Among other things, it highlights one difficulty that I've been worrying at for a few years. Pinker argues that the following questions:
Darling, I know that you always have been faithful and always will be faithful, but just hypothetically, if you were going to have an affair, which of my friends would it be with? Or try this: In a dinner party, ideally one of mixed ethnicity and religion, ask the question, well, of course none of us here are prejudiced, but if we were, if you were bigoted, which ethnic group would you be prejudiced against, just hypothetically?has only one correct answer:
The answer to these questions is not to deliberate and then say, well, no, I wouldn’t want to sleep with any of your friends, or now that I think of it, there isn’t any ethnic group that I’m prejudiced against. One must reject them instantly. Just allowing them to percolate in your brain is considered morally corrosive.Unfortunately, both me and most of the folks I hang out with consider and then answer the question when posed. Which leads to my question? Why are smart folks considered subversive? In short because most of them are socially retarded in that they don't have the ability to turn off the brain and accept the standard answer, once a question has been highlighted. And if you're actually considering a question, there's real good odds you won't reach the "correct" conclusion. Therefore smart folks are almost always correctly considered dangerous to the social fabric.
Anyhow, Pinker's a short must-read. Go visit. Ties in nicely to Devin's recent post as well, but at a more meta- level.
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5 comments:
People who can't use Doublethink are a threat to society? There's a novel in there somewhere.
I think 'non-neurotypical' fits what you're saying here better than 'smart'. Lots of smart people (especially in the 110-130 or so range) are plenty neurotypical and doublethink and crimestop just fine. I'll grant that said capability degrades as you pass 2 sigmas (at 3 and 4 sigmas, you need to be increasingly good at deception to be able to convincingly emulate being neurotypical--Bill Clinton is a good example IMO of a +3 sigma who is far from neurotypical who has excellent emulation via deception--you see this in his ability to manipulate the neurotypical without being vulnerable at all to the converse.
Jehu,
I'm kinda screwy here...and you're correct. I grew up in a family where the slow folks were 3-sigma...and in a town where the entire honors program in the high school was populated by professors children, often children of 2 professors. I don't even think of 1.5-2 Sigma as smart. That's "normal" in my own personal very very warped world-view...or at least it looks normal from here.
Indeed there are some folks (Clinton/Nixon may be among them, though opinions vary) who seem able to can fake normal, while being >2 Sigma...but they seem significantly few and far between.
Brent,
HA! Good point.
Aretae,
I've been working on my neurotypical 'emulation mode' for at least 15 years now and it's still far, far from perfect. I find religion (which I'm intrinsically very interested in) and sports (which I'm considerably less so) very useful in reducing how alien I seem to the neurotypical. Amusingly, when I think of sports as a sort of ersatz warfare I have an easier time getting into the spirit of it.
My older brother actually got a pretty good roll of the dice---he's about 3 sigma and he's either neurotypical or has an incredibly good emulation mode that's basically always on---good enough to fool his own younger brother.
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