The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Sorry, sorry, potential wife.
My children are not yet capable of a coherent conversation. I still find them wonderful and amazing; the last few months have been pretty tough, and interacting with my eldest has consistently been the largest source of genuine joy and contentment in my life, to the point that several times I've stepped away from crises with work to simply pick up and hold them.
There are times when I might have been tempted to claim that I was smarter than my wife. I know a lot more about history, philosophy, politics, pretty much anything academic, and she certainly lacks my encyclopedic knowledge of banal gun trivia. And yet, she is miles better at most practical matters than I am, and it turns out that those practical matters are extremely important every day of the week, while my academic knowledge is mostly useful for arguing on the internet. My life improved massively by all objective measures when I married her, and if I lost her it would immediately get much worse by those same objective measures, completely ignoring the emotional and personal factors.
If my children take after me, I hope my wife will be able to teach them a great deal of her practicality; my life would have certainly benefited from more of it. If my children take after her, then it will be my job to try to compress what insights I have down to a level their capability and inclination can make use of. Intellect that cannot be communicated has scant value. I am likely always going to be "smarter" than them, simply because I'm much older and have much more data and experience; the question isn't whether they're my intellectual equal, the question is whether my intellect is sufficient to the task of making good humans from scratch.
My father was quite critical, and I think I've inherited a double-portion of his critical nature, but this is something I'm aware of and can try to compensate for. I'm critical because I see how things could be better, and I want them to be better, but nothing gets improved without the motivation to strive, and criticism is not a good motivator for most people. So, again, the test of intelligence is not whether I can find flaws, but whether I can motivate improvement. I'm proud (and terrified) that my eldest can climb a ladder. I'm proud that they can hold a pencil. I need to cultivate and communicate this pride to them, teach them that focused, purposeful effort is the essence of value, that that I am proud of their growth.
More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense. Self-deception and rationalization scale in direct proportion to intelligence. Von Neumann was not, in fact, the God-Emperor of mankind; he was in the end successfully yoked to a society of his supposed inferiors, and his more unique ideas were thankfully discarded by those same supposed inferiors. Intelligence is not isomorphic to Goodness, but rather is values-neutral. There are no shortage of examples of the harms caused by intelligence turned to evil ends, and no reason to believe that a dramatic increase in intelligence, either on the individual or societal level, would alter the human condition in any fundamental way.
I suspect your wife is intelligent, and specializes in something different from you. Most people are not that intelligent, and are mediocre at both practical and intellectual tasks! You didn't randomly select a wife from the American population.
Do you think that, if society had an IQ cap of 100, we would understand quantum field theory, or general relativity, or have most of the technology we use so much? This is a bizzare statement. The average person mostly can't do algebra, and genuinely doesn't understand why they keep getting inflation when they vote for more spending and less taxation. Yes, smart people use their intelligence to be wrong in novel ways, but it's a process that in many areas converges.
This is conflating the fact that Von Neumann's technical aptitude was controlled by highly intelligent people with social and political aptitude with strong progressive / democratic values guiding public opinion with a sense that Von Neumann was being guided by the People and their average intelligence.
If the world were entirely composed of 100 IQ people, the world would be so much worse by any reasonable set of values. We wouldn't have an internet, we'd be missing most treatments for currently existing diseases, we'd lose great art and music (Scott Alexander's brother is a famous musician. Coincidence? lol). This isn't neutral!
More options
Context Copy link
That was very beautifully said. I will notify you when I marry her.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link