This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
@ last paragraph, 'intelligence' is just whatever causes intelligence, and if that trait makes people - in practice, in the complexities of society and technical work - smarter, then it is 'part of' intelligence too, because it really does lead to that person being smarter in the specific area
I'm saying that there's a separate personality trait that's something like the drive to make stuff despite failures, to not give up in the face of difficulty. And this is not always a Hollywood hero upward trajectory. One side of it is someone trying over and over with sub-par results or taking way longer than others with less stubbornness but more intelligence would. I know people who are relentless and put lots of energy into something fruitless and they aren't very skilled for it. They may build dangerous contraptions out of wood and metal but with lousy construction, inefficiently etc. They may obsess over reading history and politics and come out of it believing various pants-on-head tinfoil conspiracy theories, or may spend way too much time on building hopeless perpetuum mobile constructions etc.
Willingness to work hard (intrinsically driven industriousness, relentlessness, stubbornness) can be decoupled from intelligence. On the flip side, many intelligent people are lazy and coast along, wasting their potential.
There's a subtlety here, though. Why is it a separate personality trait, and not a 'component' of intelligence? Because if you are an 'intelligent person' 'wasting your potential', and that waste-of-potential is set up in such a way that it can't easily be externally fixed because you need to have that "drive" to figure out a bunch of different things to be smart, then that's just another cause of having lower intelligence.
Intelligence is usually understood as an ability, the cognitive processing power, your ability to deal in abstractions and meta levels, notice patterns, keep more stuff in your working memory, etc. It's distinct from experience, lexical knowledge, amount of acquired skills etc.
If you don't want to use the word intelligence like this, then let's name my concept intelligence_2, and understand my statement as "intelligence_2 is a distinct trait from willingness to work hard from an intrinsic drive."
I mean, I could say something similar about some of these. Working memory isn't part of intelligence, it's just a separate trait. You can be incredibly intelligent, but just not have the working memory to keep a big list of facts or intermediate steps (although is this actually how working memory really works? idk.), and thus waste your potential in practice. But in practice it's a key component (not to say anything about what memory is or how it's constructed, which, idk, and the same is true of that "drive", they could all be high-level features of some more complicated underlying mechanism that doesn't have those as levers). Which is kind of my argument - intelligence is complicated and messy, it's related to many mechanisms in the brain, and there's not really a particular reason to say that the 'drive' isn't intelligence but working memory is - and we don't really know how intelligence works, so decomposing it in ways that seem convenient isn't necessarily the best approach.
If an intelligent person is externally motivated to do stuff, by teachers, parents, expectation, poverty etc. they can perform well.
So basically, drive can be substituted by something else, but the cognitive power of your brain can't be replaced through external influence.
To tie it back to the original point: just because you get good grades in high school, and get good test scores, doesn't mean you'll be a good at practical programming. You can even do a full CS degree program and still not be good at programming compared to your peers who pour a lot of hours into it from this itch to create stuff.
That's true, but I'm trying to say that a person with that 'drive' will, all else equal, understand things more deeply, figure out more stuff, and therefore be "more intelligent" in every observable sense we say "intelligence", and that's part of why they're better at programming. So saying it's separate from intelligence isn't quite right imo
You are setting up a circular argument. Good programmers need intelligence. By intelligence we mean whatever makes people good at programming.
This has no explanatory power.
This isn't about the programming thing anymore, i'm just saying that 'intelligence', in the sense that we commonly understand it, already includes some component of 'self-driven desire to understand things deeply'.
The explanatory power would be that very good programmers would tend to be very intelligent in most other areas too, and that the 'taking stuff apart, trying things over and over even if they fail' causes / is caused by intelligence. Obviously you can have some of the latter without some of the former but they are related, and aren't just distinct traits
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link