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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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You are obsessed by tests

Yes, because this is the generally accepted way we empirically measure intelligence.

Somebody who is constantly wrong, but enjoys being wrong and expects himself to be wrong and puts in place structures to cope with the inevitable fuckups that happen when you bash yourself against reality and reality wins, is far more useful and intelligent than the kind of person who prides themselves on getting A in a class about French artists.

Well obviously not. If they were more intelligent why are they constantly wrong?

The French artists is just an example. We can make it physics, we could make it engineering, we could make it anything. In general the smarter guy should be better. It's practically tautological.

Now, IQ tests have a meaning. Scoring better on IQ tests tends to correlate with the kind of intelligence I am talking about. Knowing nothing about them, I would rather have higher IQ students than lower IQ ones. But that is not enough, and a history of perfect test taking can often correlate with the kind of arrogance that makes you an extremely bad employee and problem solver.

Interesting enough, higher IQ tends to be correlated with prosocial traits. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2049959070556172302

Oh, what's the use. Either you can't see or you won't see. At least I got a couple of good paragraphs out of it.