Rosencrantz2
29d ago
Yes, and it means people here claiming that he was acting in good faith when trying to dispute the election results, because he really believes there was fraud, are making a kind of category error. There is not really such thing as 'acting in good faith' for someone with a brain like his.
Rosencrantz2
29d ago
I'm not sure it's a knock on democracy to say that it can break down and fail at times. We know that. Maybe this is one of those times. I don't know who is to blame? You can't blame someone who's convinced of something despite evidence -- they're idiots. You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.
Rosencrantz2
30d ago
I also think that outstaying the 2 term-welcome is such a taboo in American's minds, that it is unthinkable for anyone to break it.
Don't quite know about this. You can't imagine what specific pathway and pressure dams could potentially be created in order for a cunning enough president to extend a second term beyond the normal timeframe. It could be a movement to postpone the election until voting mechanisms have been properly safeguarded, or for an as-yet unknown emergency (a form of low level civil war for example) that supposedly makes holding an election at a given moment too dangerous. Putin got around term limits by installing a puppet for a term and then changing the rules. Trump could do the same and become the true POTUS with Don Jr or someone as the nominal candidate.
I do agree with you that most politicians share the dictator spirit. But I think the norm of keeping it strictly secret, which Trump often doesn't abide by, is incredibly important to proper functioning democracy.
Rosencrantz2
30d ago
I feel that the snapping pictures of a beach and choosing the best ones gets at something here. That doesn't really sound like art at all. It's an obvious thing to point a camera at and has little intention to it, only a few more degrees of freedom than your anime example. The more you specify the care and thought that goes into the choice of view and reasoning behind it and craft to control the image, the closer it gets to art. Same with prompting. If you do enough micro decisions, curation and combination and juxtaposition of what the ai gives you, the more you are moving in the direction of art.
Rosencrantz2
30d ago
I agree there's another option (given that no evidence of fraud exists): that he always believes what it benefits him to believe but this is actually not dumb but clever in his case because it advantages a political actor to be convinced of their righteousness. In other words his brain is built differently not for truth seeking but winning and that is a good trait in a politician who is on your side.
Rosencrantz2
30d ago
I don't understand your point, are you saying we don't need evidence for fraud because you and your circle have been so sure of it for so long? Do you believe every losing Republican candidate prior to Trump should also have denied the election result? What would you think if dems acted the exact same way?
Rosencrantz2
30d ago
Seems to me many serious defenders of Trump privately believe there are enough checks and balances to keep wannabe dictators from taking power; witness January 6th. They would make the case that it's worth having a wannabe dictator as president in this case because Trump is great and it's not that much of a risk. Plus they think everyone wants to be a dictator, and that Trump is just less secretive about it, and so no more dangerous than anyone else, maybe less.
If anyone here (Trump fans and detractors alike) believes Trump wouldn't become a dictator given the chance, I'd be fascinated to hear from them.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Would Biden really gun for a Trump victory in order to defeat his real enemy, Obama?
I certainly wasn't suggesting that high IQ and social smarts are mutually exclusive. Just that the upper ends of both may be less likely to occur together.
Edit: perhaps I should add the reason I don't consider this refuting is that this is not a list of randomly chosen high iq people. It's a list of acknowledged geniuses, who are more likely to be socially able than your average high-iq person. They collaborate with others, they navigate institutions etc.
Good excerpts by the way.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think the embryo case below probably is going to be about the tail end of the curve because of the Silicon Valley demographics of people who'd use an embryo selection service for IQ. They are people with high IQ, who've been successful because of their IQ, and are in a culture that is a bit obsessed with IQ, so they especially care about that of their kids and may be trying to terminate the IQ130 embryo in favour of his 140 brother!
I find it highly likely that at the lower, mainstream part of the curve, IQ is indeed more simply correlated with many good things – a less alloyed good if you will.
But as for trade-offs to do with types of intelligence in general, it just seems pretty intuitive to me that if you take a bunch of archetypal impressive people, successful in different ways, you will find many whose brilliance could have been compromised by being too good at logic and not distracted enough from logic puzzles by other parts of life.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
This is well put. What we don't understand as well, when it comes to different forms of intelligence, is what the trade offs are. Whereas it's very easy to see that the weight reduction that helps you cycle faster can hinder your sumo wrestling prowess.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
But if you look at the highest IQ university graduates they seem more socially inept on average and sometimes less adept at managing poorly defined problems than their not-quite-as-high-IQ peers. Perhaps they don't even have some higher innate trait, they might just be more in their own worlds and thus more able to focus/get good at logic problems. And the thing is that, while logic problems and math are useful in certain contemporary professional and scientific settings, they are in a sense simpler to solve than social problems are to navigate. We could end up creating AI that can replace high IQ people but cannot replace people who are good at handling social and political complexity, or who are good at understanding what really motivates someone.
To be clear I have no proper evidence that very high IQ is associated with less good understanding of people, it just matches my experience so wouldn't surprise me. And I don't believe psychological studies are good enough to prove it either way.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Maybe I'm not evolving the discussion much but I think he is unique or at least extraordinarily unusual in his shamelessness.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I do think that there are advantages to not having too high an IQ. I studied maths at Cambridge and met my classmates.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think people are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics and the mind. I hereby bet that in twenty years they realise the lower-IQ kids they were screening out actually may have had superior brains and intelligence traits in other respects.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Interesting point, I've noticed this and would like to read/think more about why some women are better able to handle such seeming contradictions. I can't help thinking one style of thinking has got something mixed up and I'm not at all sure it's the female style.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Do you think it's real though? "It comes down to who you trust, and I trust Trump to fight against the communism of the wokes." That seems like a joke to me, I would hypothesise it could be a liberal false flag post attempting to make republican supporters sound dumb(er).
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Do we know to what extent these are rural/urban differences vs rep/dem?
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
To be honest my mind would have been broken even if I agreed with you that he is just a bumbling fool and not in fact a cruel and mendacious one. The fact that so many people think a bumbling fool is some kind of brilliant saviour would already (then) have been shocking enough to me to break my charity towards them.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think his motive is attention and the obeisance of others. He has since learned he can get those things without building anything.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think you're right that Trump has a unique effect. He has done on me. I would say in my case he has utterly shattered what used to be an (okay, probably patrician) sense that the average Joe is a basically well intentioned person who is smarter than sometimes estimated and is a canny judge of character. The popularity of Trump has really changed that and made me significantly less confident in the average person's judgement. That so many people can be enchanted by the most naked sociopathy I have possibly ever seen has changed my view of human nature.
If, prior to his first candidacy, you had showed me 100 hours of video of Trump speaking, I would have thought it was some kind of satire.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I think the thing with Trump is that like or hate him, he’s not beholden to traditional politics or norms. He’s the guy who wants to get things done and build things.
I am sort of perplexed that you would consider this some kind of statement that one and all would agree with. Does he particularly get things done and build things? I tend to think of him as pure surface and not actually concerned with what he builds at all except insofar as it confirms his self-regard.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Suppose #2 were brand-new, and what you saw was exactly as the designer intended it, to the point of intentionally and carefully corroding the steel where the toilet meets the sink with meticulously-collected and -applied urine. Would that make it better?
It might be interesting as art or as a theatre set but very cruel as a prison. Deliberately unpleasant instead of carelessly so.
Agree with your preferences re the gymnasium rooms. Those ones seem most in harmony with their purpose. The classroom is a downer.
Regards your choice of vocabulary – filth, complexity and chaos – I must say I am surprised. This style of architecture strikes me as favouring very simple lines rather than complex ones (which I'd associate more with e.g. gothic architecture). I also don't find them to be especially filthy – in fact, I think they have to be kept in good nick to be palatable. The Barbican Centre would be dystopian for example if not carefully looked after but it's actually really nice to wander around because they mop a lot!
I do admit there is something Lovecraftian about looking on large expanses of concrete, when they are inhuman in their scale. But it's possible to design with this element of 'disharmony' or 'discomfort' while spending a lot of effort on making the building functional and comfortable when it comes to using it on a day to day basis (seating, bathrooms, walking lines etc).
In fact this combo is especially pleasing.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
All these things can be true! And no, it's definitely not cost efficient.
Hmm, I think the belief that democracy is the least worst system can survive the probability that there are a lot of idiots and it will sometimes fail. But that's a big discussion.
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