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Why? Biden could become a President (indeed, beat Trump at a debate!) while in early stages of dementia, so it wouldn't be far-fetched for Trump to achieve more than Biden while being an idiot. And what has he even achieved, except winning the vote, installing his loyalists (often profoundly inept, like Kash Patel or RFK Jr. or Linda McMahon or… then again, your may refuse to acknowledge their ineptitude too) and doing random intense costly actions he can afford because the US is rich and powerful? And as regards winning the vote, the task seems easy enough: just be an unprecedentedly faithful representative of the immense mass of stupid and malicious people underserved by previous candidates, just shitpost more, be a bigger and louder primate. It's not like American democracy demands any kind of moral or intellectual achievement of their leaders. It's vibes, spite, boredom, hubris, petty sadism…
I understand how acknowledging such mechanics behind your political culture might be hard.
Yeah yeah, money talks bullshit walks, reality is that which pays. This is not a philosophy for human beings.
Pandemic era Biden didn't come across as demented. He came across of someone who was still compus mentis when fully awake, but who was too physically frail for the demands of executive leadership (or indeed running an in-person campaign, which he fortunately didn't need to do in 2020 because of the pandemic). This is consistent with what staffers have said about the administration, which is that Biden was lucid for 4-6 hours a day and able to use those hours to prevent a power vacuum appearing that could be filled by someone else.
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Biden won via the democratic establishment carrying him to victory. Trump engaged in a hostile takeover. They are not the same.
Biden had no staying power; Trump clearly did.
Re money talks — yeah it’s exactly a philosophy for human beings. Person A accomplished a lot. Person B hasn’t. Person B tries to tear down A to make themselves seem more important. Well, the proof is in the eating of the pudding.
No, pragmatism is a philosophy for economic agents with status anxiety. You're status-anxious to the point you don't even accept any notion of "intelligence" or "correctness" per se, only of success, which supersedes every other dimension. In your logic Idi Amin or Hou Jing must have been highly intelligent, because they achieved victory against far greater odds than Trump. To say nothing of people who had succeeded within largely or entirely non-cognitive fields, or just via being scum in public – Mike Tyson, Tupac Shakur, Kenneth Copeland, and other illustrious Americans. That is "intelligence" of the pudding-eating people, too. Money is intelligence, charisma is intelligence, sexual prowess is intelligence, nepotism is intelligence. Everything is intelligence except intelligence.
The reality is that the peaks of elected political power in the United States are not terribly contested, cognitively speaking. It's not a corporate world with knife fights between execs, and especially not the heavily competitive world of linear employees. Perhaps high-ranking escorts have more g-loaded competition because they need to appeal to paying customers and not the average American voter. As of mid-2020s, it's a human capital wasteland to which you need not a SAT pass but an invite from some pimp donor. The high and mighty "establishment" that crumbled before Trump is made of sexually deviant dysgenic freaks, confused old people with imaginary friends, self-professed hereditary shabbos goys (and those are Grand Elders of the Party, like Schumer and Pelosi)… Does this not strike you as comical? It is not Trump's intellectual achievement that his last challenger from the Establishment was an unlikeable woman with dirty laundry, nominated at the last moment by a spiteful senile old husk, who ran on an unintelligible gibberish platform about "brat" or whatever because nobody had a clue of what to do with her (and even so, she got plenty of votes, just because people voted for the party and against Trump – the bar is on the ground). Crowing about "staying power" contrasted to Biden is hilarious when I see Biden's defense like «Biden was lucid for 4-6 hours a day and able to use those hours to prevent a power vacuum appearing». Did it take a lot of intelligence to just smile and dunk on these squalid creatures before an audience that is starved for ownership and desperately yearns to finally be loyal to some strongman? This is below the level of hereditary monarchies, and close to the level of late USSR.
You don't have any object-level defense for Trump's idiocy. Take, for instance, his insistent bullshitting about "windmills" in China, which is of course the #1 consumer of wind turbines by a light year, not just the biggest producer. There is a cogent argument against subsidies for renewables in the US in particular, but instead Trump consistently spreads very stupid and checkable lies about this issue. Just why? One "charitable" explanation I see is that he simply hates them for a petty personal reason, which is not just "not a rationalist" but outright childish silliness. Another is that he correctly believes his supporters to be natural slaves that need simple slogans and will make excuses for any extent of his dishonesty. The same logic is true of his opponents who now lie about datacenter water use. Trump, of course, lies so much about so many random things that these strategic explanations fail. It's not a grand strategy, it's simply what he does by nature, and what the competition he is in allows. His strategic actions are discussed well enough and I don't expect us to have much common ground here.
Generally, smart people try to lie plausibly and avoid spelling out outright falsehoods, because in the circles where smart people compete, that produces an exploitable weakness if not legal liability. But this is not the world of American big politics. You don't need to be smart to get into the NBA Hall of Fame, nor to be a POTUS, nor to be top 0.1% on OnlyFans. There are other… merits.
Let’s reduce your long post to its merits: intelligence is weakly correlated with success. Thus, success is not an accurate marker of intelligence.
Allegedly smart people who write long posts on the internet love to separate intelligence from success presumably because they have no success but their self worth is tied up in being smart. Putting down “dumb” people who’ve accomplished a great deal is par for the course. But of course most people want success. So why isn’t our poster on the internet successful? They will tell you X, Y, Z (maybe they aren’t anxious about their status). Instead, I think it is a defense mechanism to shield the reality (ie they couldn’t figure out a way to succeed and thus really aren’t all that smart) from their image (ie they are really smart and it’s all of the dumb status strivers who make life difficult for the smart ones).
Yes, this is trivially true across different dimensions of success, regardless of how you want to rationalize your support of Trump.
Did you think you're cooking here?
People can compete on anything, there are countless hierarchies of prestige, aptitude and competence. It is possible to leverage intelligence for greater success in a cognitively less demanding field, and it's correlated with other beneficial qualities, so elite performers, swindlers, sex workers, athletes are usually smarter than their mediocre peers, on top of domain-specific excellence. This, however, is not strictly necessary, so you get people like Yao Ming who are just very blessed on the most relevant dimension of endowment. This is most purely expressed in simple sports like sprinting and weight lifting. In fact, a strictly subhuman creature (a dog, a horse or a clanker) can outperform the best humans there.
But intelligence is extremely correlated with success in cognitively demanding fields. Hence, for example, results of SMPY, and I would never insist that some STEM luminary is "dumb actually" – even if he does say or do stupid things or at least things I disagree with; he may have particular reasons for bias, ignorance or feigning them, or I could just be wrong.
Big politics in the US is not a cognitively demanding field, so your argument is nonsensical. For an outgroup example, Gavin Newsom is a highly successful politician, perhaps a future President, does well in podcasts, and he's generally an accomplished man with an Instagram-perfect upper class White family, with a rich dad, just like Trump. His SAT was 960, which is slightly below the median (he can cope about medical reasons but it's bullshit), he has zero interesting thoughts and there's no evidence he's good at administering his domain. In other words, it's possible to be in the top 0.001% of success while being in the bottom 53% of the population intellectually. This is all obvious. This is, in fact, the promise of American dream (or Middle Eastern dream). You don't have to be a genius to succeed. You don't need truth, or knowledge, or any authentic superiority, you just need to grind and hustle and have "chutzpah". Then again, a rug merchant or a pimp, though a simple creature, is acutely aware of human status signals. He understands that the literati may look down on him, so he develops this kind of retarded doctrine about "success" in general.
Trump has no remarkable successes outside big politics. He's a shitty businessman and a so-so entertainer, roughly Vince McMahon tier. His political views are primitive, his object level knowledge of the world is patchy at best, he's incurious, he's repetitive. We have zero evidence to suspect that he's intelligent. It's just this circular insistence that Americans voted for him so he is "successful" so he's "not an idiot", and then you walk in circles like a smug blind pony. Your model doesn't require intelligence to exist at all, as a variable, and you don't believe truth or reality even matter, they are all downstream of "material success". In your book, Perelman is dumber than Trump because he didn't rally retards to elect him and then use this to enrich his corrupt son-in-law. Perelman doesn't even have a son-in-law, what schmuck. Any illiterate Patel with a highway motel mogs him.
I dont particularly like Trump (he is weak) but wresting control of a major political party is actually really successful and demands real intelligence contra your claims.
Yao Ming is irrelevant.
Your Perelman example is bunk because I would say he actually is successful.
Oh, so now success only measures intelligence if it makes you "relevant" in some undefined sense? Yao Ming was quite relevant in the NBA.
Perelman is broke and alone. His success and excellence are entirely on the object level of his intellectually demanding field.
You're simply out of arguments because your doctrine is vacuous.
You bring up stupid and irrelevant issues and claim my doctrine is vacuous? Being successful in sports — especially a sport where being tall at Mings level was highly predictive of playing in the pros — is an example where intelligence clearly is orthogonal to “success.”
Perelman received international fame within his field receiving (and sometimes rejecting) great honors. If that isn’t “success” I am not sure what is.
Your argument is that re-inventing yourself three times, taking on the entire establishment and beating them, and having a historic political comeback is all orthogonal to intelligence. I think that is patently absurd.
And if you are honest, it is because you have two irreconcilable positions: Trump is dumb and accomplishing what he accomplished isn’t easy. So your solution to cleave this knot is to say you can accomplish what he did without intelligence. I would argue one of your positions is wrong (ie Trump isn’t dumb).
Again, Trump has had success in three fields and in one it is rather unprecedented. Give the devil his due. You can still disagree with him. You can still say he makes some silly mistakes.
My point exactly!
American electoral politics is the same. Basically it's a beauty pageant sponsored by pimps. Your political culture, at the moment, does not reward intelligence, indeed it's detrimental to be smart because demonstrable smartness offends the anti-elitist (status-anxious) instincts of red tribe Americans. You are not ruled by exceptional people, the system works despite the morons' vice grip on the ballot, by virtue of institutions, Deep State, general productivity of the population and depth of capital, etc. You can cheer for Trump "defeating the establishment" but the establishment is also senile and doesn't hold to power, like look at their out-of-touch priorities, their retarded self-defeating commitments to stuff like BLM, the way the DNC flailed impotently and coped in the Biden-Harris fallout (or we could go back to "it's her turn" Hillary, who was clearly disliked enough to rule her out as a liability). Were they somehow outmaneuvered cunningly? No, they're just that bad at Power. Few players, incestuous court politics, everyone important is old, the staffers have woke brainrot, a decrepit system going through the motions.
This is all pretty low IQ territory, very fitting for Trump's history of failure, limited vocabulary, absence of "nerdy" interests or competences or coherent political beliefs, childish tantrums, performative renamings of bodies of water, embarrassing brags about him being the greatest President in history, ill-conceived hostilities that get awkwardly walked back and billed as "winning" once retaliation comes, and his animal instinct for spiteful nicknames, vibing with the crowd or picking on the weak. He wouldn't last a week administering a 100K city in China, he's just not smart enough to be a professional official; but politicians are not held to the same standard as officials, just like basketball players. There are more biological factors at play. Longevity, stamina, body size, skull shape, voice, hormonal balance, sexual function, aggression and dominance displays, instinctual deference to actual resource allocators, etc.
Sasha Grey is vastly more impressive in this regard.
Miserably failing at your core business ventures (repeatedly) only to get bailed out by Russian-Israeli oligarchs, then whoring yourself out to conservative Zionist donors on merit of a good family track record in Philosemitism and compliance, is not really invention nor reinvention. His competence is consistently that of an entertainer that American voters will like, a particular recognizable televised character, the Stern Boss who doesn't shake hands and drops "you're fired", a natural foil to liberal pantsuit girlbosses with annoying laughter; his talent is, at its purest, demonstrated in The Apprentice. I don't deny that he's exceptional at this job. This package is, evidently, what is required to be a great President in a true Democracy. It's just not about intelligence per se. You guys could have elected a Ronald McDonald and he'd function fine as a Caesar, so long as enough non-elected people keep doing their jobs.
Yes, it is patently absurd that this system works. And yet it does. You have not pointed to a single thing Trump did that demonstrates that he's smart, you only point to results. Black box approach is fine to a limit, but past that limit we need to reconsider the correlation of results and inferred measure.
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Is Kamala Harris smarter than you? You say here that she sucked her way to victory. You may say she lost, but objectively, she was the Vice President. She's as successful than JD Vance, and by your own metric, much more than you. Does that make her smarter?
Noticed my argument was about Trump in particular. It wasn’t just that he won the presidency. Instead, he wrested control of a party from its establishment. Harris was an empty vessel the establishment put forward. They just aren’t the same.
Huge dodge.
Kamala did this too. She also ran for president. She also had control of the party.
Your view on this matter is inconsistent. Trump vibes friendly so he's a genius, Kamala vibes enemy so she's an empty vessel and slept her way to the top. Sad.
I would say they have about the same g-scores.
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Why is your model of the world like that? What is there to «figure out» in success? It's not a puzzle or a math problem. There are many smart people who are lazy or too autistic to socialize or work in person without pain and therefore they don't become elected officials or other types of popular (most «successful») people.
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The reason I reject this premise is because it implicitly plays into well known failure states of logical thinking. It’s the same reasoning that allows idiots to say things like “Well if you’re an economist and understand the economy so well, why ain’t ya’ rich; HUH?” That’s not how that works. Just because a referee understands the rules of the NBA doesn’t make them an NBA superstar. Or it’s like saying, “If Karl Marx was so smart why aren’t his followers using the materialist conception of history to predict the stock market?”
People want success on their own terms and not everybody is after the same thing. I have the background knowledge certainly to work in occupations that come close to doubling my current annual salary. I’ve spent decades close to people in infosec, I have personally met and went to dinners when I was younger and sat directly at the table and participated (more of a tag along thing than anything else) with people you can currently find in DefCon videos, RSA Conference talks, one who was in the NSA and who’s wife works at the FBI headquarters in Quantico, one of them who’s a veteran software engineer who’s made single paychecks big enough to retire himself for the rest of his life, and others who are still published authors to this day (I remember being at my father’s job when I was younger after said famous public intellectual’s new book just dropped while he was casually working right there in the office next to him, in cases of cardboard boxes and we were encouraged to take one); and I personally stay on top of new developments in the space. So then why don’t I pursue past leads I still have lying around? Desire. I don’t want that as much as I want other things in life. If I had a family to support maybe I would be on that kind of grind. But I personally don’t need a lot to be happy.
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Bulverism is a logical fallacy where you assume an opponent's argument is false and explain why they hold that view instead of actually proving why the argument is wrong.
Particularly useful for shutting down criticism of "successful" people because there are countless avenues one can measure success by and find the critic wanting.
It’s the “they just hate us cause they anus” defense. You see it all the time in debates where when a person can’t refute your argument, they instead attack your credibility. Yeah well I’m not a climate scientist either but I can still tell you it was hot and dry yesterday.
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He was also never that smart or studious when his brain was at full power either.
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Respectfully disagreed. I am surrounded IRL by people who reject exactly those simple messages, and whose lives are downward spirals of empty talk, self-delusion, and the rejection of all measurable metrics in favor of declaring as profoundly ethical their bad habits, self-destructive behavior and perpetual failures at even their own stated goals, and who excuse their lies, their parasitic existences and their proselytizing to this complex of self-defeat with words very similar to yours - that human beings needn't accomplish or even do anything to be valuable, and that all those who in fact do things and accomplish things are surely immoral and deserve contempt.
There are probably unhealthy extremes either way, but maxims like
actually form a very healthy philosophy for humans under most circumstances.
There are measurable metrics of intelligence, such as IQ and SAT. There are measurable metrics of academic and scientific accomplishment, such as GPA and h-index. There are measurable metrics of managerial performance, such as the KPIs used by the Chinese Communist Party to promote officials, or quarterly returns of a corporation. There are measurable metrics for all kinds of things, but Trump's measurable success is that he could get enough Americans to vote for him twice. The assertion that this metric is a proxy of intelligence is ill-supported. What you try to argue is just slavish worship of power, not some "healthy philosophy".
I'm not saying anything about Trump at all. I'm strictly discussing the maxims you described as unfit for humans, and how I consider them superior to the one actually espoused by many humans.
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