Comment on Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
Jayjader@jlai.lu 21 hours agoEmpathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.
Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.
Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.
Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?
You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.
freedom@lemy.lol 19 hours ago
No rule applies 100% of the time. Understanding that putting good into the world can improve your environment beyond easily identified individual gains is an intelligent concept likely surfacing from group survival, not individual conscious thought.
Imagine you’re born into a world where 1 out of every 100 people is a socio/psychopath and 10 are (to use your terms) less knowledgeable and prone to manipulation of behavior.
Low socioeconomic status is likely to grow for the subset of 10ths that keeps growing exploited under the less ethical influence of the 1s. Low socioeconomic status is linked to having more offspring, which slowly grows the “10s” to higher and higher relative percentage of the population.
Identifying this mechanism and being concerned for the implications as related to life’s adaptation ability, is certainly controversial, but not eugenics. Eugenics is intentional, this hypothetical just a natural process. The thought of people perishing without recourse is the scary part. I never proposed it needed to run its course “because”, just that it might be too late to stop it now. To be eugenics flavored, I argue intent is necessary. Again, not advocating, just acknowledging it may be unavoidable.