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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Interesting topic in a thread below

Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys* wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.

A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.

I think this is probably a point of disagreement for many here and so worth discussing on its own. I see two larger topics that this could become a test for: One is the model of "general competence"/IQ maximalism, expecting successful people to be successful at ~everything, vs a tradeoff between abstract thinking and practical or social skills. Second, whether our current elites are in some sense a paper tiger - bullshit jobs, Overcredentialism, etc.

*"I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife."

If violence is not solving your problems, you are not using enough of it. We the techies live in incredible layers of abstractions enabled by the state, economy and the cities. Majority of us will be helpless without internet, even more helpless without electricity. Few of us have the knowledge, tools and resources to black start a society. Even if we pool it.

For a person to use leverage his brawn needs not much, for brains we need insane infrastructure.

Only, outside of a few techies, intelligence seems to broadly correlate with every other positive trait, including brawns.

Is that actually true? Professional athletes don’t seem like a notably bright group.

I’ll grant you that most positive traits have some level of correlation together, but I don’t think brawn in the sense of pure physical strength and speed is particularly tightly correlated to intelligence in the same way as height.

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