I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is much more intelligent than I am. I don't know why there's such a taboo over saying some people are more intelligent than others. It's not a moral judgment or a be-all-and-end-all of a person's value.
Makes it easier to seed resentment and division. There's a notable cohort of ideologically-possessed individuals whose mission in life seems to be flatly denying the existence of meritocracy. If everyone is as smart as the smartest people in the world (and we'll repeat this until it's accepted as true), then some injustice logically must be taking place. Our ideology just so happens to have a solution to address this, so you should give us power. It's a pattern that's been playing out for a while now.
But it is, even though it actually means nothing at all. Let me try and explain.
Our society prides itself on being both rational and egalitarian at the same time. Its most basic ideological paradigm basically says: "everyone is equal". Of course, that is a meaningless statement - people themselves are not quantities to be measured and compared; "everyone is equal" is just a shorthand for "everyone is just as much a human being as everyone else, regardless of the physical characteristics of their body, and deserves to be treated with equal dignity, because every person has a human mind."
Now imagine a trait, "intelligence", which basically says "this person has more mind than that person". This is in contradiction with the premise of equality; in the rationalist paradigm, this is more or less equivalent to saying "this person is inherently superior than that person". So either differences in intelligence do not exist and intelligence is a meaningless signifier (perhaps a performative role ascribed by particular situations)... or rational egalitarianism is in contradiction with itself (and therefore factually wrong by the rules of its own logic).
Either option is enough of a bummer that a normal person would be driven to ignore the matter entirely. Hence, the taboo.
Intelligence is but one value competing in an ecology of values.
I'm not trying to put "intelligence" or "geniuses" on a pedestal, though I would argue they're already being put there by our culture's norms. If they were really so important, wouldn't people be a lot more outraged about faulty definitions and fallacious reasoning?
Instead, we get sarcastic variants of the "well, ackshyually" meme any time anyone insists that correct reasoning is a prerequisite for a meaningful conversation, and indeed colloquial language doesn't really optimize for the use case of honest, unambiguous representations of reality
Strong disagree. Intelligence is not a more valuable attribute than any other.
Concrete example: there's no point being a more intelligent officer in the Army if you aren't able to physically get yourself to the fight in time and someone else who's less intelligent but is more fit is there on time to have an impact.
I also disagree with this statement.
>a "more intelligent" person is defined as "having more consciousness" which, in a system that ascribes value to humanity and consciousness, is equivalent to saying that a more intelligent person is "more of a person", and therefore inherently "superior in value"
This is what I meant. Do you still disagree with this statement?
And, well... should I make my posts more detailed or less, considering they fail to communicate the idea? Or should I go back to just saying nothing?
Just wondering - what exactly makes you think so?
What's so unlikely to you about the idea that he's relatively intelligent and that's played a part in his success?
People want to pretend it's all luck and connections. I don't think it is, and I think people pretend that to make themselves feel like they could have done it if only they had the same resources.
Nothing, I haven't even questioned his intelligence or said anything about him at all.
I just don't have a slightest clue in how to assess his intelligence and compare it to mine based on what I know about him, which makes me wonder what's making it so obvious to you. Especially when talking about things so blurry as "business decisions", since there are so many outside factors at play in any business that one's intelligence is never a single thing that determines business success.
Occam’s Razor. Maybe it’s possible it’s all sheer luck? But most likely - he’s a shrewd and intelligent business man.
Just for one specific example: even if I was in his exact situation back then, I wouldn't mortgage out my house, ask friends and family for loans, cash out all of my savings, and then dump it all into my failing green energy startup during its "make it or break it moment". But he did, and none of what Tesla/SpaceX are presently would have been possible if he didn't make that decision.
And that's just one extreme thing that he did that I know for a fact I wouldn't have been able to do, even with the resources and everything else he had.
Trump was smarter than Einstein apparently. (Well, Einstein was German, bad example...
They never made it to president, or billionaire status though I don't think... It could be said Trump was more "successful"...
Does success === intelligence? God, I hope not or we're doomed as a species.
Is Donald Trump smart? Well I think it's a non-partisan fact that he outsmarted the entire US political establishment in 2016. You decide how smart that is for yourself.
His campaign has been purposely based on lies and hate, which to me seems like an exact opposite of "smart" even if successful.
An immoral person can be smart. And in fact it's a common and dangerous mistake to assume someone's stupid because you think they're immoral.
Are you arguing it would have been smarter to do something that was unsuccessful?
I find it really weird that you even ask.
A smart person dutifully operates as best they can within the rules.
But a smarter person realises that actually the rules aren't what everyone thought they were in the first place.
There's lots of examples in history.
Navies originally thought that submarine warfare was unfair somehow or against some unwritten gentlemanly rule. The less smart thing to do would be to take that rule and not use submarines. The smarter thing to do would be to say 'don't care' and build submarines anyway.
Football isn't a good example because you're volunteering to play by the rules in the first place.
Operating inside someone else's artificial rules is not smart.
I'm pretty sure that it certainly is an indicator of several personality traits, but it doesn't tell you anything about being "smart".
Challenging assumptions, thinking outside of constraints, re-assessing the foundations of the way we do things, redefining what is possible... smart.
Galileo had to break the 'rules' to model the solar system. Do you think he would have been smarter if he'd followed the current thinking instead?
BTW. Did you even notice that you just compared Trump's campaign to Galileo's work?
I don't think you do. You've just made a moral point. But we're talking about how smart people are, not how moral they are.
It could be very smart to find a way to steal something. That doesn't make it moral to do so.
> BTW. Did you even notice that you just compared Trump's campaign to Galileo's work?
But again, that's moral not smart.
See if you can rephrase your point without any reference to morals, and I think you'll see where you're confused.
Just taking things because nobody's looking is not "smart" regardless of its morality, of course. Even if you were doing it to steal from the rich and feed the poor, there's nothing smart in it, even when it's successful. You don't need exceptional intelligence to do that. Just like you don't need exceptional intelligence to build your political capital on xenophobia. That's just dumb brute force, not smartness. Everyone knows you can do that if you're willing to get dirty enough, it worked many times in the past already. What could be smart is to successfully build that same capital without resorting to such lazy and harmful tactics, as that would require much more wit to pull off.
You need the intelligence to see which rules really impact you and which don't. That requires insight.
> What could be smart is to successfully build that same capital without resorting to such lazy and harmful tactics
Often being 'lazy' is the smart thing to do. Why do extra work that you don't need to do?
What's why I think you're confusing it with morality. You're saying it's better to do it without being lazy... but why? If being lazy gets you the same or better result, then surely it's the smart thing to do?
Because of the consequences.
Tesla had used customer-grade components for control & entertainment systems in their cars. Nobody else did that, what a smart thing to do! They recognized that there's a rule to break to cut costs!
...unfortunately, the customer-grade touchscreen panels in their cars were breaking so often for exactly the reasons why you don't use them in cars and go for more expensive and harder to obtain industrial-grade components instead that they were fined and forced to recall whole production runs.
Now, if you actually did figure out a thing that nobody did before in order to put less work or cut costs and achieve the same or better results - you'd be indeed smart. Neither Trump's campaign nor Tesla's use of customer-grade electronics were examples of that. They just did something that others did not because of other factors than their intelligence.
Some rules are there for a reason and breaking them does not make you smart.
The smart thing was to realise that in fact there were no consequences to breaking some rules.
> Some rules are there for a reason
And others are not. Telling the difference requires you to be... smart.
...which is exactly my point of why your examples of "smart" fall short ;)