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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.
There are a number of ways to solve this sort of problem. The only ones within the Overton window is terrible, however -- systems can be arbitrarily complicated, but smart people pay other smart people to help the stupid people navigate them, and the stupid people are let off the hook if they screw up anyway. This means the world becomes arbitrarily difficult for intelligent people while the stupid people (and smart people who can manage to also get let off the hook) get all the benefits for free.
The idea of making all systems simple enough for stupid people just isn't viable; you can't run a modern economy based on -1SD intelligence (and if you try to de-modernize enough that you can, the results will be mass starvation). As @satirizedoor says, the complexity is irreducible.
The idea of a tiered society where stupid people just don't get certain benefits -- e.g. if you're too dumb to understand an amortization schedule, you don't get to have a mortgage -- is pretty much anathema. If you have something like that, then as soon as there's a little crying about inequality, we get subsidization programs to make it go away. Or sometimes they take away the thing for non-stupid people too. The idea of letting stupid people suffer the consequences is also anathema.
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