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Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.
What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.
Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.
I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that systems too complicated for stupid people are deeply unfair, even if I personally have no trouble understanding and even benefitting from these systems. When we look at something like credit cards, smart people can gain an edge in convenience and even a net profit from gaming the points systems. People in the middle with sufficient executive function will get the convenience benefit without too much trouble. People that either don't really understand what credit is, don't understand how interest works, or lack impulse control will purchase things they can't afford, accumulate more debt with compounding interest, and ruin their lives. In my previous, more callous thinking, I basically thought, "well, tough shit for them, it's not that hard to understand and they should just do better". Observing people's behavior, that's just not true. No matter what they do, they're not capable of understanding how compounding interests works, even if they grasp it during a conversation, that's going to be right out within a couple days.
This also extends to student loans. While I still have antipathy for people that absolutely can grasp what they're signing, it's just obvious that many people really don't understand what they're signing up for and don't understand the basics of financing. We can see people posting stories about how shocked they are that they've already paid the amount they owe, but the principal is still the same. People think "cancellation" is something that can be done without any impact on the other side of the ledger; they have no idea that there even is a ledger, they literally believe that the only reason their debt isn't cancelled is because some people are just mean and hate them.
I'm sure it could never work. But I've thought for some time that the just action for some fraction of student loans would be to transfer the obligations from the student to the university, for any student who filed for financial aid and was required to take remedial sub-"college" level algebra by the university that they were enrolled in. Like the university as an organization knew (1) that person has no way of understanding exponential functions and therefor compounding interest (2) would need to undertake a compounding loan in order to pay for the tuition. If you know a person does not have the capacity to understand the considerations of a contract, I find it highly unethical to enter into such a contract with them. It also seems preposterous to be charging US university level tuition for material that's available from a $2.50 workbook at your local grocery store checkout. I've laterally seen students learning to reduce fractions in a top 50 usnews ranked university.
I’ve long held the conspiracy theory that ‘cancellation’ discourse at the level of elected officials is mostly just fighting about who has to eat the cost of these bad loans- if they don’t get paid back, someone has to.
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