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Intelligence, Personality, and Survival

haksayngNov 18, 2018, 7:19:44 PM

Let's begin this blog post by assuming human differences in intelligence and personality. Here, I am not going to treat the idea of "multiple intelligences"; I am talking about G ('General Intelligence'), which I believe is a useful, stable metric. As for personality, you may choose your favorite model—whether that is the 'Big Five Personality Traits' or some other system. Humans are different, often unchangeably different—there are some differences between us which no amount of specialized training, new diets, or anything else can "correct".

As a society we must learn how to work with these differences rather than denying their existence, as I believe many people have been programmed to do through education, media, and the like. Further down, I'll propose a small set of useful guidelines centered around the ideas of voluntarism and providing opportunities—more on that later.

But before getting to these solutions, allow me to present a diagnosis of the problem at hand here—

Egalitarian Fantasies

In the West (I write from Commie-fornia), we take the idea that "all people are created equal" (not just men) to new ideological heights.

Literature Review

Imagine that everybody is born a tabula rasa, a 'blank slate'. Who we become is overwhelmingly determined by our environment. Why do some people turn out to be stellar musicians while others don't? Training! Duh! So, let's give everyone the best-est education ever.

Why do some kids hate going to classes at school? Why do so many people have trouble focusing?! There must be institutional factors at play that we need to address. Maybe the white boys are unable to focus because they are racist against their brown neighbors (from their parents' indoctrination)? We must correct these things!

Institutional Solutions

Attributing differences in outcome in school, finding and keeping employment, saving for retirement, or whatever other metric you choose, overwhelmingly to environmental (c.f. 'genetic') factors, government bureaucrats, policy makers, educators, and similar metastasized hall monitors have taken up the task of trying to impose their egalitarian fantasies on the world.

If there are inequalities, they must come from injustice.

Equality vs Diversity

The ongoing project of correcting inequality (often ironically in the name of 'diversity') will never be solved in a single lifetime. But in the mean time, it provides thousands (millions?) of jobs, more often than not funded by your tax dollars.

The hall monitors legislate new fees, degrees, and the like to make themselves the custodians of diversity, a new priestly class for the Age of Equality.

Millions of children attend Vacation Equality School whether in brick-and-mortar classrooms, through their not-so-blank slates (iPads), and increasingly so, through their "fun" activities like playing video games or browsing social media. Many adults have been infantilized and wish to be treated similarly to these children. Wasn't life simple when I played Pokémon on my Gameboy color and did as I was told in school? Why can't my whole life be driven by educators' instructions punctuated by lunch/recess bells? [1]

Biological Diversity

I call "egalitarian fantasies" fantasies because they are largely untrue (duh). People differ a loooooooot in intelligence as well as personality. These are things that are for the most part handed to us—we don't choose, and therefore there is no blame of moral failing (or praise of good-job!) should be assigned to people for traits they had no hand in choosing.

With that being said, people (at least those trying to be politically correct) often use language in ways that suggest moral failing rather than biological programming for many perceived societal ills. I hear this most often in the context of hard work.

Not so infrequently, I will hear a highly educated person make remarks about how such-and-such just needs to work harder/focus/study/etc. and then everything will be fine and dandy. This is the ultra-unhelpful advice of "just go to college" as if it is a silver bullet for everything from drug addiction to an idle mind [2].

Survival Strategies

When highly educated people believe that everyone else should just go to lots of school, following their footsteps, I think they are being very narrow minded. One man's trash is another man's treasure. But if we convince everyone that certain pieces of paper are worth tens of thousands of dollars, then oh-boy there is a lot of treasure to be had!

There is a kind of truism that "humans and the bacteria we genocide with anti-bac" are both equally evolved in the sense that we have arrived at the same time and place through millions and million of years. I am a human and I like humans and I think humans are the best, but I can't deny that the bacteria that I wipe out with hand sanitizer from time to time have "failed" evolutionarily.

Another interesting case is domesticated animals. One may criticize their evolutionary "strategy" of becoming humankind's slaves... ...but by the numbers they are doing much better than say... great pandas (who have only relatively recently gained the favor of Chinese emperor(s)).

The egalitarian fantasies described in the previous selection assume that one particular way of being (i.e. falling into line, trusting the government, and slaving away) is best. WE MUST OPTIMIZE THIS. SCIENCE. STATISTICS.

But if we take a step back and meditate upon the the lives of the bacteria we boil alive before eating instant noodles on a Sunday morning (gee... that doesn't sound half bad now), this seems like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

Humans have evolved a lot of diversity to fulfill diverse roles. Just now, within a couple hundred of years, he have made "more equal" societies. But this certainly hasn't been the case for most of human history, otherwise, why would it be regarded as such a development now?

As some people are more "wired" to sit quietly and listen (descendants of Confucian scholars), others are wired to be fiercely independent and anti-social (lone wolf, strong independent man don't need no 9 to 5 job). Some people may excel at quickly maturing and producing offspring, while others may excel at surviving long, cold winters in cramped quarters [3].

Why discuss these things?

Many people in positions of power think they know what is best for you and you and you and you. Oftentimes, they are grossly misinformed, operating on egalitarian fantasy software. For obvious reasons, operating with bad information and unhelpful theories can be very, very dangerous. Ironically, perhaps more dangerous than attempting to start from a "blank slate" like egalitarian fantasies hypothesize people to be.

Voluntarism

What's to be done? I believe that a general good formula is to opt to give people more choice. We cannot force equality on people without tyranny; why not let people choose their own paths? One may retort to this and say, "oh... but we already do!"

Sure, in many ways we (here I'm thinking of the US) do give people choice. But there are also plenty of things we force people to do, leaving no other real options. For example, if you don't really like fiat currency, can you simply switch to using alternatives (e.g. make your own currency to use in your community, use cryptocurrency)? In summary, no you can't, not legally at least. Big brother needs to tax you, fear the audit.

By allowing people to have more choices, we give more opportunities for different types of people to succeed, not just ultra-optimized NPCs.

Opportunities

Rather than trying to eliminate risk by telling young people that they "just need to get a college degree" and all these things are magically guaranteed to them, I think that the best formula for human well-being is to allow people to try-fail-and-learn in situations that don't have devastating consequences.

Things like minimum wage, employers providing healthcare, etc. make it harder for employers to take risks and give people chances.

On the other hand, if you are a rebellious libertarian that does things like hire neighborhood kids to mow your lawn, you are getting kids interested in contributing useful services, exchanging value for value.

Scary things like AI-takeover become less scary when you don't give the state the power to determine which individuals are "optimal" and which ones are bound for obsolescence.

Intelligence, Personality, and Diversity

As a species, diversity is our strength. We are able to adapt to all sorts of stuff because there are different sorts of people. Trying to homogenize all of people into a un-nationed, un-racial, etc. blob is like destroying all the organ walls (or cell walls) in a person's body so that all tissues can be treated more equally. That's bullshit. There's a Bible verse about this:

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" (NIV)

Let us return to this ancient wisdom and embrace, rather than deny, differences. It's fine that some people are not as smart as others. They may be better at things like... being happy and enduring hardships for all we know? It's fine that some people hate sitting in the same place for extended periods of time—maybe they are good at being adventurous and will do things like rescue Thai kids from caves while I blog about social justice.

Positively, let's seek ways to make opportunities for one another and build stuff like relationships and nice spaces.

Notes and References

[1] Sadly, my demographic (Asian-Americans) seem to have greatly contributed to making school more and more like this.

[2] Some would suggest college makes these things worse for most people—particularly those that aren't in a college major that directly leads to employment.

[3] In the 21st century, many people look at traits like "having a slow metabolism" as being annoying/bad because they wanna eat more food and post pictures online. But, there are many reasons why having a slow metabolism can be a helpful—if not life & death determining—asset.