically) complex and not unidimensional, and that there's no one way to measure it. I stayed coy as long as I could.

ntelligence is (ironically) complex and not unidimensional, and that there's no one way to measure it. — Noble Dust

Quite right! You can say measure again.

measure

:smile:

*

Don't get me wrong; I'm against stupidity as much as tim wood is! — Noble Dust

Oh not at all. It's obvious. What with the name Noble Dust.

Nice catch; I deleted that comment but now it's forever there in your quote; I like the poetry of that. I deleted the comment for the sake of avoiding confusion. I'm against stupidity, but not in the way @tim wood seems to be.

Don't worry. I'm still trying to figure out tim wood myself.

I am too, but thankfully I'm Mensa-level.

If anyone reading this thread is unsure, I'M MENSA-LEVEL IQ

:lol:

I'M SMARTER THAN THESE FUQKS dammit

I'M SMARTER THAN THESE FUQKS dammit — Noble Dust

:lol: For sure!!

But not really, though.

Hmm. You can be either, but not both.

Let's play a game: what's my IQ?

You have to comb back through all of my 4.7 thousand posts to figure it out. The winner doesn't get banned. The loser is banned.

42?

What a stupid and overdramatically grandiose OP!

Jeez,some of you need to get out more or look at the considerable motes in your own eyes.

Tim is watching too much TV and consuming too much American media.
Relax Timothy.

I had the pig down for greed - thought that figured - snake for hatred - check - and roster for stupid. — Wayfarer

I guess the causal connection is like this: Ignorance (root cause) -> Vanity -> Hatred -> Ignorance (root cause). I'm not quite clear how hatred leads to ignorance. — TheMadFool

In Early Buddhism, ignorance, avijja, refers specifically to being ignorant of the Four Noble Truths.
Being ignorant of the Four Noble Truths makes worldly standards seem acceptable, correct (so hatred seems acceptable, normal, or even desirable to a person ignorant of the FNT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_poisons

American politics, in particular, seems characterised recently by large outbreaks of stupidity. I mean, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a living breathing example of stupid, making it possible for anyone to carry a gun without a license but litigating against schools that want to get their students to wear masks. If that’s not a definition of ‘stupid’, then I don’t know what is. — Wayfarer

I see it not as stupidity, but as post-truth politics in practice. It's a symptom of the mentality that winning is all that matters. And so arguments are only a means to an end: they don't have to be true, they just need to help one win a case, whatever the case and with whomever it may be.

I always thought Peterson's support of Trump was the stupidest thing he ever did. Also note that he confidently predicted that Trump would win in 2020. — Wayfarer

So did I. Americans choosing Trump is only logical, given American mentality.

Ignorance of our true nature, rather, and what is our true nature you ask? Emptiness.

What a stupid and overdramatically grandiose OP!

Jeez,some of you need to get out more or look at the considerable motes in your own eyes.

Tim is watching too much TV and consuming too much American media.
Relax Timothy. — Ambrosia

You’ve taken it personally. I wonder why? :chin:

Stupid is not only an absence of understanding or skill, it is an active principle that seeks ways to circumvent attempts to contain its effects.

If one puts stupid in a corral, it will keep a constant eye on the gate. If the gate is left open for too long, stupid will get out. To counter this agency, a concentric ring of other corrals are built so the results of failures to restrain stupid are minimized.

In times when many gates are open simultaneously, that is when the destructive capacity of the agency is greatest.

Stupid wants to be free. — Valentinus

Why do you conceptualize this as "stupid", and not as confident?

- - -

Point! Assume ignorance and educate! — tim wood

What several posters here describe as stupidity, I would describe as confidence.

Scammers were mentioned earlier in the thread. A percentage of people who fall for scammers indeed may be stupid, naive; but I think they are very few. Some fall prey because of their own greed and demand for easy gain. But it seems that the biggest group of those who fall prey to scammers are people who are confident in themselves, who believe that they are such wonderful persons that nothing bad can ever happen to them; and that if it does, it's never their own fault in any way. People who believe that the universe is a safe and welcoming place for them.

There's that saying -- "He that has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope." But this misses the point. People tend to get bitten when they confuse a snake (a dangerous being) for a harmless one (a piece of rope). They are so eager to think highly of themselves and to believe that the universe is a safe and welcoming place for them that they don't see danger, but misinterpret it as something harmless -- and then behave as if all was well. And get bitten.

Ignorance of our true nature, rather, and what is our true nature you ask? Emptiness. — praxis

If your true nature is to be a Mahayani, yes.

The whole edifice of the psychology of blame would crumble if the angry accuser were ever to come
to a realization that there’s is no such thing as irrationality, there are only different forms of rationality, and the blameful finger-pointer is unable to extricate themselves from their own worldview, or even recognize their rationality as a just one of a potentially infinite range of worldviews, each of which aims at the same moral end , but via an often profoundly different construal of empirical circumstance. So they have no choice but to see the one who violates their expectations as morally culpable , irrational, stupid. The irony here is that it would be the accuser who is being stupid here, but I would have to use that word in this context according to its innocent , non-moralistic sense. They don’t want to have to accuse anyone, but they lack the insight into how others think to avoid succumbing to hostility. — Joshs

But in sense-making creatures like ourselves , reason is guided by normative cogntive-affective aims. We aim to anticipate events in as orderly a fashion as possible. Our ‘reasons’ are our best predictions about events. We only view others’ reasons as irrational when we fail to recognize the nature of sense-making. We don’t necessarily have to be able to translate the others system of anticipations into terms that we can understand, we only have to recognize in principle that this is how cognizing beings organize experience. — Joshs

My original post was about the basis of blame, accusation and hostility. I argued that such an attitude requires that I reject the idea that there is an internal order behind the behavior of the other I accuse. I will not need to blame if I recognize that the other is operating out of a moral worldview , even if I don’t quite understand its details at the moment. — Joshs

Exactly.

My second point is that many conflicts involving blame are like the above , where it is not a master of the other being irrational, but instead their being in the thrawl of a way of thinking that you have moved beyond , but don’t understand why they can’t see things your way. So you assume they are being stubborn, lazy, irrational. Instead, they simply haven’t made the ‘shift’ that you have. — Joshs

This seems to assume that the blamers are objectively more advanced than the ones they blame.

You can easily find cases where it's evident that the blamer has at no point in their past thought about things the way that the person they blame does. So the blamer hasn't necessarily moved beyond the way the other person thinks, it's also possible that they never thought about things the way the other person does to begin with.

You can see this, for example, in the vaccination debate where there are vocal pro-vaccers who consider it blameworthy if a person doesn't show the same enthusiasm about vaccines as they do, and this goes to the point of accusing that person of being an anti-vaccer and feeling justified to go on a public crusade against them.

A poster who evidently isn't all that enthusiastic about vaccines and masks, clearly said that he has taken the vaccine and uses a mask as obligated. And yet even _after_ he said that, several posters had a go at him for being an anti-vaccer. They ignored an important piece of information an indulged in their crusade.

Also, how do you locate this continuum of rationality in the context of intersubjectivity and the potential shared interests of society/groups? — Tom Storm

Take this example, from another thread:

In some countries, a high-risk population that is reluctant to get vaccinated are young medical nurses, for fear that they will become infertile.

Now, at first glance, and esp. when seen from a male perspective, this seems an unwarranted fear.

But if I were in their shoes, my line of reasoning and concerns would be such: Taking hormonal contraceptives increases the risk of something going wrong when taking the vaccine. So in order to reduce those risks, stop taking hormonal contraceptives. But then it is almost certain that an unwanted pregnancy will occur (since men cannot be relied upon to use condoms or to wait), and this will need to be solved with an abortion. An abortion increases the risk of infertility. If a woman isn't able to have children this can result in the man abandoning her or otherwise reduce his affections for her.

So what are those young women supposed to do?

Statistically, it's probably safer to take their chances with covid than with a man. — baker

Why default to the belief that these young women are not being rational when they refuse to get vaccinated against covid?