IQ

The dangerous genius

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

In the Simpsons episode They Saved Lisa’s Brain (1999), Springfield’s smartest residents are appointed to govern the town following the sudden departure of Mayor Quimby.

It seems like a good idea but each genius has his own wacky proposals and things soon turn to chaos.

Principal Skinner changes the clocks to metric time, Professor Frink wants to prohibit sport, and Comic Book Guy wants to ban obesity for females. He later announces that breeding should occur only once every seven years, which would be a significant increase for him.

To be fair, if you asked any of these geniuses to write a book about their idea, they’d probably be able to justify it in more detail and address some of the counter-arguments.

However, all the ideas are comically wacky because they fail a cost-benefit analysis.

The writers are highlighting a real problem of the very clever: they know they are smart so they assume that all their ideas are good. They are often unwilling to seriously consider alternative viewpoints.

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Clever people are stupid, part 2

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://cdn1.medicalnewstoday.com/content/images/articles/320/320152/illustration-of-intelligent-young-woman.jpg

Some years ago I wrote a post entitled Clever people are stupid.  It describes various ways in which the highly intelligent can be a bit silly, whether it be from general eccentricity, overspecialization, overconfidence or the ability to believe highly complex, internally consistent but utterly wrong things that a dumber person could not hope to wrap his inferior head around.

Today we will more closely examine the last and consider how it relates to our present cognitive overlords, the Cloud People.

There has always been some form of elite opinion.  It might have been called Read More

Mokita

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Book review of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

In the last two years I have read an enormous number of books due to my technological isolation, and many times I have thought, why the hell didn’t I read this when I was twenty?  This is one of those.  It is so prescient, so relevant, and so essential to understanding present-day SJW/Big Tech hysterias that I was embarrassed that I had not read it before, and that, like most others, I had completely misunderstood what it was all about.  If you haven’t read it, you no doubt suffer that same misapprehension.

The Bell Curve is one of the most maligned, unread and misrepresented books of the last century.  The main purpose of this post is to explain what it is really about, and how important it is.

First, of course, we must explain what it is not about.  The Bell Curve contains one section about race and IQ, with some speculation about the causes of observed aggregate differences.  It does this only as the Read More