JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
18d ago
If by "high IQ" you mean an SD or two above average, I absolutely agree. Being smarter than the average bear is a big advantage. If by "high IQ" you mean "higher IQ means more success", then it's obviously wrong. There's a bell curve to functionality for IQ too. Everyone who runs an institution is probably above average IQ. But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.
Intelligence is hyper-optimized. Like, for instance, physical skills. Good athletes are not necessarily smart, but they tend to be above average, and at the top of any sport, they are usually quite smart. But at the top end, say, bodybuilding, the proxies being chased are so remote from reality that it ceases to be functional. People who wind up in charge of things disproportionately have some athletic background or pursuit, although not necessarily a high-level one. Does being athletic predict success? Yeah, kinda. Does that mean the strongest person is always in charge? Not even a little. If you could invent a test that would score athleticism, you'd see a good correlation with both sporting success and with life achievement. Should we re-orient society to min-max this AQ?
I'm not bagging on IQ so much as urging people to consider other factors and a wider context. Yes, intelligence is important for a whole lot of things. So is everything else.
JTarrou
19d ago
Think a bit more deeply, and it will seem far less important. The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.
Yes, if we keep using academia as the way we pick our upper classes, IQ is going to be important, and the current black population will be at a disadvantage for a long time. But that's a big "if". If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.
The problem is not relatively minor (but important at the margins) IQ differentials, it's a social system that outsources elite production to an IQ-loaded institution.
JTarrou
19d ago
Doesn't it?
No. The materialist world is where we live, but we humans are sentient. Meaning we don't live solely in the materialist world, we interface with it through our brains, which are full of delusion and fantasy. Delusion and fantasy are how we overcome the randomness of the universe.
This is all old existentialist philosophy, with roots in stoicism. Camus said that the whole point of life was the revolt against death. To live and experience is to deny death for one more day. Through our offspring (genetic, artistic, ideological, political) we live beyond our own lives, and deny death into the future. It is our task to live our lives as seems best to us, to enjoy what we can, overcome what we cannot, and fight it out to the last.
The last act is bloody, however brave be all the rest of the play. But our own personal experiences are tiny, insignificant things, important only to us. There's six billion people breeding and fighting, all trying to get to the next stage, the next generation, into the future.
JTarrou
19d ago
Thanks for the sympathy.
I am lucky, in many ways. I could think of it all as bad luck, but that ignores the full range of possibilities. I know how bad things can actually get, and complaining about my relationships on the internet from my climate-controlled townhouse is far from the worst possible outcome.
JTarrou
19d ago
I disagree. Value can only come from within.
My philosophy is that value is created by sacrifice.
Things, people, institutions, are only worth what people give up to get them.
To become a better man, a greater man, you must find more to sacrifice. This is why the ancients burned their children, the ultimate evolutionary sacrifice.
There is no objective value in the Universe. The universe does not care.
Only our subjective experience imputes value to the randomness of nature.
And our subjective experience grants value to those things we give the most to get. By definition. That which is easily attainable is not valuable. Value is scarcity. Suffering is cheap. Making it produce something positive is hard.
JTarrou
19d ago
Is it too late to save your marriage? Do you even want to?
Barring some highly unlikely miracle scenarios involving lightning strikes, brain tumors or religious conversion, I think so. And yes, yes I would. I would and have given damn near anything to make it work. We don't control other people. We can only control what we do in response.
You're concentrating so much on the pain and so little on the life.
Life is pain.
Everyone is in pain, but not everyone is using it well. Exercise and getting fat both hurt. When you understand the Myth of Sisyphus, you understand the universe.
As to plans, I figure it will probably take me a few months to get everything in order for a clean break. It's a lot of work, especially in secret. I expect to be ready to file mid-summer.
JTarrou
20d ago
Ok depressives, hop in.
For once on this forum, I'm really going through it in my personal life. Been a tough winter. Grandparents are dying in slow motion. Marriage is imploding. PTSD is acting up. Even broke down and went to the VA to see a therapist. That was back in January, they've scheduled me to see someone to evaluate whether I should talk to a therapist sometime in May. You know, normal bureaucracy.
I'm in my mid forties and my life is coming apart at the seams.
But lads, this is my year. One way or another, it's going to end better than it began. As bad as things are right now, I am entirely confident in my ability to turn it around.
To psych myself up a bit, I want to talk about my luckiest day. The real hinge point in my life. The reason I'm talking to all of you, or to anyone at all. A dummy-rigged IED just outside Iskandaria nearly twenty years ago.
Just wasn't injured badly enough. Hadn't planned on living. I was clawing my way up the ranks of the pointy bit of the US imperial project. The whole point was to get as high as possible before my luck ended and I bled out in some dingy alleyway or Afghan hillside. My luck though, was even better.
By a combination of the vast sums of money America spends on protecting its troops, and the inferior grade explosives used by the Iraqis, the rocket that should have killed me by any rights instead fizzled. I was left “disabled”, but not enough to feel sorry for myself about. Given the options, of course.
A lot changed that day. My career was over, and with it identity and status. I wasn't going to get to die. I was going to have to live, broken. And be a civilian. Took me a few years to get my head around it. The plan was always live fast, die young.
I had to change. Adapt. Re-orient. Re-motivate. Learn new skills. I spent twenty-five years becoming someone, and then I had to become someone else.
I gotta say, it's been excellent. Even with current troubles, I've had another twenty years with my grandparents, reconciled with my parents, seen my siblings grow up and grow families of their own. Met a great woman, and we had ten good years. I've been happier (and sadder) than I ever thought possible at twenty-five.
This is all bonus round for me. I should have died a long time ago. I've been hurt worse, I've rebuilt from less.
Yes, it sucks right now. Currently at “forcing myself to leave the house” stage, and started crying in public at my boot guy's place yesterday. It's gonna be a long year, but I'll get there.
Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something.
JTarrou
21d ago
Saying men have a competitive advantage over women in physical sport is the same as saying blacks are genetically uncivilized?
Not sure you want to nail that comparison to your mast.
restricting a right
Which right is that, exactly?
JTarrou
21d ago
They're not China, they're Canada.
Politically irrelevant backwater just north of an actual powerful country. Being "progressiver-than-thou" about Britain is Scotland's national identity. Just another not-really-a country making stupid laws to stick it to The Man (meaning the people who protect their borders and fund their government).
JTarrou
22d ago
The question is whether they want to reduce the incidence of rape or if they want to lecture men who are not rapists.
The answer is in their behavior and rhetoric.
JTarrou
22d ago
Achievement is always zero-sum. We only respect and feel the power of things that other people cannot or will not do. The magnitude of an achievement is directly proportional to the number of people who have failed.
What the people whining for easy mode are trying to do is co-opt the social cachet of the skill required to beat a hard game at a lower investment in time/ability.
JTarrou
23d ago
On one level, it's a silly, ridiculous political "scandal" for a slow news week.
On another, there is a lot of signaling going on there, on both sides. Politics isn't about politics, and this is as valid a battleground as any. It is interesting to see the positions being taken.
Boosting a niche thing like trans awareness over the prime holy day for (supposedly) 65% of the country is a little on the nose from a public relations standpoint. Christian-bashing has become so prevalent on the left that they sometimes forget it's a majority of the country they look down on.
IQ is a proxy of a proxy. At the top end of the scoring distribution, the proxy stops working, because the sort of people so totally maxed-out on one ability are incapable of living normal lives or talking productively to normal people.
Sort of how height is predictive of NBA ability, but the tallest people can't play sports.
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