FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Sounds more like something vaguely in the ADHD cluster than pure laziness.
Is there a difference?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Bill Gates said "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Even a definite correlation between stupidity and criminality wouldn't necessarily imply a correlation between stupidity and evil. It's possible that smarter evil people tend to avoid getting caught, not by planning the perfect crime, but by realizing the expected value of the crime is negative (both because they're better at such estimation and because they tend to have more socio-economic status giving them more to lose) and just not committing it. Such people would still be evil in the sense that they'd do evil if they could definitely get away with it, but since they can't they just don't try.
I know some psychologists have done studies where they ask people "if you could [do something evil] and be 100% confident that you would face no punishment for it, would you do it?" It would be trivial to plot their responses against their SAT score and see if any correlation presented itself. But such a study would have all the weaknesses of any comparable survey: just because someone says they would/wouldn't do something, doesn't mean they would/wouldn't really do it if they found themselves in such a hypothetical.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Somebody here once compared it to bike-shedding on a nationwide level, a comparison I've been unable to unsee ever since.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Yes, but per @Opt-out's distinction, Hitler and Stalin committed great evil out of "ends justify means" utopian thinking. Whereas Madoff was merely selfish: he did great evil not because he wanted to make the world a better place or because he enjoyed causing harm to others, but simply out of a desire to enrich himself.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
15hr ago
Fair point, although I would split 1) into two categories: did evil because they liked it vs. did evil because they were completely indifferent to the suffering of others. I think Madoff fell into the latter category, wherein he was aware of the harm he was doing to others, didn't derive any especial pleasure from hurting other people (he wasn't a sadist) but simply didn't care about their suffering. If Madoff could have made his money without hurting others I imagine he would have if only for pragmatism's sake, whereas for many serial killers, cruelty really does seem to be the entire point.
They're probably positively correlated, but that correlation is not 1, and it's much closer to 0 than it is to 1. There are a lot of really nasty evil smart people, and a lot of kind, wholesome, good people who are dumb as a sack of bricks but somehow brighten the lives of the people around them. I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody.
While I don't disagree that clever evil people exist (nor unintelligent but kind-hearted people), I would caution you that your perceptions of the relative frequency of both is heavily contaminated by selection effects and the availability heuristic.
From the perspective of media coverage, an idiot who's violent and can't be reasoned with is a dog-bites-man story in a very literal sense: many violent people are so because they're literally too stupid to understand the harm their actions cause. By contrast, evil geniuses are man-bites-dog stories: writers of fiction and journalists alike can't get enough of intelligent people who outwardly seem normal and civilised but who are really vicious and cruel. It follows that a given news outlet will devote far more attention and column inches to the crimes and misdeeds committed by intelligent and seemingly civilised people than they will to the crimes committed by idiots. There are ideological reasons for this (progressive outlets don't want to pay much attention to the crimes committed by idiots lest their readers draw conclusions favourable to HBD; for reasons of slave morality/sour grapes, unsuccessful people of either political stripe love to hear stories confirming their belief that everyone who's more successful than them is a moral mutant, especially if they're also a member of the Other Tribe), but even leaving these aside, an intelligent and seemingly civilised person who's secretly a vicious sociopath is just a more incongruous (hence compelling) story on its face than an uncivilised idiot who's also a vicious sociopath. "Intelligent sociopath" is a man-bites-dog story; "idiotic sociopath" is a dog-bites-man story; "intelligent, law-abiding person who works hard and pays his taxes" is not even a story at all, but I dare say a much higher proportion of law-abiding people are above-average in intelligence than vice versa. A person whose model of the world is based on consuming mainstream news outlets could very easily end up with a radically skewed impression of how much crime is committed by intelligent people, as opposed to the reality that the overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by a very small number of repeat offenders who are none too bright.
Even allowing that you know some kind-hearted but unintelligent people, you certainly aren't seeing the most unintelligent people (unless you work in a care home for people with Down's syndrome), and the unintelligent people you do know are heavily selected for kind-heartedness and responsibility. The Darwin Awards were set up to collect darkly amusing stories about people who inadvertently improve the genetic fitness of the population by selecting themselves out of the gene pool through acts of catastrophic stupidity. Along the same lines, prisons heavily select for idiots. (The latter point, in itself, does not prove a correlation between stupidity and criminality: there might be no correlation at all, and the ones who find themselves in prison are merely those stupid enough to get caught.) It follows that the unintelligent people you know are not a representative cross-section of the entire demographic, but selected for those who are law-abiding and who aren't careless enough to, say, point a loaded gun at their genitals with their finger resting on the trigger. I think it's reasonable to assume that a person who's careless about their own welfare will tend to be careless about other people's welfare, ceteris paribus.
Lastly, I want to talk about the Breakfast Question. For those unfamiliar, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed to be a psychology researcher who was part of a team conducting intelligence tests in prisons, one of which concerned counterfactual hypotheticals: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning, how would you feel right now?" Many respondents were simply unable to answer the question, insisting that they did have breakfast this morning. It's amusing watching people conduct informal replications of this "study" on social media and receiving similar results. For me, the interesting part of the post was after the titular question, when the poster hypothesised that many inmates in prison were so lacking in intelligence that they literally lacked the imaginative capacity to place themselves in another person's shoes and imagine how they would feel. Expecting these people to empathise with another person was as unreasonable a demand as expecting them to do calculus.*
Obviously this is just an anonymous 4chan post and we have no good reason to believe that the author is who he claims to be, nor that the results of the study he described are accurate, nor that the study itself even exists. Nonetheless, it is a fairly well-established finding in developmental psychology that theory of mind is not innate and must be actively, consciously taught to young children, and that some people (most notably, the severely autistic) really are too unintelligent to ever grasp the concept. (This is also why, as noted by @ymeskhout, unintelligent people make for bad liars: they lack the imaginative capacity to put themselves in another's shoes and thereby construct a lie that would seem convincing to someone in that position.) But the idea that a certain floor of intelligence is a prerequisite for empathy is a disquieting one, and punctures many of our intuitions about the orthogonality of intelligence and morality. How can you possibly expect someone to treat other people as they themselves would like to be treated when, through no fault of their own, they literally cannot imagine what it would be like to be another person?
*Last Friday I mentioned @naraburns's review of Freddie deBoer's The Cult of Smart, and there was one passage that really stuck with me:
But when [deBoer] observes that "We sink vast sums of money into quixotic efforts to make all of our students equal" it does not seem to occur to him, at all, that we could therefore choose to stop doing that. Instead, bizarrely, he recommends we continue doing that--indeed, he thinks we should pay teachers even more money to keep doing that. Only instead of trying to make students equal by teaching them math, we should make them equal by teaching them to care about one another, to be compassionate, to work to the best of their abilities and be grateful to receive from others in accordance with their needs. Why deBoer thinks schools will be any better at teaching children these things, than they are at teaching children math, is never expressed or explored. Why deBoer fails to notice that there is no reason, in principle, to think that people's dispositions are any less governed by their DNA than are their capabilities, I can only guess, but it is an absolutely glaring oversight. What do we do, in his perfect world, with children who are predisposed to be bad at caring ? What do we do with teachers who are bad at teaching it? DeBoer seems to be laboring under the delusion that teaching people to behave is substantially less quixotic than teaching them algebra. [emphasis mine]
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
19hr ago
New Year's resolution check-in:
- In an effort to catch up with my flagging posting schedule, last Friday I banged out a quick post on the ongoing controversy around Sally Rooney and Palestine Action. It now sits as my third-most viewed post ever and only my third post to exceed 100 likes, while the posts I slaved over for weeks die on the vine. Magnum opus dissonance strikes again.
- Went to the gym three times last week. I'm starting to think a lot of the recurrent problems I've been having with lower back pain may have been ultimately caused by wearing a weightlifting belt that was too loose. I've been using one that belongs to the gym which is much tighter than mine, and I can deadlift with much less effort (granted, with less weight than my peak). I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @ThomasdelVasto?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
20hr ago
I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody.
Bold of you to assume that all woke busybodies are above average in intelligence.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Walt Bismarck restacked one of my articles. His name rings a bell, but I don't really know anything about him. Does he have interesting opinions?
One, I was not as aware of the details of phalloplasty; two, I was responding to the claim that, antiquote: "You may have noticed that female people have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to fashion a ... penis." The esteamed commenter would have been more accurate had he said "...do not have enough flesh in between their legs with which to...".
This is some of the most obnoxious hair-splitting I've ever encountered in my entire life.
"Why don't you buy a house?" Alice asked.
"Well, I don't have any money," Bob replied.
"Ah ah ah!" Alice retorted. "I saw your bank balance, and you have $200. So it's strictly untrue to say you don't have any money. You should have said you don't have enough money to buy a house."
Yes, I am going to tap the sign: "It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
This is extremely tiresome and obnoxious. A clitoris, no matter how large, cannot be used to construct a neopenis. We both know this. Do you really think tedious pedantry of this sort is a productive use of your time?
And this exercise in splitting hairs is coming in response to you asserting, falsely, that a phalloplasty is a vaginoplasty in reverse i.e. while a vaginoplasty consists of inverting external genitalia and making them internal, a phalloplasty consists of inverting internal genitalia and making them external. Not only is this an inaccurate description of what a phalloplasty entails, it is wrong to the point of outright anatomical impossibility. But you're giving me a scolding for daring to say "women have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to make a neopenis" as opposed to "women don't have enough flesh in between their legs which can be used to make a neopenis", when every native English speaker in the entire world understands that "X has no Y" is often meant figuratively to mean "X has an insufficient amount of Y for the object under discussion".
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
There's no conflict between "the hassle of stepping in shit is one of the most pressing issues of urban life" and "it's not the responsibility of cafés and restaurants to prevent the homeless from shitting in public".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Still can't provide a source for the knee replacement claim, then. Curious.
I don't believe there's any evidence that de Morhenshildt actually worked for the CIA.
Also, I said that Oswald "acted alone", not merely that he was the "sole shooter".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
First the press and the left in general want to cast frats as the enemy caste. This has been going on for a long time, remember "A Rape on Campus" in Rolling Stone in 2014?
You're absolutely right, except it's even older than that.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
As long as school shootings happen, there will be a pretty sizeable contingent that will want to ban all guns, Australia style (though you can still get shotguns in Australia…).
Not to mention that the efficacy of Australia's gun buyback programme in preventing mass shootings has been radically overstated. Even after multiple such programmes, a random American is only 21% more likely to die in a mass shooting than a random Australian.
Per his Marine record, Oswald achieved a rating of 212 with the M1 rifle, two points more than that required for a "sharpshooter" qualification, which indicates that he could hit a ten-inch bullseye from at least 200 yards away, eight times out of ten – and that's without a telescopic sight, only using the M1's iron sights. The FBI considered his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle a very accurate weapon and found that it never misfired in numerous tests. The distance from Oswald's sniper's nest in the TSBD to the point on Elm where the fatal bullet struck Kennedy was, as you say, less than 90 yards, and Oswald had the benefit of a 4x telescopic sight mounted to his rifle. And for all the talk of the supposedly "miraculous" shot, Oswald's first shot missed Kennedy entirely. You can count the second shot a miss as well, assuming that Oswald was aiming for Kennedy's head and struck him in the upper back instead (which might have been survivable). Firing at your target three times and only striking it on the third attempt hardly sounds "miraculous" to me.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
It's a great character and a great performance in search of a better movie for both.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
"It's not what you know. It's what you can prove." - Alonzo Harris in Training Day.
I once read a theory about road rage. If you're walking on the footpath and someone walking the other way bumps into you, they will usually acknowledge their error in some way. They may not actually say "sorry" or "excuse me", but they will at least raise their hand, make an apologetic facial expression, or make some kind of gesture to indicate they know they're at fault. Whereas if someone knocks into your shoulder without even acknowledging their error, we tend to interpret it (understandably) as a personal insult, and react accordingly.
When driving a car, you often can't see the faces of the drivers in the other vehicles (and vice versa). The person who cut you off in traffic may not have intended to do so and may feel very embarrassed about their error, but there's often little they can do to signal their remorse other than maybe sticking on their hazard lights for a second, which you may not even notice. What this means in practice is that drivers are far more likely to interpret mishaps on the road as deliberate personal slights about which the perpetrator feels no remorse, rather than unfortunate errors made in a split-second by flustered drivers who feel embarrassed by their own carelessness.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Well, it certainly wasn't a miracle shot, and he didn't have to run faster than Usain Bolt, for starters.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
(I originally posted this in the Small-Scale Questions thread, but @Primaprimaprima thought it might be a better fit here.)
Last week I finished reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the record straight on the JFK assassination and prove that Oswald acted alone. Posner reserves plenty of ire for the assorted conspiracy theories that mushroomed around the assassination over the last six decades.
I dislike the terms "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", as they're generally used as terms of dismissal or abuse: characterising a particular hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory" is tantamount to saying that it's untrue, and characterising the person who espouses it as a "conspiracy theorist" is tantamount to calling them paranoid and unserious. But this shouldn't be the case, because conspiracies do happen! Some important historical events really were the product of conspiracies. Imagine if a public figure was killed, you thought he might have been murdered, and I rolled my eyes and said "oh, you're one of those 'murder theorists'." Murders really happen! There's nothing intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given dead person might have been intentionally and unlawfully killed by another person; nor is there anything intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given event might have been the result of multiple clandestine actors working together to bring it about. As many have noted before me, theories about history or current affairs are rubbished and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" – right up until the very moment they're proven true, at which point they simply become historical fact.
However. We're all familiar with the type of person described by the term "conspiracy theorist". The people in tinfoil hats, the people who never believe the official story, the people who attribute every setback (no matter how trivial) to the dark hand of da Joos/the CIA/the Illuminati. These people may not be paranoid in a clinical sense, but they reflexively jump to the conclusion that there is more to every news story than meets the eye, and the conclusion seems effectively predetermined. They arrive at the conclusion first, then go looking for evidence to support it.
I wish we had better terms for "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", respectively. When we use the former, what we're really getting at is that a historical event is being attributed to a vast nefarious conspiracy on the basis of little to no evidence. "Conspiracy theory" should be a neutral term which expresses no judgement on whether the theory is true or not, but I think it would be genuinely helpful to have a separate term for how the term is used nowadays i.e. as a particularly far-fetched and implausible example of same. "Truther" is starting to catch on ("9/11 truther", "Lucy Letby truther"), but it would be nice to have a noun for the theory itself, as opposed to the person espousing it.
And when we characterise someone as a "conspiracy theorist", we don't usually mean that they espouse one conspiracy theory and no others. We usually mean that they advance conspiracy theories habitually and reflexively, that there are vast swathes of human history they attribute to the machinations of nefarious organisations operating in secret. People to whom the term "conspiracy theorist" don't, as a rule, endorse the mainstream historical narrative except for one little wrinkle: it's an entirely different worldview, a paranoid style. I think "tinfoil hat wearer" is a much more apt term for people with this worldview or mindset than "conspiracy theorist", except that I'm not sure if anyone actually wore a tinfoil hat in complete sincerity.
What do ye think? Any ideas? What would your preferred terms for these concepts be?
I once dated an Asian-American woman for a couple of months, during which time I fell in love with her. Interestingly, she didn't tick any of these boxes: she had a healthy relationship with her parents, spoke Mandarin fluently, and struck me as significantly less neurotic than I was (despite having had certain experiences which might reasonably lead one to neuroticism). She had dated multiple white men besides me, but gave no impression of thinking white men were obsessed with or fetishizing her, nor on the verge of reenacting the Japanese internment camps.
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