while i don’t ardently agree with all your rhetoric it makes me feel such a sense of solace to see some of these ideas expressed in the wild.
it’s absolutely confounding how even seemingly rational people begin to emotionally seethe when presented with the fact that shitposting and generally bullying people isn’t activism. seems to be a very human thing.
i think a big part of the issue generally is that people think of their intelligence as some sort of absolute and continuous character trait rather than a discrete aspect of your personality; i.e, the idea someone is a “stupid” or “intelligent” person is of itself, a stupid idea lol. sometimes you’re the biggest brain in the room, sometimes you’re an idiot.
i appreciate your focus on the emotional aspect of it because that is certainly the more pertinent part. imo all humans average around the same intellectual capability, sans extreme outliers. it’s more about how people choose to use what is available to them than an actual lacking of mental capabilities. these people are just as rational as anyone else, it just happens that the vast landscape of knowledge itself is full of many pangs and holes that lead to nowhere; they seem stupid because there exists a seemingly logical perspective that causes them to infinitesimally and continually spin around these holes, like a coin in a make-a-wish donation thing. not sure if i’m conveying my rationale very well but i have found that the stuff in the cracks between ideas like this is often where the calculus of the universe hides in life.
everything you said here is absolutely correct and i’m glad at least some people recognize this issue. perhaps my use of the word rational in quotes was unfounded, i should’ve chosen better/more correct diction.
i suppose my point of “these people are just as rational as anyone else” is a bit of a misnomer and not exactly what i should’ve said; to clarify i probably more aptly meant “everyone, on average, has available to them the same basic cognitive faculties and it is a myth that the difference between these populations has something inherent to do with them as people,” which reading your reply you seem to agree with. i think this is key to fighting this, recognizing that on a grand scale it is in the course of life that these problems emerge vs the exact circumstances of birth. there’s definitely an argument about free will/determinism hidden here and you’d be valid to question how the circumstances of one’s birth relate to the course of your life (obviously, there is a strong relationship), but i digress. the important part is recognizing where these people “diverge” from what we would call “normal” is during life, not at the immediate beginning necessarily.
i like the example of literacy because it helps highlight the point i’m trying to make a little better, i think. most people adept in historiography and history would likely agree that there is a persistent myth that people in the past are somehow intellectually lesser than modern people. this of course isn’t true, but it’s difficult to explain why. to the layman it seems obvious that those in the past could do less than we can, but to the trained eye you can see that people have always been around the same level of average intelligence on a timescale comprehensible to human beings. improvements in average intelligence of the species are a very gradual evolutionary process that we can’t really perceive within the scale of human history; what has actually changed overtime is the sum of human knowledge. thus, people in hunter-gatherer societies were not “less intelligent” than their modern counterparts, they just used their intelligence differently. this is the crux of my argument. the literacy rate in prehistory, was… well, zero; as reading and writing had not been invented yet. but we don’t claim these people are less intelligent, for reasons described. literacy is intimately related to the problem at hand, but it is a symptom rather than a cause. i think we should extend that same logic to modern illiterates. they’re not necessarily lesser. taming the scourge of anti-intellectualism will hinge on truly understanding and recognizing that fact, which is something scientific outreach has done a poor job of imo. that has to do with the natural human inability to do true introspection along with the difficulty of the skill of empathy: problems that crop up in many facets of this debate.
although, as you describe, this is an active attack on us in what can only be described as a class war. modern LLMs and GPTs are another great case study. “intelligent” people are able to use these tools as nootropics and offload even more of their cognitive workload to the computer than ever before. it seems like most, however, aren’t capable of using them this way, as you point out. i think it speaks to the nature of intelligence enhancement tools generally. those who are capable can achieve greater things than they could alone. most, however, will see the opportunity to do less cognitive work as just that, a way to have to think less; and they then fail to properly utilize the tools in a way that is adverse to their own intellectual ability. interesting diactem, i think. speaks to the core of the problem.
i’m not so sure this is a problem we can even solve. there’s an episode of futurama where they travel to the distant future and all of humanity has diverged into two separate species of dumb, orcish brutes and frail, hyper-intellectual imps. maybe this truly is the path we are on, maybe the forces driving this divergence are too strong to be reconciled.
any thanks for listening to me ramble