Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

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The fact that some people are smart and some people are stupid is obvious to everyone. Every single human quality (strength, hair color, endurance, patience, height, immunity to diseases, penis size, etc.) follows some form of smooth distribution and we all agree on that. The claim that intelligence somehow doesn't because reasons is so blatantly false I don't understand why would we be discussing it in the first place. If you're a woman you ain't going to compete with men in MMA no matter how hard you train. It's extremely evident with children who innately display different skills. Also mentally disabled people exist and they prove that "everyone is equally innately smart" is false as fuck unless you don't consider mentally disabled people to be people - controversial position, but not exactly useless.

The issue here is that the society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.

And what exactly is intelligence. Because there are many aspects to usual understanding of it and ability in each of them can vary quite a bit, even though there is some transfer (and it even has a name).

And then the issue of innateness, there is so much interplay with education both formal and informal, socioeconomic status, diet, emotional state, and myriad other things that it turns out pretty quickly that it's hard to say how kuch each part contributes.

It gets pretty murky fast once you start being careful when reasoning about this.

What’s very funny about this is that most people who aren’t very smart know they aren’t. They’re not too smart to think that there’s no difference between smart people and not smart people.

> society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.

What are the logical implications?

Are there clusters of people with high/low intelligence, just like there are clusters of people with other traits? Like, Asians tend to be short, Africans are mostly black, men are usually stronger than women, Irish are redheads, etc. If we identify groups of people that are indeed stupid, what do we do about them as a society? We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.

Assortative mating is a weak form of eugenics.

> what do we do about them as a society?

Same thing we do now - some are on welfare, some are homeless and some are in prisons.

Ideally we can be more compassionate towards these people without also placing a huge tax burden on everyone else.

> If we identify groups of people that are indeed stupid, what do we do about them as a society?

> We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.

Why do you think we need to do or eliminate anything/anyone? Do you think we need to eliminate people due to the other properties you listed too?

If you want to do something, then give people the opportunity to become better, but whether they want or not is still their decision.

Why do you think that you're part of the we?

Well there’s a spectrum with literally everything, including benchmarks. The perception of who is intelligent changes over time.

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