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What are good moral and epistemic frameworks for unintelligent people?
One of the issues I keep coming back to is the unspoken assumption a lot of society have that stupidity is a moral failure. That being stupid means you are a bad person, and if you were a better person you would just be smarter. I suppose a blank slatist has to believe this, because they believe everyone has the same potential and therefore if you aren't intelligent it's an intentional failure on your part.
I wholeheartedly reject this. Clearly intelligence is at least part genetic. Some people are just born dumb and it's not their fault. Further, looking at people makes it obvious that intelligence is not the same thing as morality. They're probably positively correlated, but that correlation is not 1, and it's much closer to 0 than it is to 1. There are a lot of really nasty evil smart people, and a lot of kind, wholesome, good people who are dumb as a sack of bricks but somehow brighten the lives of the people around them. I've been friends with several unintelligent people, and I would gladly take them over some college educated scammy salesman or woke busybody. It is obvious to me from empirical evidence that unintelligent people can be good people. But how? How do you reliably determine what is good and bad when everyone is disagreeing on what those mean, and are smarter than you? How does someone with an IQ of 80 ensure that they're actually being a good person and not just being manipulated by virtue signalers?
I think that Humility and/or Fealty is a partial answer. Humility being you don't get yourselves involved in politics or culture warring and just act locally on things that have obviously good first order effects. Work hard, be kind to people, contribute to charities. And most importantly, don't go around lecturing people about morality because you know you are wrong all the time and thus have low confidence in all of your beliefs. Fealty being you pick a person or people smarter than you who seems genuinely kind and you put your trust in them. Whenever complicated moral dilemmas come up you ask them for advice and trust their opinions. The danger here is if you put your faith in the wrong people then you end up just as bad as they are. Being maximally humble and loyal with a random target to trust should allow someone to approximate an average morality (if they choose truly randomly), but also adds the risk of being taken advantage of if the person knows you're trusting them and is a bad person.
Religion is also a partial answer. Many of the unintelligent but kind people I've known have been Christians. You take the teachings and the community around it, learn from it, and trust it. It's harder to be led astray by copying individuals if there's a textual basis for what good and bad means. But even then, this is still subject to issues. There are a lot of different interpretations for what each line means, what's literal and what's metaphorical, and a lot of different variants even within one religion. Someone who just blindly goes to church and believes whatever they're told to believe is likely to end up a better person on average than someone of equal intelligence who just thinks for themselves, but they still risk ending up in a cult or supporting a corrupt pedophile, or just ending up in an evil religion if we're taking enough of an outside view and considering this globally. How does the unintelligent person who isn't good at logical or moral reasoning tell the difference between a good church and a bad church?
Overall I think my question is underspecified, because I'm not entirely sure how to properly adopt an outside view here and set aside my own personal beliefs about what is good and consider a general principle that's simple enough for someone who isn't already me and is less intelligent than me to use to eventually arrive at some approximation of goodness (which I believe is equal to my specific beliefs about what is good, even if I don't always live up to them). But it's not sufficient to just say "do things that seem good." because that doesn't always work. How does someone without the sophistication to understand second order effects not just get one-shot by virtue signallers who sacrifice the greater good in favor of optics and first order appearances?
Maybe it's early in the morning, bu I haven't really noticed this. Can you provide some examples/evidence that this is the unspoken assumption?
As one example, this is a standard broadly liberal ethos for centuries. It goes with belief in tabula rasa and belief that humanism is the correct (liberal) atheist ethical structure can be gained by using science and reason. The whole liberal schtick for decades was that all it takes is a proper education and we will all live in Star Trek space luxury communism society.
You never encountered opinions that let's say Trump voters are uneducated stupid heliolites or that all Christians are science deniers or some version of this argument? It was very popular attack since my youth with new Atheism.
Roughly speaking, yes. With those examples, my interpretation of the claim is that stupid people are (sometimes) seen as less valuable, less worthy, lesser.
Anyway, the main problem I see with the argument (as I understand it) is that when people attack Christians, or Trump voters, or whomever as "stupid," the point is to insult and degrade them. It doesn't matter whether or not they are stupid. So I don't see how the proposed "epistemic framework" would make a difference. In a hypothetical world where "stupid" is no longer seen as an insult, people would just find another way to insult and degrade their out-group.
It is both. They are ignorant because they don't want to learn The Science™. And they do not want to learn because they are intellectually lazy bigots. This is a standard pathos + false ethos attack that James Lindsay described quite well. He described it as an ultimate Ad Hominem battery of attacks - you do not have scientific consensus, plus you probably also have some unresolved trauma and also your opinons are very close to what fascists and racists say.
So it is a blend: you are white supremacist fascist, Jones level MAGA conspiracy supporter. religious bigot who suffers trauma from priest child diddling and sexual repression. It is all one neat dehumanization package.
Of course there are other strains of this, e.g. old school eugenics intellectual progressivism - something very close to maybe current Grey tribe technocratic elite often with Fabian Socialist bent: most people are just stupid and they simply do not know what is good for them. We are the intellectual utilitarian avant-garde who will establish benevolent technocratic permanent beurocracy, where we will use psychological tricks, nudging, propaganda, economic and tax incentives and other means to make sure that the the sub 100IQ plankton can live their lives in moderately prosperous society. Of course they will fight us, but it is because they are stupid and barely above some animals intellectually.
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