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Stephen Moore's avatar

The problem with your (GREAT) writing and thoughts is that most of them begin require people to be adults… which is, you know, the biggest problem 😂

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Michael H.'s avatar

I agree > nice remark. I have two friends with very 'high' IQs. Around 170 180. Neither is competent to construct a daily life embracing friendship or deeper ideas about faith or the spirit (whatever one deems that to be). I like this comment from Hari Kuzru: The resurgence of biological racism is one cluster of ideas that I’ve spent a lot of time looking at. It’s easy to discount crude racist ideas. More insidious are the “soft,” media-friendly versions; there are many people online who like to point out the deficiencies in social constructionism or the idea that the mind is a “blank slate,” and then use this position to move forward into more tendentious assertions about group differences in intelligence or propensity for violence, and from there to proposing that members of out-groups should be denied political and civil rights. You only have to google something like “heritability of IQ,” and you become aware that there’s a deep desire out there to reassert the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century.

I think...the intellectual exercise of taking seriously views you find challenging or even abhorrent...is a very good way to see the blind spots in any kind of received wisdom.

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