What is happening?
In a particularly notable moment, the president said that “some of his ideas are really the same ideas that I have.” At another point, he added that “we agree on a lot more than I would have thought. I want him to do a great job, and we’ll help him do a great job.”
Any attempt to quantitative measure intelligence is pro eugenics.
IQ or otherwise. It can’t be done. We need to accept that, and stop saying that some people are superior to others. We are all equal.
Oh definitely, I’m with you on that, 100%. Regardless, it’s not productive to just accuse people of being eugenicists when it’s infinitely more likely that they weren’t aware of how problematic it is to frame intelligence in the way they did.
I’m firmly of the belief that far more important than any seemingly innate intelligence is the support and opportunities for learning that we have access to. It sounds like this is in line with what you think also. That in mind, I hope you can see why your initial comment wasn’t helpful towards anyone learning.
IQ is borne out of an ideology in which there is a class of special people, who should do all the thinking, and everyone else, who should just be mindless drones. Rejecting that ideology means reckoning with the fact that our thinking and reasoning capacities depend massively on our circumstances — and our ability to grow is limited by not knowing what we don’t know. For me, recognising that we’re all equal in all the ways that count means that I feel a duty to facilitate people having access to opportunities to learn and grow. I’m not saying that you should feel obligated to explain complex topics to people who you don’t know will even be receptive, but I am saying that the least you could do is avoid lowering the quality of the discourse.
I initially took the time to reply to you because although your comment was hostile and unnecessary, I have enough background knowledge on the topic to guess that you’re someone who is well-informed and principled. Indeed, it sounds like your views here are quite similar to my own. You could’ve written a comment that might’ve usefully challenged the person you replied to, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see that.