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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28378 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Domain expertise can be taught to almost anyone. You have to be smart to be a doctor, but that doesn't mean you have to be a genius. Or even exceptional. Having worked in healthcare, I've met some incredibly stupid doctors, when you catch them outside their field of expertise. "Dumb" is not synonymous with "retarded," and "smart" is not synonymous with "genius."

And it's actually quite funny that you mention tech. Because that's the side of healthcare I'm directly engaged in. You couldn't imagine how many idiots proliferate in our field. Far from being the exception, most of us who work in it know first hand that it's the rule.

Domain expertise can be taught to almost anyone. You have to be smart to be a doctor, but that doesn't mean you have to be a genius.

Many of cheap manufacturing jobs are sourced to Asia. Africa can't offer even that.

These examples of stupidity are so rareified, it's surreal. I also do some cybersecurity. Yes, cross-site scripting is a serious problem, there are all kinds of vulnerabilities floating around, people are negligent and complacent... But stupid people don't understand these kinds of highly abstract issues AT ALL. They fall for basic, bottom of the barrel scams. Many of them cannot spell or put a sentence together. Think about boomer facebook comments. Think about the stuff that happens on tiktok:

The Benadryl challenge, the blackout challenge, the cha cha slide challenge, the penny challenge, the skullbreaker challenge, the NyQuil chicken challenge... It goes on and on. There's a huge difference between people being lazy and self-serving to advance their career at the cost of the company and people driving into traffic or poisoning themselves because of a tiktok challenge. People self-sort, we surround ourselves in bubbles of people who all understand algebra or per-capita. We assume everyone is capable of spelling and can deal with basic computer issues. Many can't.

You're splitting hairs at this point. It fundamentally doesn't make any relevant difference to the point if a smart but lazy person is indistinguishable from an motivated idiot. Many extremely intelligent people lack basic social skills. I'd say they're pretty stupid as far as acting out their plans go. Nikola Tesla gave us the modern world and couldn't get laid at the same time. He was pretty stupid as far as evolution goes. I think your objection is still a facile and misleading one at best.

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