Some weeks ago, this Swedish study on the correlation between cognitive ability and readiness to accept Covid vaccination made the rounds. It irritated a lot of people, particularly in these circles, for appearing to support the observation that getting vaccinated is just something that more intelligent people do – and, by implication, that vaccination is more objectively rational.
It all comes down to STREET smarts, not BOOK smarts.
Many 'smart' people - as defined by an MBA or a PhD, or as 'the system' defines it, were duped. Not just by C19 either, but by Ukraine and other things too.
Since 2020, I had a concrete realization of what my dad always told me - there's a difference between street smarts and book smarts. They're not the same, at all. One can read between the lines and see how the world really works - while those with book smarts can simply recite information when asked to take a test.
As a HS student I read "The Gulag Archipelago" and it became the greatest influence on my life. I can never, ever, ever fully trust any government or other authority.
Yes, but there are two legs to indoctrination and education. Given the same teaching, some people will come out better educated than others because they have more ability to comprehend, remember, and integrate. And given the same propaganda regime, some people will come out more indoctrinated than others because they are more susceptible to the power of suggestion and less inclined to be suspicious of what someone is trying to sell them. These represent a variety of mental characteristics that can't well be crushed into a simple linear measure of "intelligence."
One of the most educated, discerning, skeptical people I know bought it all, hook, line, and sinker.
I couldn’t believe it. The one good thing about her was she never asked me about my health or inclinations, so we did hang out after we returned to work. Didn’t really talk much about C-19.
We had a nice conversation over pizza and wine. Then I gave her a ride to her home and my heart dropped when I saw a Ukrainian flag in her porch window.
I guess what I saw as her non-conformity essentially conformed to a preset, kinda like how 60s hippies did. She just go switched to a new preset when 2020 came around.
"I've done some reading on education, and really the best thing you can do for a person is teach them how to educate themselves." That is what homeschooled people are taught to do.
Rarely are 2 things idnetical as opposedto similiar so when we use terms like Iteligent and Uniteligent most realize that people don't actually fall into oneo or the other but are somehwre in between the 2. Another example would be to claim all Democrats are of onemind. We know the Democrat party has split with classical Liberal Democrats choosing not to follow the woke Cult of Democrats down the path of self destruction they are headed and yet we still say "Democrats" when referring to the woke Democrats because they appear to be the majority of the Democrat types; they at least seeem to have the partys power.
It’s the old fallacy of “we don’t want to teach them what to think, but HOW to think”. Well, you can’t do one without the other. In teaching a person how to think, i.e., educating them, you must put something in their brain and what is being put in is this propagandistic indoctrination. Most students, imo, don’t stand a chance.
This is TL/DR I would say that most people don't stand a chance in regards to thinking for themselves.
I've done some reading on education, and really the best thing you can do for a person is teach them how to educate themselves. That, like grit, or a lot of things in life, you either cultivate it and develop it, or you don't. I have way too many hours looking at (in some ways incomprehensible) scientific studies to prove this.
I remember relying on Google for searching things out, but as of late the pickings get slimmer and slimmer. It's sad, but I do email searches in my mail app looking for substack articles on subjects like "pediatric covid deaths" and such because I know the mainstream media is going to blow everything out of proportion, and censor any dissenting thought.
Side anecdote: I was taking an informal course at a church back in the late nineties called "Wise Counsel" and it was all about teaching people to be better counselors or listeners. During the class, I came to realize that a lot of the stuff being taught was painfully obvious. It almost felt like those stupid fluff reports on TV reminding people to wear sunblock in the summer.
I came away from that course, that I don't believe I actually finished, with the understanding that you can't teach people to care. The course went over a lot of information about active listening. but most of it came down to "are you interested in the person you are talking with, or aren't you?
I think this applies to learning "how to think" as well. You either are interested in learning the truth and your thoughts on it, or you aren't.
The other night I was in a zoom discussion group where we were talking about the poem song "The Foggy Dew" and there was a lot of talk about Irish independence. But the verses that stuck out for me were evergreen ones about the "too few who fought for the cause of freedom."
"While the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few
Who bore the fight that freedom's light might shine through the foggy dew"
I think the world does gaze at those of us in amazement, but it isnt positive, but rather, the shocked audacity that we would dare walk around unjabbed and masked when there was a ubiquitous deadly disease present.
I see the foggy dew in our situation as one of "the fog of propaganda and lies" that surround us and keep us from seeing "freedom's light." And what is freedom's light? Part of it, is simply silencing a lot of the white noise around us.
There was also side talk about the Irish who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism who "took the soup."
When it I was asked my insights on the poem/song which has an eery haunting way about it as sung by Sinead O'Conner, all I could think about is that yes, like all fights for freedom, it often involves very few people standing up for it, and also a large number of people "taking the soup,"
How many "took the mask or the vaccine" as the soup during the pandemic just to get along? I know I did at times wear a mask. The price of it was getting my prosthetic leg made.
There will be a few though that will stand, who will think and question. And for those of us that hopefully aren't incomprehensible, can shake those move along to get alongers into more rational thinking.
Google, DuckDuck, Brave, Yandex, all of these main search engines most accessible are pure crap these days. Because Google is crap, and the others buy their product, then apply their own touch.
Very limited results, many gibberish suggestions, often not even related to the search words. And at some time in the last few years the search engines stopped recognizing Boolean search signs that help filter results. The search engines ignore them. I was a darn good internet sleuth by knowing Boolean, but they've made that skill irrelevant.
I know there is such thing as a "dark web" out there that takes off the content constraints and filters that this web we use exists in. Making it both more free, but you assume more risk on it, illegal websites that get LEO attention, and that you really don't want anything to do with. But I wonder if anyone is knows of a non-Google based search engine on the dark web where information is accessible and knowledge of Boolean still matters and can get you to more of the full resources available on the web? There has to be a way around this Google monopoly on internet search and I think it might be on the Dark Web. Avoiding the problematic sites.
Those are one and the same. It's, I believe, an inherent character feature that some have and others don't. My brother, while intelligent and not part of the higher-learning scam just as I am, doesn't have the same street smarts as I - not even close.
Same- Ever wonder what makes us able to "see" when in my case my sister is a complete illiberal liberal. She teaches by the way, and is unable to be conversant.
One of the findings I ran across is the inability to discern the mis-use of english, as in the leftist lexicon, verse "common sense language" a code of sorts.
I found out that the few school teacher I know are the most gullible people in my circle. One hair dresser, quite hypochondriac to begin with, caught on quickly, the other 2 I know did not jab at all, their daughter warned them and they believed her. Lawyer jumped on the cart as well.
As a group, secondary school teachers are not very intelligent, as their test scores show...They are by far the lowest scorers on standardized tests of any profession...
Which is why they are teachers. My wife is retired French teacher. Always been 'establishment/authority is right' sort of mindset. I had to fight to get her to see sense and I was and still am struggling with my health so it cost me a bit (violins will now play mournfully!).
She did eventually thank me that we avoided the vaxxes.
Our builder and cleaning lady are far more clued up than the so-called well educated or 'intelligent'.
Interestingly, my brother is very liberal but also knows many facts about how the world works. Not a truther, but does his own research. My parents are street smart, as am I, but my brother is not. It's the damndest thing.
Same in my family. Two brilliant brothers (I mean genious level-both went to top boarding schools in UK, record no of exams, attended best Colleges at Oxford along with half of the UK government leading the covid response-double degrees, post doc research etc. etc. and now absolutely at the top of their professions. I am the black sheep, expelled from high school. I have had to overcome a deep inferiority complex and as a result...I am relentlessly curious and question everything. Also an inveterate auto-didact that became an investigative journalist. To be fair, I was that way as a child and gave my parents no end of grief. Interestingly, both my parents and step father were very politically active during the 1970s campaigning/standing for parliament (Tory party) in an era when the UK nearly became an extension of the Soviet Union! After my father's death a year ago we learned the extent of HIS involvement too in counter intelligence. So there you go. Some of it must be in the genes.
Absolutely, no doubt about it. But, it was curious how gullible my siblings and geriatric father were during the covid nonsense. They were, however, very gracious and never made me feel less than although they knew exactly where I stood. One of my brother's is a Dr. and by late 2021 he knew things were "Off" and was dealing with a bad case of cognitive dissonance. Not helped by the fact his wife is a scientist at Imperial College; her first job when covid hit was to research off label drugs that might help against covid. Well, that didn't last long! When I visited in 2022 the the two of them were unable to discuss the subject of vaccinations anymore even when my gentle brother asked good questions. She, the immunologist, totally clammed up. The whole episode was quite astonishing.
Begrateful it’s funny because I’m married to a scientist( not pharmaceutical), as I was classed as an essential workers it soon stood out to me that it was all a cronk of shit that Boris and co were spewing.
Curiosity got the better of me and off digging I went. Even armed with tons of information and the Pfizer trial data my other half can and still won’t admit it was a con and he will not accept even with video evidence that he took experimental gene therapies, he’s adamant they’re still vaccines.
The funny thing is, at the very top of the article it says "opinion." They are using an opinion piece to tell why masks work. Anyone bothering to read the article will see ways it is wrong. They post studies from 2021 on droplets, but the lion's share of the article is explaining why RCT's are not needed for masks. They discuss how masks are an engineering issue and are like seatbelts, bike helmets, and life vests."
Have they created a way to simulate infection/transmission of a disease?
This is where critical thinking kicks in. Are seatbelts, bike helmets, and life vests similar to masks or dissimilar, why or why not? And in so asking this question this is why they fall down under scrutiny.
We don't wear bike helmets over our mouths, life vests do not impede breathing and communication, seatbelts are not worn outside of the car. The author of this article claims that there were no RCT's run to test these things. And yet we know there are, they just aren't on humans. A good facsimile of a human body/human skull/and the weight of a human body can be created to determine if a life vest is buoyant and properly keeps noses and mouths from being filled with water, keeps bodies from being mangled in car/bike accidents.
I know there are some lab experiments done on mannequins to determine if there is virus present underneath a mask. But are the mannequins properly simulating respiration? Can a mannequin properly simulate an organic being and show how viruses infect/reproduce/ and transmit to other organisms?
In a Canadian shopping mall ,me and my wife came across a stand ,that offered the lifesaving injections and next to it there is a black box ,where one can test the I.Q . The sign said if you take your shots here you get a hamburger for every shot you take free .We where hungry and took three shots for three hamburgers .Two burgers for me and one for my wife .Before leaving my wife insisted I take the I.Q. test ,so I inserted a quarter and the machine spit out my intelligence quotient ,it was absolute O below Kelvin .
And rigid beliefs, particularly with authority figures. The information is not lost on elected officials, dictators and presidents, CEOS, heads of large trusts and foundations (get Bill Gates in here! POW POW)
Correct. Intelligence is domain specific. A PhD in quantum physics doesn't mean you won't fall for a crypto scam coin or buy a bridge from Brooklyn. I wrote the same comment on this when it appeared on another blog. The rest of this piece is excellent, so let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I'm not aware of a testing instrument for Streetsmarts IQ outside of the school of hard knocks.
Even when forced by government edict! Those of us out of the workforce didn't have that leverage applied to us by employers. The ongoing idiocy of our DOCTORS should have taught us the medical profession is full of the most midwits we now face. I have lost a LOT of respect for the top levels of that profession. You should have seen my doctor recoil in abject fear when I pulled my mask down to show him my face! You would have thought I pulled a gun on him. I will lose even more respect when they pull this stunt again next year with a new scam.
The ongoing failure of the medical profession to get its head out of its collective ass when it comes to nutrition and weight loss advice is proof positive that doctors are mostly midwit groupthinkers that persecute those with even a sliver of insight.
I brought up the vitamin D levels point to my then gf, who's part of the medical environment. Her no-brain comment was that everyone knows that. Ok, so then everyone knows and then does little to nothing about it? Ridiculous.
went to the doc this spring, a new as the old retired, and she was wearing a mask. She also listed Pronouns. I should have not even gone in, she refused to treat my infected ear and wanted to prescribe me 3 drugs I did not need. Needless to say she won't ever see me again.
I don't know why she thought you would be impressed by her knowledge of basic grammar. Perhaps studying that left her no time for pesty things like how to treat an ear infection.
And yet you still go to an idiot doctor...who you don't respect...who's placed their own license and paycheck above your health you're entrusting them with. I encourage you to lean into that street smarts of yours and question why you still place your trust in a medical system for anything these days.
Natural healers, the so-called "quacks" who are homeopaths, traditional naturopaths, holistic practitioners, herbalists, etc are much more capable and trustworthy with your health and wellness than an allopathic system of medicine that believes that man can override nature with his intellect and tools instead of the natural healers who work *with* nature to protect your health. Even disease like cancer is best healed by a skilled alternative medicine healer.
Anyone still going to allopathic medicine practitioners who resisted the mandates and pushed back on ignorant to complicit advice their doctor gave them suffers from cognitive dissonance. Like a victim of spousal abuse going back to their abuser after the black eye telling themselves their abuser didn't mean it and they still provide for them so maybe they deserved it. Just. Leave. Your. Abuser.
I found a concierge doctor. He has a fantastic functional medicine practice. He treats most of the Amish community within driving distance. Just sitting in the waiting room you will meet people who drove from all over the country to see him and hear testimonials of how much he's helped them. A few years after seeing him I picked up a little paper he wrote abput himself. His first degree was a doctorate in rocket science. He has 3 other master's degrees and then got his medical degree. Brainiac. He's a fantastic doctor.
Stephen, some suggest the jabs alter the brain. If your brain is already not working very well, what happens if it gets damaged? My father, almost 90, until 3 years ago was very bright. At first I thought that he grasped my reasoning against the jab. But then he got an invitation (personally, could only change time or date once etc) and went. He just got his sixth jab and I hold my heart, hoping they inject salt water now... if he passes away even of old age, I know these jabs have taken the father I knew away.
The problem with being old is that you can have anything wrong with you, completely minor and curable, but doctors don't bother looking into it because they attribute everything to old age. My father died at 89, with definite symptoms. His doctor ignored him, and on my father's death certificate he wrote, as cause of death, "failure to thrive."
The point is instead of saying that vaccination status is an indicator or intelligence or testicular fortitiude or a gauge of morality, the focus should be on getting the little motherfuckers who put everybody in this position. The problem of stupidity is not going away. The proximate cause of the misery however is a bunch of sociopaths who killed millions of people and are still in power.
Ok. Here’s the deal. You take yourself back to 2020 before you had all the information you have now. You own a medical practice by yourself. You have employees. You have bills to pay. You can’t go to the hospital and work if you don’t get the shots. Your overhead is a million dollars a year. You still have to pay for your mortgage and equipment etc. your employees are now unemployed. forced, coerced, it becomes semantics. If they are grabbing you in the street and holding you down, different story. Knowing what I know now, I might have figured out a different strategy. But hindsight is not a valuable superpower.
The doc of a friend told her he did not get the jab and neither did most of his colleages. I suppose the all gat a fake jab. I would have considered that too, had I been in the situation. Some people told me to find a person to make me a fake on so I could go visit my family but I refused that.
those who held a medical practice on their own would be okay for quite a while. It took a long time to pull some licenses of the single-person offices. Some of them managed to switch over to the telehealth model before they lost a license. They often still lost specialty board certificates.
I responded to another comment that I think it's ultimately inherent in someone, or it's not. Even members of the same family can be opposites in this regard.
I would say intelligent people have an over-confidence in their abilities, because as you point out, they imagine because they are successful in one area requiring high intelligence, that applies across the board. We see this in top movie stars who imagine because they are so successful in their career they are experts on climate, disease, solving poverty, etc. I think this presents as an over willingness to accept things at face value, a lack of scepticism, particularly if conveyed by fellow intelligent people, rather than enquire further and use critical analysis. Many years ago I had a job selling to professional people. The easiest sells were the most intelligent as all I had to do was dangle the idea that other top level individuals in their profession were using the product. There is a conceit and arrogance in intelligent people, that they have nothing new to learn and cannot be wrong.
Doctors make lousy pilots. They think that because they are intelligent that they are good pilots. But every job has nuance, and a certain amount of time is required to master any skill. And certain skills are perishable if you don't maintain them. Everything is not like riding a bicycle. Being a bad pilot leads to bad outcomes.
Salespeople rely on psychology to make their money. Understanding your customer makes you an effective salesperson.
But, we are speaking in generalities. As one acquires experience, say in dealing with salespeople, (usually the hard way - the price of practical education), one learns to make better decisions. Three powerful words are "I don't know." When you don't know, admit you don't know. Then you are open to learning. If you think you know all you need to know, you're probably wrong and you're probably gonna find out.
Experience is the most valuable asset. A man with money and a man with experience meet on the corner. When they part, the man with experience has the other guy's money, and the man who had the money now has experience.
I think also (being in that 140 - 160 range) that there is a huge gap between intellect measured in critical thinking with a social indoctrination degree and the intuitive ability for pattern recognition which leads to an enhanced capacity to smell a rat.
I think there was another crucial factor at play: intellectual flattery. Even the most brilliant people are susceptible to psychological weaknesses.
The shots were presented to everyone as the culmination of specialized scientific research, and it was implied that the mRNA technology was much more advanced than it turned out to be. For those without a background in epidemiology, virology, or similar, the temptation to rely on others’ expertise was not illogical in this context. Often, the very smartest people are those with a better understanding of how much they DON’T know.
I spent a considerable number of years in the academic environment, after serving as a combat arms officer in the Army for a few years, and one of the lessons I learned was most academic professionals don't enjoy remarkable intellects. They are of course well studied in their field but not infrequently cloistered fools otherwise. Most also have a dreadful tendency to adhere to the herd, which doesn't foster intellectual innovation.
As for COVID injections, anyone with a grasp of grade school math could look at infection fatality rate data available by mid 2020 and see that COVID posed no meaningful risk for the vast majority, which was also clear from no end of anecdotal evidence. Then if they simply understood the injections employed a radical new technology with no medium or long term track record or testing they would understand submitting to injection to be absolutely foolhardy. Note, they didn't need to wait until COVID injections proved both horrifically dangerous in the short term and ineffective.
Yes, I saw German studies coming out in March of 2020 or so and they reported about a 0.3% IFR. Even before then I knew it was a scam, but these early reports solidified my beliefs. I resumed jiu jitsu training shortly thereafter, which is the exact opposite of social distancing. I lived a normal life to, in one regard, show people not to be afraid.
And when the data is scrutinized you will find 90%+ of those fatalities are people who were not at all healthy. Reasonably healthy people face close to no danger (0 risk for healthy youngsters). Furthermore many studies counted fatalities which were only tangentially related to COVID or not related at all, and they failed to account accurately for the great many people who recovered without ever being tested.
True, and this was clear to anyone who did just a little homework very early on. Tragically most just believe whatever nonsense political narrative corporate media feeds them, including most medical "professionals" (SHAME on them).
All the hard science PhDs I know took the shot and got it for their kids. Even though it was plain as day that COVID was largely harmless for kids and young people.
These are people who have an exalted opinion of their own intelligence. Consequently, they assume PhDs in other scientific fields should always be believed, just as they expect their opinions in their own field of expertise are to be worshipped as irrefutilble fact.
That's a big part of it. If your own position and status in society relies upon deference to expertise, then the most dangerous thing to your standard of living isn't COVID or any vaccine, but the rejection of the moral authority conveyed by specialism. These people may not think about it that way explicitly, it's more like an intuition that if people go around blowing off expert advice then things are deeply wrong with the world in a very disturbing way, and therefore of course they're going to comply without thinking.
Most of these people will, if pushed a little, say they think it's extremely arrogant and even immoral to disagree with someone about their own specialism, a rule that makes no exception for things that are "obviously" stupid.
Definitely! I am certain my IQ is well below 160 but it doesn't take that level of intelligence to reason the endless contradictions and forever moving goalpost coming from the so called experts, the history of Pfizer, the obvious stupidity of Rochelle Walensky, EUA, and overall hysteria, were all red flags. And there were many more at this point I wouldn't trust my own doctor if she told me water was wet.
This wasn’t even that hard. The 6-month Pfake Pfizer trial showed that the thing prevented 1 Covid death and caused 4 cardiovascular deaths. The assessment that it’s safe and effective is deranged. But this was a military-intelligence operation from the beginning, never about medicine and science. Ever wonder how the Soviet system lasted as long as it did?
BARDA (Rick Bright) worked with Moderna, announced partnership in January 2020. BARDA is HHS, not DOD. DARPA & DTRA (Robert Malone/DOMANE & Inovio - he co-founded Inovio) are DOD. Inovio was front runner for Covid19 transfections but were later eliminated.
Both HHS & DOD were involved in this most recent scamdemic - not their first rodeo. Anthrax, AIDS, Zika, Ebola, flu vaccines- same players! The parasites have become multimillionaires while innocent people (including our Military & Vets who are used as guinea pigs) have died or suffer permanent health issues. Remdesivir (BARDA/DTRA/DOMANE) & ventilators (hospital protocols) continue to kill unsuspecting Americans, the DOD isn't 100% responsible for those deaths, it's a joint effort that includes HHS/CDC, Congress, Governors & their state's health departments. Follow the money…
Nasal vaccines are the next step - Malone & his wife own the patents- follow the money, same players. But don't worry, their inventions will save millions of lives, as Jill wrote in June 2021 about mrna transfections. Their very generous gifts to humanity.
Street Smarts or what used to be called common sense before the whole street smarts meme became the more popular term to use.
Book Smarts today means the sane as before but the books have chnaged and so book smart from the 1980's does not match book smarts from the 60's and the book smart people of teh 2000's don't match the book smarks of the people from the 80's. It''s not something done once every generation but is something that once measured between generations (i.e. every 20 years for example ) can be more easily seen. When they slowly swap outthe books required inpublic eductaion they are over enough time able to dumb down society while the people think they've actually advanced
parrots are book smart. they can learn quite a bit but do not understand what they learn. I don't know how easily they can be fooled though. Probably less than the sheeple.
and multiple choice tests ! when I was in school there were only multiple choice pages for the psychological evaluation. All the exams were questions which you had to answer in your own words.
Street smarts with a PhD in the school of hard knocks wins the day. Add experience of living under Communism and you'll have individuals who can smell a rat from a mile away.
We must repeal Obama's Smith Mundt Modernization Act so we can hold the media responsible for lying to us, corrupt Republicans sponsored it. The propaganda machines have gone wild, highly educated folks believe their lies.
More like book DUMB and street DUMB...the state of the “influencers”....look at the “education” of the public schools and the overwhelming degree of jabs...and the cancelling and despicable attention against anyone who says “no”. Those who push this senseless and lethal jab...the educated ones...were but leaders of sheep...these leaders may be the smarter ones but no different that ISIS leaders of their terror groups. The left are just amassing their own Army of enforcers who like the dark web will be funded by dark donors and dark fed projects tailored to control US...they have the means to monitor everything about US and with so many illegals males...you think citizenship would be an easy carrot?
As I've said from the begging, this was about spirit and spiritedness, not intelligence. Very few actual working-class people, for instance, some of whom might represent the 5G magnet refuser in the meme above, actually fell for this fraud. Their spiritedness resisted the Covid scheme and those who insisted on promoting it. But many of those same people ended up taking the jab because they were forced to. They are not, however, likely to look into detox protocols or investigate how they might limit the dangerous effects of mRNA or the spike protein or what have you. They'll keep drinking Coors Light or its European equivalents and grow increasingly apathetic, though at the same time cynical and distrustful. Their spirit was in the right place, but their lackluster subsequent approach and their failure to grasp what is really going on make them more or less useless in any potential struggle against the midwit powers that be. That leaves a very small number of people whose intellects are sharper than most but who are still fundamentally spirited enough to resist and, if necessary, fight.
People with an MBA might have been duped but there are data from the US showing that vaccine acceptance was much lower among PhD holders than Masters degree holders.
I've seen that bell graph as well. The majority in the middle didn't question it, but those with some higher academic studies seemingly wanted to wait a bit until more data was available. I don't think that's due to street smarts though, but it's a valid point.
Smarts based on our current models of education, based on a persons ability to basically memorise across a broad range of subjects, followed by a third level stint being taught by the very people described in the stack, a great stack, by the way, is blatantly not smarts at all. I couldn’t agree with your Dad more!👏✍️
It comes down to confidence. I firmly believe that I'm the smartest person on earth and that I'm right about everything. When I'm proven wrong I readily admit it, yet it never shakes my confidence that I'm going to be 100% right for the rest of my life.
Sep 26, 2023·edited Sep 26, 2023Liked by eugyppius
Exactly.
Nothing to do with intelligence.
It’s a social pressure, herd mentality phenomenon coupled with a lack of critical thinking skills and common sense. In med school we called them ivory tower morons.
These people are not smart. They are indoctrinated. They have been trained to follow orders and never question authority. That actually is the definition of stupidity and having no critical thinking skills. When a person is street smart they have learned by life experience. They do not trust authority.
I'd often remark that all of life is high school writ large. Though more recently (said recency pre-dates C-19) I've restated it as middle school writ large. The social and life experience learning curve has become somewhat truncated, plateauing at a lower level than was the case in my early adulthood.
Sep 26, 2023·edited Sep 26, 2023Liked by eugyppius
This is an exceptionally important post--it's fundamental to what's gone wrong in our information society. Digital discourse has become the plaything of rhetorically articulate 120 IQ midwits--the sheep dogs competing to influence the herd.
The true Shepherds of Being go unnoticed in all the barking and snarling while vast herds of befuddled sheep stampede to and fro . . .
Yes, the “college educated” group who revel in the fact they all vote Democrat, support the war in Ukraine, and are multiple-vaxxed—as if a US college degree means anything anymore. Aka 120 IQ Mid wits
The tragedy is 120 is not low obviously. In some parts of the world they'd be running the country with that.
The indoctrination seems to be the factor. The mid-range IQ is fertile ground for bad ideas, especially bracing visions of a great future, like living in a pod and getting everything delivered. I think the effect we are seeing is just enough stupidity to lack the mental horsepower to really think it through, but elevated enough to be able to condemn everyone who objects to a lower status - you just don't get it. I certainly got that during Covid.
You are right, 120 is absolutely not a low IQ. Personally, I believe much depends on whether you want to be part of the pack (to be ‘accepted’) or whether you are an Einzelgänger. People who feel ok and secure when they do not follow or belong, likely were much less inclined to fall for the ‘inclusivity’ marketing campaign.
Yes, I think it is discomfort at standing out from the crowd. A character trait independent of IQ.
Where IQ comes in is you have the brains to convince yourself something that seems a bad idea has less obvious benefit. So we know masks don't work, but we wear them to send a message to the stupid they must be careful. I think that is their weakness. The emperor's new clothes.
Anyone who says "educate yourself!" displays this. They THINK they understand something very smart, and that you are too stupid or stubborn to believe it.
Yes. It is also a diversionary tactic. Mainly because they can't explain something without an appeal to authority, which gives the game away.
It is the ease with which their minds are captured that fascinates me. Climate initiatives are set to bankrupt whole counties and hammer the middle class, and Covid wasn't a picnic either. All these WEF ideas that enthuse people.
The vac boosters will limit their true effectiveness over time for they will be infertile and die early due to their many boosters....but the unvac’d illegals will be ready players with the carrot of citizenship...and most of these players are solider aged adult males...and you think the Dems have not been cultivating these folks....of course they have!
As regards standing out from the crowd, my husband and I are really in a comfortable place now in that we’re old. He’s 72, and I’m 64, we’re retired so there’s not a lot anyone can do to us. He already almost died from C19 (delta) and I’ve had omicron twice. We live in Texas where masking, after the first couple of months, has been optional. Yes, there are some people even here who can tend to get a bit “manic” about masking and shots, but as Mr Marsh said, I think that’s independent of IQ.
1. I believe people are only capable of judging intelligence up to their own. In other words to an average person (100 IQ), there is no difference between a 120, 140 or 160. They are indistinguishably smart.
2. For the past two generations (at least here in the U.S.), the "everybody gets a trophy" mentality has taught people they are never wrong, so there is no humility or self awareness of one's true capabilities.
3. You can distill many of the ills of society (including obviously covid response) to the fact that the wise are no longer in leadership positions. Wise=highest IQ+education. True education has sucked for a long time. But we've also lost the system of filtration and gatekeeping in government that elevates wise leadership and in media that elevates wise opinion/journalism. In the U.S. (and I'm simplifying) the original idea of democracy was that regular citizens (and only few could vote) elect local leaders who they know and can judge for wisdom and character, local leaders elect the wisest national leaders and national leaders elect the wisest president. We no longer have anything like this. The internet and social media destroyed the biz model of traditional journalism so there are no longer gatekeepers (editors). Now any idiot can have enormous reach and (see #1) the average person has no way of differentiating good ideas from stupid ones.
Excellent points! Especially number two: “For the past two generations (at least here in the U.S.), the "everybody gets a trophy" mentality has taught people they are never wrong, so there is no humility or self awareness of one's true capabilities.”
This is one of the things that has upset me most for the past 38 years, and that would be since my eldest child started participating in sports.
Have you any idea how hard it is to raise a child to be a responsible human being in a society that tells him that everything he does is great whether it is or not? You have to consistently tell your children (I have four, now adults with children of their own) that just because they received a trophy, it doesn’t really mean that they were the best. It only means that they made it to all of their games. That they acted responsibly, and THAT is a good thing. It was a daunting experience back then, and, if parents don’t want to raise special little snowflakes but responsible humans, it’s a daunting experience now.
I don't agree that a person with an IQ of 100 can't distinguish persons with IQs of 120, 140, or 160. For example, I think most people immediately recognize an extremely high IQ (e.g., Vivek Ramaswamy) vs. high IQ (e.g., RFK, Jr., Steve Bannon) vs. slightly above-average IQ (e.g., Oprah).
I'm intrigued by how much consilience there is among the ideas articulated by critical thinkers across subjects. I realized a while ago that, to the average person who doesn't lift, there's no real difference between someone saying "I can lift 350 lbs" and "I can lift 700 lbs." Both are so heavy, so impossibly incomprehensible, that there's no real difference in understanding what each entails and the massive difference between the two (350 is like being a 100, while 700 is like being a 150). Reminds me very much of your IQ-comprehension comment.
I think you are almost absolutely right on 'judging only up to their own' intelligence. It's just a kind of glass ceiling. Observed this over the course of my three children's 'education' in public school.
I think that the arguments proposed here by you are correct. However, there is I think a missing crucial ingredient necessary to make it work, namely the framework of a high trust society. Western and central European countries have traditionally been high-trust societies and in particular in the post-war era (at least until quite recently) the political leadership has continually delivered on unprecedented material comfort and peace. The crowd of above-average-but-not-brilliant people has been a demographic that has so far been rewarded disproportionately by the post-war system offering managerial and professional jobs to bright and industrious people who may have come from more humble backgrounds. I think it is particularly this history and the cultural context which makes these people especially susceptible to manipulation from authorities. And of course it is exceedingly treacherous by the powers that be to abuse the trust that has been built up over so many generations in this nefarious way.
Yes this trusting nature is key here. Where did it come from? They 100% believed that the virus was dangerous and the shot less so and the Govt was trying to help. Believed every bit of it. Incomprehensible to them that the authorities were wrong, incompetent or outright lying. That sounds like crazy paranoia to them! Obviously they personally have never been harmed by a Govt or doctor or expert. Charmed lives!
Excellent point. People do tend to trust "experts" in the USA, which has prided itself on being a meritocracy--most people think that people get important jobs because they deserve them (if they know people who don't deserve them, they think those are exceptions). Very few people don't trust doctors. Almost no one, amazingly, questions public school teachers and administrators. We want to live in a world where people are all trustworthy and deserve their positions of authority. But Americans have been working to destroy any mechanism for this outcome for several decades now, so in addition to the crooks and conmen who always manage to get in, we now have large numbers of outright frauds, as well as a lot of people who did not really do the work to earn the degrees and things they've been awarded.
I know that in my case, I already had a long experience with the medical system and its shortcomings prior to covid. Therefore I was skeptical, to say the least, of the promises made by megacorps like Pfizer. I knew the history of these criminal corporations and the many poisons they sell as medications. I don't know where I fall on the IQ charts and don't really care. I know what I know and no set of GIGO studies from interested parties (which includes those getting directly funded by big pharma and those whose careers are predicated on running with the herd) will convince me to take any recently productized "medicine" from these monsters. If a medication doesn't have a solid 10-20 year track record of doing no harm these days I just don't take it. I recommend that approach to anyone who isn't near death and desperate to try anything.
Excellent point regarding the communications barrier. I don't think it's entirely accurate in all cases: there are highly intelligent people who can make themselves understood to anyone, but this is a skill in itself that not all possess. There's also a strong dependence on subject matter. Take Chris Langan. On political subjects he's very easy to follow; once he gets into metaphysics it becomes quite difficult. However, those caveats aside, my experience is that this principle generally holds. There's about a 1 SD separation beyond which communication becomes increasingly difficult.
I suspect this is the source of a great deal of the ennui of the sensitive young men of the dissident right. As a group, they are highly intelligent. Ideally they would want to find wives who are comparable. However, women tend to be a bit lower in intelligence at that end of the distribution (greater male variability), and they're additionally more susceptible to social pressure regarding beliefs for reasons of personality; these two factors mean that the majority of bright young women are quite thoroughly indoctrinated with the new religion of Woke, which renders them utterly unsuitable as wives. Result is an extremely small pool of potential romantic partners, and a consequent epidemic of loneliness.
Simonton considers whether the highly intelligent may also have the superior ability to make themselves more comprehensible and thus transcend their "range of comprehension." For various reasons (some more persuasive than others) he thinks their capacity to do so will be limited. Of course, when they do, they'll be competing with many lower cognitive tiers also pitching their ideas, and the less intelligent consumers of this production won't be able to sort out the IQ 160 from the IQ 120 ideas. This is his conceptual framework, anyway.
Richard Dawkins is a good example of an exceptional communicator. I don't know his IQ but it won't be low. Some of his written work is outstanding and easily understood I would imagine.
Richard Dawkins is a superb communicator but in my personal experience, if you draw him off his talking points, he doesn't have anything really illuminating to say. It's kind of jarring, actually. His strength might very well be that he's just enough of a midwit to have a much larger effective audience than most of his peers.
I think you can learn and train yourself to communicate effectively with those outside your 1 SD ideal communication range, but it will always be a more artificial form of communication. You are kind of running your actual thoughts and ideas through a translator and they are coming out lower resolution. Doing this takes brainpower though in trying to model the mind of the other person and adjust your communication appropriately (assuming you don't just memorize scripts to recite). The midwit will have the natural advantage communicating with the normie, because it is still within their natural communication range.
I do think the high IQ person is better able to communicate with a grug-brain than a midwit is though. In this scenario both the high IQ and the midwit are outside their natural range but midwit lacks the IQ to translate their communication.
White liberal women in the US seem to be the main drivers of wokesterism. And I agree, absolutely not wife material as it comes with a fatal dose of radical feminism and the associated adoption of masculine behaviours over time which just seals their fate. Could all be a plot by the cat food industry mind you 😜
Sadly, that is my granddaughter who is now an expat who will not marry or have children. She's a cute, bright person who used to have a quick wit. I ache for what her life will be when she is 80+, alone in a foreign country.
I dont think we should discount the impact that "high trust" has on society. Sweden especially, has historically been one the highest, and in fact it was that trust which guided much of their initial pandemic response
I know Sweden very well. That trust continues to this day. I think it is why they never had lockdowns, masks, or mandates. The perps didn’t need them and they still got a voluntary vaxx rate higher than the US with all its coercion. Scary because the Swedish pols can do almost anything and expect compliance.
With the data available in early 2021, anyone of average intelligence could have figured out that the risks outweigh the benefit. The myocarditis, the new technology, the adverse effects, the low IFR, none of this required a very smart person to notice.
When we look at a graph of vaccine uptake, all we're really looking at is a graph of trust in the technocracy. I think you'll find that's what explains almost all the variance. Either you trust the technocracy, or you don't. On average high IQ people will tend to trust the technocracy more, because life tends to work out better for them.
High IQ people will come up with very elaborate reasons for their decision, low IQ people will come up with none or just some paranoid rambling about how the WEF wants to kill us all. But the reasons are just data you grab from the ocean of information available to us, after you already made your decision. We don't decide whether we grow up to trust the technocracy, circumstances beyond our control decide that for us.
If the vaccines just contained plutonium and nothing else, Pete Buttigieg would have still signed up for them. If we had received a live codon deoptimized intranasal vaccine, Alex Jones would have still thought it's part of a secret plot to kill us all.
"anyone of average intelligence could have figured out that the risks outweigh the benefit."
That's it in a nutshell. I was following all the pandemic info from the beginning, because none of us knew what to expect. I was hesitant of a vaccine, and put it off until a non-mRNA vax was produced. But by then the CDC had released the percentage of survival by age group and mine had a 99.5% chance of surviving Sars-CoV2. That's when I knew I didn't need any vaccine because the vaccine risks weren't worth .5%. And that was before all the vaccine adverse events were widely spoken of.
"low IQ people will come up with none or just some paranoid rambling about how the WEF wants to kill us all." You are right... that's crazy... they only want to kill most of us ... got to be some slaves...I mean workers left..
Sep 26, 2023·edited Sep 26, 2023Liked by eugyppius
Excellent analysis. It also explains why PhDs and the highly university educated are more easily convinced by propaganda than the street smart without tertiary degrees. They have a social investment in always being right, on being smarter than almost everybody else, about everything - it is their identity.
That is my experience. My common sense good-hearted relative heard Naomi Wolf reading from the Pfizer documents at Hillsdale College and decided never to take another shot. Among my very liberal, very educated relatives and friends, not the case. But there are really many parameters, seems to me. People who are dependent on the healthcare system to live or who have loved ones that are, no matter their IQ, cannot have their faith in it challenged without destructive effects. There's also the "who has their head together" factor, as some people are totally un-self-aware and others have done psychological work. Also, who has prior experience with the pattern. In Sunnyvale CA, realm of Apple, near Google, and close to Facebook, there are many immigrants from China. When the DIE CRT curriculums were instituted, they saw them as indoctrination immediately as they knew the pattern. In America, World History hasn't been taught in a very long time. A few years back, on YA (Young Adult) twitter, there was a pile on witch hunt against a woman who had gotten a lucrative book deal as her characters had bronze skin. She was accused of cultural appropriation, though it was a science fiction novel drawing from Russian indigenous history. One of the attackers said she was appropriating slavery as "nothing like slavery ever happened in Russia" It can't be an accident that none of us are ever taught the history of medicine or pharma. I don't know if pattern recognition is part of what is measured as cognitive ability, but I am sure we are living in the dark ages of analogic thinking.
When I was young - a long time ago - I wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was a dedicated student but very quiet and introverted and standing out from the crowd terrified me. But as I’ve got older I’ve changed. I’ve also done things backwards. I finally got my degree at 58 having changed my mind about university two weeks before my course was due to begin. The advantage of this was that I could see when I was being taught BS and could spout what was needed to pass without believing in it. Along the way I have become ‘bolshy’ and I don’t like being told what to do. The covid jab was a giant exercise in being told what to do by a government and people I had little respect for. I smelt BS from around April 2020 and no way was I falling for their tactics.
I don’t believe I am particularly smart but I’m not that stupid either!
This is true, I just think that if IQ studies (which represent the most widely replicated findings in all of social sciences) were going to convince the public at large, they would have already done so. People's willingness to believe in Occam's Butterknife (to borrow a Steve Sailer-ism) when it comes to population differences is religious in nature. I'd have an easier time convincing an early Christian martyr of the non-divinity of Christ than I would in getting my shitlib cousin to affirm the findings of Charles Murray.
Perhaps if it was not inappropriately condemned for narrative maintenance reasons the Right would indeed tone it down. Alas, the clampdown on IQ has triggered a kind of arms race. It is so condemned by academia the IQ researchers have been forced to upgrade much of their source data from merely very good to excellent. It is hard to ignore, although may not explain everything.
It all comes down to STREET smarts, not BOOK smarts.
Many 'smart' people - as defined by an MBA or a PhD, or as 'the system' defines it, were duped. Not just by C19 either, but by Ukraine and other things too.
Since 2020, I had a concrete realization of what my dad always told me - there's a difference between street smarts and book smarts. They're not the same, at all. One can read between the lines and see how the world really works - while those with book smarts can simply recite information when asked to take a test.
Huge difference.
It comes down to indoctrination versus education.
As a HS student I read "The Gulag Archipelago" and it became the greatest influence on my life. I can never, ever, ever fully trust any government or other authority.
Nice to know there’s someone else out here who’s as old as dirt, lol!
Yes, but there are two legs to indoctrination and education. Given the same teaching, some people will come out better educated than others because they have more ability to comprehend, remember, and integrate. And given the same propaganda regime, some people will come out more indoctrinated than others because they are more susceptible to the power of suggestion and less inclined to be suspicious of what someone is trying to sell them. These represent a variety of mental characteristics that can't well be crushed into a simple linear measure of "intelligence."
One of the most educated, discerning, skeptical people I know bought it all, hook, line, and sinker.
I couldn’t believe it. The one good thing about her was she never asked me about my health or inclinations, so we did hang out after we returned to work. Didn’t really talk much about C-19.
We had a nice conversation over pizza and wine. Then I gave her a ride to her home and my heart dropped when I saw a Ukrainian flag in her porch window.
I guess what I saw as her non-conformity essentially conformed to a preset, kinda like how 60s hippies did. She just go switched to a new preset when 2020 came around.
"I've done some reading on education, and really the best thing you can do for a person is teach them how to educate themselves." That is what homeschooled people are taught to do.
Rarely are 2 things idnetical as opposedto similiar so when we use terms like Iteligent and Uniteligent most realize that people don't actually fall into oneo or the other but are somehwre in between the 2. Another example would be to claim all Democrats are of onemind. We know the Democrat party has split with classical Liberal Democrats choosing not to follow the woke Cult of Democrats down the path of self destruction they are headed and yet we still say "Democrats" when referring to the woke Democrats because they appear to be the majority of the Democrat types; they at least seeem to have the partys power.
It’s the old fallacy of “we don’t want to teach them what to think, but HOW to think”. Well, you can’t do one without the other. In teaching a person how to think, i.e., educating them, you must put something in their brain and what is being put in is this propagandistic indoctrination. Most students, imo, don’t stand a chance.
This is TL/DR I would say that most people don't stand a chance in regards to thinking for themselves.
I've done some reading on education, and really the best thing you can do for a person is teach them how to educate themselves. That, like grit, or a lot of things in life, you either cultivate it and develop it, or you don't. I have way too many hours looking at (in some ways incomprehensible) scientific studies to prove this.
I remember relying on Google for searching things out, but as of late the pickings get slimmer and slimmer. It's sad, but I do email searches in my mail app looking for substack articles on subjects like "pediatric covid deaths" and such because I know the mainstream media is going to blow everything out of proportion, and censor any dissenting thought.
Side anecdote: I was taking an informal course at a church back in the late nineties called "Wise Counsel" and it was all about teaching people to be better counselors or listeners. During the class, I came to realize that a lot of the stuff being taught was painfully obvious. It almost felt like those stupid fluff reports on TV reminding people to wear sunblock in the summer.
I came away from that course, that I don't believe I actually finished, with the understanding that you can't teach people to care. The course went over a lot of information about active listening. but most of it came down to "are you interested in the person you are talking with, or aren't you?
I think this applies to learning "how to think" as well. You either are interested in learning the truth and your thoughts on it, or you aren't.
The other night I was in a zoom discussion group where we were talking about the poem song "The Foggy Dew" and there was a lot of talk about Irish independence. But the verses that stuck out for me were evergreen ones about the "too few who fought for the cause of freedom."
"While the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few
Who bore the fight that freedom's light might shine through the foggy dew"
I think the world does gaze at those of us in amazement, but it isnt positive, but rather, the shocked audacity that we would dare walk around unjabbed and masked when there was a ubiquitous deadly disease present.
I see the foggy dew in our situation as one of "the fog of propaganda and lies" that surround us and keep us from seeing "freedom's light." And what is freedom's light? Part of it, is simply silencing a lot of the white noise around us.
There was also side talk about the Irish who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism who "took the soup."
When it I was asked my insights on the poem/song which has an eery haunting way about it as sung by Sinead O'Conner, all I could think about is that yes, like all fights for freedom, it often involves very few people standing up for it, and also a large number of people "taking the soup,"
How many "took the mask or the vaccine" as the soup during the pandemic just to get along? I know I did at times wear a mask. The price of it was getting my prosthetic leg made.
There will be a few though that will stand, who will think and question. And for those of us that hopefully aren't incomprehensible, can shake those move along to get alongers into more rational thinking.
Google, DuckDuck, Brave, Yandex, all of these main search engines most accessible are pure crap these days. Because Google is crap, and the others buy their product, then apply their own touch.
Very limited results, many gibberish suggestions, often not even related to the search words. And at some time in the last few years the search engines stopped recognizing Boolean search signs that help filter results. The search engines ignore them. I was a darn good internet sleuth by knowing Boolean, but they've made that skill irrelevant.
I know there is such thing as a "dark web" out there that takes off the content constraints and filters that this web we use exists in. Making it both more free, but you assume more risk on it, illegal websites that get LEO attention, and that you really don't want anything to do with. But I wonder if anyone is knows of a non-Google based search engine on the dark web where information is accessible and knowledge of Boolean still matters and can get you to more of the full resources available on the web? There has to be a way around this Google monopoly on internet search and I think it might be on the Dark Web. Avoiding the problematic sites.
Worked fantastically for the eugenicists and technocratic and social engineering idealogues.
Those are one and the same. It's, I believe, an inherent character feature that some have and others don't. My brother, while intelligent and not part of the higher-learning scam just as I am, doesn't have the same street smarts as I - not even close.
Same- Ever wonder what makes us able to "see" when in my case my sister is a complete illiberal liberal. She teaches by the way, and is unable to be conversant.
One of the findings I ran across is the inability to discern the mis-use of english, as in the leftist lexicon, verse "common sense language" a code of sorts.
I found out that the few school teacher I know are the most gullible people in my circle. One hair dresser, quite hypochondriac to begin with, caught on quickly, the other 2 I know did not jab at all, their daughter warned them and they believed her. Lawyer jumped on the cart as well.
As a group, secondary school teachers are not very intelligent, as their test scores show...They are by far the lowest scorers on standardized tests of any profession...
That statement mainly applies to Education majors in college..Those who majored in real subjects, like physics, are much more intelligent...
Which is why they are teachers. My wife is retired French teacher. Always been 'establishment/authority is right' sort of mindset. I had to fight to get her to see sense and I was and still am struggling with my health so it cost me a bit (violins will now play mournfully!).
She did eventually thank me that we avoided the vaxxes.
Our builder and cleaning lady are far more clued up than the so-called well educated or 'intelligent'.
Interestingly, my brother is very liberal but also knows many facts about how the world works. Not a truther, but does his own research. My parents are street smart, as am I, but my brother is not. It's the damndest thing.
I felt the same about the will to resist. That there is some innate trait that enables some but that others (the compliant) lack.
High testosterone accounts for some of it I think. Partially why there's such an attack on it.
Same in my family. Two brilliant brothers (I mean genious level-both went to top boarding schools in UK, record no of exams, attended best Colleges at Oxford along with half of the UK government leading the covid response-double degrees, post doc research etc. etc. and now absolutely at the top of their professions. I am the black sheep, expelled from high school. I have had to overcome a deep inferiority complex and as a result...I am relentlessly curious and question everything. Also an inveterate auto-didact that became an investigative journalist. To be fair, I was that way as a child and gave my parents no end of grief. Interestingly, both my parents and step father were very politically active during the 1970s campaigning/standing for parliament (Tory party) in an era when the UK nearly became an extension of the Soviet Union! After my father's death a year ago we learned the extent of HIS involvement too in counter intelligence. So there you go. Some of it must be in the genes.
Likely part nature, part nurture.
Absolutely, no doubt about it. But, it was curious how gullible my siblings and geriatric father were during the covid nonsense. They were, however, very gracious and never made me feel less than although they knew exactly where I stood. One of my brother's is a Dr. and by late 2021 he knew things were "Off" and was dealing with a bad case of cognitive dissonance. Not helped by the fact his wife is a scientist at Imperial College; her first job when covid hit was to research off label drugs that might help against covid. Well, that didn't last long! When I visited in 2022 the the two of them were unable to discuss the subject of vaccinations anymore even when my gentle brother asked good questions. She, the immunologist, totally clammed up. The whole episode was quite astonishing.
Begrateful it’s funny because I’m married to a scientist( not pharmaceutical), as I was classed as an essential workers it soon stood out to me that it was all a cronk of shit that Boris and co were spewing.
Curiosity got the better of me and off digging I went. Even armed with tons of information and the Pfizer trial data my other half can and still won’t admit it was a con and he will not accept even with video evidence that he took experimental gene therapies, he’s adamant they’re still vaccines.
I don't even know if it's necessarily street smarts. I think what one must be is merely interested or curious.
On twitter someone posted this link as a rationalization as to why masks work.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/masks-work-distorting-science-to-dispute-the-evidence-doesnt/
The funny thing is, at the very top of the article it says "opinion." They are using an opinion piece to tell why masks work. Anyone bothering to read the article will see ways it is wrong. They post studies from 2021 on droplets, but the lion's share of the article is explaining why RCT's are not needed for masks. They discuss how masks are an engineering issue and are like seatbelts, bike helmets, and life vests."
Have they created a way to simulate infection/transmission of a disease?
This is where critical thinking kicks in. Are seatbelts, bike helmets, and life vests similar to masks or dissimilar, why or why not? And in so asking this question this is why they fall down under scrutiny.
We don't wear bike helmets over our mouths, life vests do not impede breathing and communication, seatbelts are not worn outside of the car. The author of this article claims that there were no RCT's run to test these things. And yet we know there are, they just aren't on humans. A good facsimile of a human body/human skull/and the weight of a human body can be created to determine if a life vest is buoyant and properly keeps noses and mouths from being filled with water, keeps bodies from being mangled in car/bike accidents.
I know there are some lab experiments done on mannequins to determine if there is virus present underneath a mask. But are the mannequins properly simulating respiration? Can a mannequin properly simulate an organic being and show how viruses infect/reproduce/ and transmit to other organisms?
In a Canadian shopping mall ,me and my wife came across a stand ,that offered the lifesaving injections and next to it there is a black box ,where one can test the I.Q . The sign said if you take your shots here you get a hamburger for every shot you take free .We where hungry and took three shots for three hamburgers .Two burgers for me and one for my wife .Before leaving my wife insisted I take the I.Q. test ,so I inserted a quarter and the machine spit out my intelligence quotient ,it was absolute O below Kelvin .
lute O
And rigid beliefs, particularly with authority figures. The information is not lost on elected officials, dictators and presidents, CEOS, heads of large trusts and foundations (get Bill Gates in here! POW POW)
👏✍️
Correct. Intelligence is domain specific. A PhD in quantum physics doesn't mean you won't fall for a crypto scam coin or buy a bridge from Brooklyn. I wrote the same comment on this when it appeared on another blog. The rest of this piece is excellent, so let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I'm not aware of a testing instrument for Streetsmarts IQ outside of the school of hard knocks.
We just had the test and 90% of the species failed. Best explanation for what just went down is from the Bad Catitude substack:
https://i.postimg.cc/nzqnHN1G/Asch-Milgram-Stanford.jpg
Bad cat’s Substack is one of my favourites reads, thanks for posting I had not seen this one.
HA HA HA!
Maybe the covid jab was a streetsmarts test.
Sad to see how many failed that one.
Even when forced by government edict! Those of us out of the workforce didn't have that leverage applied to us by employers. The ongoing idiocy of our DOCTORS should have taught us the medical profession is full of the most midwits we now face. I have lost a LOT of respect for the top levels of that profession. You should have seen my doctor recoil in abject fear when I pulled my mask down to show him my face! You would have thought I pulled a gun on him. I will lose even more respect when they pull this stunt again next year with a new scam.
The ongoing failure of the medical profession to get its head out of its collective ass when it comes to nutrition and weight loss advice is proof positive that doctors are mostly midwit groupthinkers that persecute those with even a sliver of insight.
Them not bringing those points up, or even vitamin D levels, was just further proof of what the end goals were.
I brought up the vitamin D levels point to my then gf, who's part of the medical environment. Her no-brain comment was that everyone knows that. Ok, so then everyone knows and then does little to nothing about it? Ridiculous.
I was forced out of my aerospace job because of it. I knew it was a scam early on and knew I'd ultimately be forced to make a tough decision.
There may well be "sudden" vacancies appearing in the future.
Insist on back pay.
I've been asking around for any class-action lawsuits in the defense/aerospace industry but haven't seen any.
I don't even want the job back - I just want back pay and damages.
You DID make the smart decision! I’m retired though still working, but a mandate would have seen me quit my job too. Hope you will get to see damages!
I hope so too. Many in my industry that were, say, five years from normal retirement simply decided to retire early rather than submit to the tyranny.
went to the doc this spring, a new as the old retired, and she was wearing a mask. She also listed Pronouns. I should have not even gone in, she refused to treat my infected ear and wanted to prescribe me 3 drugs I did not need. Needless to say she won't ever see me again.
If asked, I say my pronoun is "you." It causes a lot of confusion in conversations.
I don't know why she thought you would be impressed by her knowledge of basic grammar. Perhaps studying that left her no time for pesty things like how to treat an ear infection.
And yet you still go to an idiot doctor...who you don't respect...who's placed their own license and paycheck above your health you're entrusting them with. I encourage you to lean into that street smarts of yours and question why you still place your trust in a medical system for anything these days.
Natural healers, the so-called "quacks" who are homeopaths, traditional naturopaths, holistic practitioners, herbalists, etc are much more capable and trustworthy with your health and wellness than an allopathic system of medicine that believes that man can override nature with his intellect and tools instead of the natural healers who work *with* nature to protect your health. Even disease like cancer is best healed by a skilled alternative medicine healer.
Anyone still going to allopathic medicine practitioners who resisted the mandates and pushed back on ignorant to complicit advice their doctor gave them suffers from cognitive dissonance. Like a victim of spousal abuse going back to their abuser after the black eye telling themselves their abuser didn't mean it and they still provide for them so maybe they deserved it. Just. Leave. Your. Abuser.
I found a concierge doctor. He has a fantastic functional medicine practice. He treats most of the Amish community within driving distance. Just sitting in the waiting room you will meet people who drove from all over the country to see him and hear testimonials of how much he's helped them. A few years after seeing him I picked up a little paper he wrote abput himself. His first degree was a doctorate in rocket science. He has 3 other master's degrees and then got his medical degree. Brainiac. He's a fantastic doctor.
It simply reinforces my point. I knew several 'smart' people that completely failed the test. Got boosted even, some of them.
Likewise. Repeated vaxx, to this day. But I’m not sure “smart” applies any longer. As you say, street smarts count. A lot, nowadays.
And you can see it in their eyes. Not all there.
Stephen, some suggest the jabs alter the brain. If your brain is already not working very well, what happens if it gets damaged? My father, almost 90, until 3 years ago was very bright. At first I thought that he grasped my reasoning against the jab. But then he got an invitation (personally, could only change time or date once etc) and went. He just got his sixth jab and I hold my heart, hoping they inject salt water now... if he passes away even of old age, I know these jabs have taken the father I knew away.
The problem with being old is that you can have anything wrong with you, completely minor and curable, but doctors don't bother looking into it because they attribute everything to old age. My father died at 89, with definite symptoms. His doctor ignored him, and on my father's death certificate he wrote, as cause of death, "failure to thrive."
I am sorry you are faced with the loss of the father you knew.
Wonder if it changed them at a core level in some way. Their soul.
the frontal lobes, where it accumulated
Maybe. Some of us were forced to take it or lose our jobs and businesses. Certainly I agree with you on the boosters.
Agreed.
I have absolute sympathy for those who were forced and without options.
The ones who did the forcing should be hanged in gibbets.
Luckily, I've always been an argumentative little shit, so telling them to piss off was a given.
The point is instead of saying that vaccination status is an indicator or intelligence or testicular fortitiude or a gauge of morality, the focus should be on getting the little motherfuckers who put everybody in this position. The problem of stupidity is not going away. The proximate cause of the misery however is a bunch of sociopaths who killed millions of people and are still in power.
Absolutely.
Hopefully you and yours had the placebo batches.
and now they have had some practice.....
You know, Harry, I think Good Harry better describes you!
Coerced is different than forced.
They tried to COERCE me to take it, but I chose to be terminated from the job instead.
Force has a very specific meaning in this regard.
Ok. Here’s the deal. You take yourself back to 2020 before you had all the information you have now. You own a medical practice by yourself. You have employees. You have bills to pay. You can’t go to the hospital and work if you don’t get the shots. Your overhead is a million dollars a year. You still have to pay for your mortgage and equipment etc. your employees are now unemployed. forced, coerced, it becomes semantics. If they are grabbing you in the street and holding you down, different story. Knowing what I know now, I might have figured out a different strategy. But hindsight is not a valuable superpower.
The doc of a friend told her he did not get the jab and neither did most of his colleages. I suppose the all gat a fake jab. I would have considered that too, had I been in the situation. Some people told me to find a person to make me a fake on so I could go visit my family but I refused that.
That still doesn't change definitions. Words have meanings.
those who held a medical practice on their own would be okay for quite a while. It took a long time to pull some licenses of the single-person offices. Some of them managed to switch over to the telehealth model before they lost a license. They often still lost specialty board certificates.
True, it could be that many smart people who didn't want to get shots were forced to by their jobs, jobs for smart people...
I responded to another comment that I think it's ultimately inherent in someone, or it's not. Even members of the same family can be opposites in this regard.
Yes. 💯
Ohhh Boy, that is so true. Great point.
I would say intelligent people have an over-confidence in their abilities, because as you point out, they imagine because they are successful in one area requiring high intelligence, that applies across the board. We see this in top movie stars who imagine because they are so successful in their career they are experts on climate, disease, solving poverty, etc. I think this presents as an over willingness to accept things at face value, a lack of scepticism, particularly if conveyed by fellow intelligent people, rather than enquire further and use critical analysis. Many years ago I had a job selling to professional people. The easiest sells were the most intelligent as all I had to do was dangle the idea that other top level individuals in their profession were using the product. There is a conceit and arrogance in intelligent people, that they have nothing new to learn and cannot be wrong.
Doctors make lousy pilots. They think that because they are intelligent that they are good pilots. But every job has nuance, and a certain amount of time is required to master any skill. And certain skills are perishable if you don't maintain them. Everything is not like riding a bicycle. Being a bad pilot leads to bad outcomes.
Salespeople rely on psychology to make their money. Understanding your customer makes you an effective salesperson.
But, we are speaking in generalities. As one acquires experience, say in dealing with salespeople, (usually the hard way - the price of practical education), one learns to make better decisions. Three powerful words are "I don't know." When you don't know, admit you don't know. Then you are open to learning. If you think you know all you need to know, you're probably wrong and you're probably gonna find out.
Experience is the most valuable asset. A man with money and a man with experience meet on the corner. When they part, the man with experience has the other guy's money, and the man who had the money now has experience.
I think also (being in that 140 - 160 range) that there is a huge gap between intellect measured in critical thinking with a social indoctrination degree and the intuitive ability for pattern recognition which leads to an enhanced capacity to smell a rat.
I think there was another crucial factor at play: intellectual flattery. Even the most brilliant people are susceptible to psychological weaknesses.
The shots were presented to everyone as the culmination of specialized scientific research, and it was implied that the mRNA technology was much more advanced than it turned out to be. For those without a background in epidemiology, virology, or similar, the temptation to rely on others’ expertise was not illogical in this context. Often, the very smartest people are those with a better understanding of how much they DON’T know.
I have always lived my life with the maxim of ABC. Accept nothing, Believe no one, Check everything.
Possibly. I call it relational thinking - the ability to connect dots.
It is an underestimated skill and may be the thing that describes what street smarts are?
Reasoning and rationality.
I spent a considerable number of years in the academic environment, after serving as a combat arms officer in the Army for a few years, and one of the lessons I learned was most academic professionals don't enjoy remarkable intellects. They are of course well studied in their field but not infrequently cloistered fools otherwise. Most also have a dreadful tendency to adhere to the herd, which doesn't foster intellectual innovation.
As for COVID injections, anyone with a grasp of grade school math could look at infection fatality rate data available by mid 2020 and see that COVID posed no meaningful risk for the vast majority, which was also clear from no end of anecdotal evidence. Then if they simply understood the injections employed a radical new technology with no medium or long term track record or testing they would understand submitting to injection to be absolutely foolhardy. Note, they didn't need to wait until COVID injections proved both horrifically dangerous in the short term and ineffective.
Yes, I saw German studies coming out in March of 2020 or so and they reported about a 0.3% IFR. Even before then I knew it was a scam, but these early reports solidified my beliefs. I resumed jiu jitsu training shortly thereafter, which is the exact opposite of social distancing. I lived a normal life to, in one regard, show people not to be afraid.
And when the data is scrutinized you will find 90%+ of those fatalities are people who were not at all healthy. Reasonably healthy people face close to no danger (0 risk for healthy youngsters). Furthermore many studies counted fatalities which were only tangentially related to COVID or not related at all, and they failed to account accurately for the great many people who recovered without ever being tested.
Average 'COVID death' had four co-morbidities. Average age of death was higher than the average age of death for all causes.
Scam.
True, and this was clear to anyone who did just a little homework very early on. Tragically most just believe whatever nonsense political narrative corporate media feeds them, including most medical "professionals" (SHAME on them).
All the hard science PhDs I know took the shot and got it for their kids. Even though it was plain as day that COVID was largely harmless for kids and young people.
These are people who have an exalted opinion of their own intelligence. Consequently, they assume PhDs in other scientific fields should always be believed, just as they expect their opinions in their own field of expertise are to be worshipped as irrefutilble fact.
That's a big part of it. If your own position and status in society relies upon deference to expertise, then the most dangerous thing to your standard of living isn't COVID or any vaccine, but the rejection of the moral authority conveyed by specialism. These people may not think about it that way explicitly, it's more like an intuition that if people go around blowing off expert advice then things are deeply wrong with the world in a very disturbing way, and therefore of course they're going to comply without thinking.
Most of these people will, if pushed a little, say they think it's extremely arrogant and even immoral to disagree with someone about their own specialism, a rule that makes no exception for things that are "obviously" stupid.
Piled Higher and Deeper
Definitely! I am certain my IQ is well below 160 but it doesn't take that level of intelligence to reason the endless contradictions and forever moving goalpost coming from the so called experts, the history of Pfizer, the obvious stupidity of Rochelle Walensky, EUA, and overall hysteria, were all red flags. And there were many more at this point I wouldn't trust my own doctor if she told me water was wet.
This wasn’t even that hard. The 6-month Pfake Pfizer trial showed that the thing prevented 1 Covid death and caused 4 cardiovascular deaths. The assessment that it’s safe and effective is deranged. But this was a military-intelligence operation from the beginning, never about medicine and science. Ever wonder how the Soviet system lasted as long as it did?
BARDA (Rick Bright) worked with Moderna, announced partnership in January 2020. BARDA is HHS, not DOD. DARPA & DTRA (Robert Malone/DOMANE & Inovio - he co-founded Inovio) are DOD. Inovio was front runner for Covid19 transfections but were later eliminated.
Both HHS & DOD were involved in this most recent scamdemic - not their first rodeo. Anthrax, AIDS, Zika, Ebola, flu vaccines- same players! The parasites have become multimillionaires while innocent people (including our Military & Vets who are used as guinea pigs) have died or suffer permanent health issues. Remdesivir (BARDA/DTRA/DOMANE) & ventilators (hospital protocols) continue to kill unsuspecting Americans, the DOD isn't 100% responsible for those deaths, it's a joint effort that includes HHS/CDC, Congress, Governors & their state's health departments. Follow the money…
Nasal vaccines are the next step - Malone & his wife own the patents- follow the money, same players. But don't worry, their inventions will save millions of lives, as Jill wrote in June 2021 about mrna transfections. Their very generous gifts to humanity.
Street Smarts or what used to be called common sense before the whole street smarts meme became the more popular term to use.
Book Smarts today means the sane as before but the books have chnaged and so book smart from the 1980's does not match book smarts from the 60's and the book smart people of teh 2000's don't match the book smarks of the people from the 80's. It''s not something done once every generation but is something that once measured between generations (i.e. every 20 years for example ) can be more easily seen. When they slowly swap outthe books required inpublic eductaion they are over enough time able to dumb down society while the people think they've actually advanced
parrots are book smart. they can learn quite a bit but do not understand what they learn. I don't know how easily they can be fooled though. Probably less than the sheeple.
That's what modern education has become. Simply learning to recite info for the test.
and multiple choice tests ! when I was in school there were only multiple choice pages for the psychological evaluation. All the exams were questions which you had to answer in your own words.
Street smarts with a PhD in the school of hard knocks wins the day. Add experience of living under Communism and you'll have individuals who can smell a rat from a mile away.
We must repeal Obama's Smith Mundt Modernization Act so we can hold the media responsible for lying to us, corrupt Republicans sponsored it. The propaganda machines have gone wild, highly educated folks believe their lies.
More like book DUMB and street DUMB...the state of the “influencers”....look at the “education” of the public schools and the overwhelming degree of jabs...and the cancelling and despicable attention against anyone who says “no”. Those who push this senseless and lethal jab...the educated ones...were but leaders of sheep...these leaders may be the smarter ones but no different that ISIS leaders of their terror groups. The left are just amassing their own Army of enforcers who like the dark web will be funded by dark donors and dark fed projects tailored to control US...they have the means to monitor everything about US and with so many illegals males...you think citizenship would be an easy carrot?
nailed it
As I've said from the begging, this was about spirit and spiritedness, not intelligence. Very few actual working-class people, for instance, some of whom might represent the 5G magnet refuser in the meme above, actually fell for this fraud. Their spiritedness resisted the Covid scheme and those who insisted on promoting it. But many of those same people ended up taking the jab because they were forced to. They are not, however, likely to look into detox protocols or investigate how they might limit the dangerous effects of mRNA or the spike protein or what have you. They'll keep drinking Coors Light or its European equivalents and grow increasingly apathetic, though at the same time cynical and distrustful. Their spirit was in the right place, but their lackluster subsequent approach and their failure to grasp what is really going on make them more or less useless in any potential struggle against the midwit powers that be. That leaves a very small number of people whose intellects are sharper than most but who are still fundamentally spirited enough to resist and, if necessary, fight.
People with an MBA might have been duped but there are data from the US showing that vaccine acceptance was much lower among PhD holders than Masters degree holders.
I've seen that bell graph as well. The majority in the middle didn't question it, but those with some higher academic studies seemingly wanted to wait a bit until more data was available. I don't think that's due to street smarts though, but it's a valid point.
Smarts based on our current models of education, based on a persons ability to basically memorise across a broad range of subjects, followed by a third level stint being taught by the very people described in the stack, a great stack, by the way, is blatantly not smarts at all. I couldn’t agree with your Dad more!👏✍️
It comes down to confidence. I firmly believe that I'm the smartest person on earth and that I'm right about everything. When I'm proven wrong I readily admit it, yet it never shakes my confidence that I'm going to be 100% right for the rest of my life.
Plenty of people are confident in their idiotic decisions and behavior.
Actually, I doubt myself all the time. But it looks like staying unvaccinated will turn out to be the right decision.
Exactly.
Nothing to do with intelligence.
It’s a social pressure, herd mentality phenomenon coupled with a lack of critical thinking skills and common sense. In med school we called them ivory tower morons.
These people are not smart. They are indoctrinated. They have been trained to follow orders and never question authority. That actually is the definition of stupidity and having no critical thinking skills. When a person is street smart they have learned by life experience. They do not trust authority.
Social pressure nails it. Most people are not that far beyond high school cliques.
I'd often remark that all of life is high school writ large. Though more recently (said recency pre-dates C-19) I've restated it as middle school writ large. The social and life experience learning curve has become somewhat truncated, plateauing at a lower level than was the case in my early adulthood.
oh yes. Completely agree. Junior high involved more shunning and bullying.
By high school, you pretty much chose the side on which to "coast" through
This is an exceptionally important post--it's fundamental to what's gone wrong in our information society. Digital discourse has become the plaything of rhetorically articulate 120 IQ midwits--the sheep dogs competing to influence the herd.
The true Shepherds of Being go unnoticed in all the barking and snarling while vast herds of befuddled sheep stampede to and fro . . .
I quite agree. Verbally capable above average types. Therefore persuasive and above all inappropriately confident in their beliefs.
Yes, the “college educated” group who revel in the fact they all vote Democrat, support the war in Ukraine, and are multiple-vaxxed—as if a US college degree means anything anymore. Aka 120 IQ Mid wits
The tragedy is 120 is not low obviously. In some parts of the world they'd be running the country with that.
The indoctrination seems to be the factor. The mid-range IQ is fertile ground for bad ideas, especially bracing visions of a great future, like living in a pod and getting everything delivered. I think the effect we are seeing is just enough stupidity to lack the mental horsepower to really think it through, but elevated enough to be able to condemn everyone who objects to a lower status - you just don't get it. I certainly got that during Covid.
You are right, 120 is absolutely not a low IQ. Personally, I believe much depends on whether you want to be part of the pack (to be ‘accepted’) or whether you are an Einzelgänger. People who feel ok and secure when they do not follow or belong, likely were much less inclined to fall for the ‘inclusivity’ marketing campaign.
Yes, I think it is discomfort at standing out from the crowd. A character trait independent of IQ.
Where IQ comes in is you have the brains to convince yourself something that seems a bad idea has less obvious benefit. So we know masks don't work, but we wear them to send a message to the stupid they must be careful. I think that is their weakness. The emperor's new clothes.
Anyone who says "educate yourself!" displays this. They THINK they understand something very smart, and that you are too stupid or stubborn to believe it.
Yes. It is also a diversionary tactic. Mainly because they can't explain something without an appeal to authority, which gives the game away.
It is the ease with which their minds are captured that fascinates me. Climate initiatives are set to bankrupt whole counties and hammer the middle class, and Covid wasn't a picnic either. All these WEF ideas that enthuse people.
Totally agree
The vac boosters will limit their true effectiveness over time for they will be infertile and die early due to their many boosters....but the unvac’d illegals will be ready players with the carrot of citizenship...and most of these players are solider aged adult males...and you think the Dems have not been cultivating these folks....of course they have!
As regards standing out from the crowd, my husband and I are really in a comfortable place now in that we’re old. He’s 72, and I’m 64, we’re retired so there’s not a lot anyone can do to us. He already almost died from C19 (delta) and I’ve had omicron twice. We live in Texas where masking, after the first couple of months, has been optional. Yes, there are some people even here who can tend to get a bit “manic” about masking and shots, but as Mr Marsh said, I think that’s independent of IQ.
Beg pardon, that was Spaceman Spiff.
Barking and snarling. LOL. Love this.
Good article. 3 points.
1. I believe people are only capable of judging intelligence up to their own. In other words to an average person (100 IQ), there is no difference between a 120, 140 or 160. They are indistinguishably smart.
2. For the past two generations (at least here in the U.S.), the "everybody gets a trophy" mentality has taught people they are never wrong, so there is no humility or self awareness of one's true capabilities.
3. You can distill many of the ills of society (including obviously covid response) to the fact that the wise are no longer in leadership positions. Wise=highest IQ+education. True education has sucked for a long time. But we've also lost the system of filtration and gatekeeping in government that elevates wise leadership and in media that elevates wise opinion/journalism. In the U.S. (and I'm simplifying) the original idea of democracy was that regular citizens (and only few could vote) elect local leaders who they know and can judge for wisdom and character, local leaders elect the wisest national leaders and national leaders elect the wisest president. We no longer have anything like this. The internet and social media destroyed the biz model of traditional journalism so there are no longer gatekeepers (editors). Now any idiot can have enormous reach and (see #1) the average person has no way of differentiating good ideas from stupid ones.
Excellent points! Especially number two: “For the past two generations (at least here in the U.S.), the "everybody gets a trophy" mentality has taught people they are never wrong, so there is no humility or self awareness of one's true capabilities.”
This is one of the things that has upset me most for the past 38 years, and that would be since my eldest child started participating in sports.
Have you any idea how hard it is to raise a child to be a responsible human being in a society that tells him that everything he does is great whether it is or not? You have to consistently tell your children (I have four, now adults with children of their own) that just because they received a trophy, it doesn’t really mean that they were the best. It only means that they made it to all of their games. That they acted responsibly, and THAT is a good thing. It was a daunting experience back then, and, if parents don’t want to raise special little snowflakes but responsible humans, it’s a daunting experience now.
I don't agree that a person with an IQ of 100 can't distinguish persons with IQs of 120, 140, or 160. For example, I think most people immediately recognize an extremely high IQ (e.g., Vivek Ramaswamy) vs. high IQ (e.g., RFK, Jr., Steve Bannon) vs. slightly above-average IQ (e.g., Oprah).
I'm intrigued by how much consilience there is among the ideas articulated by critical thinkers across subjects. I realized a while ago that, to the average person who doesn't lift, there's no real difference between someone saying "I can lift 350 lbs" and "I can lift 700 lbs." Both are so heavy, so impossibly incomprehensible, that there's no real difference in understanding what each entails and the massive difference between the two (350 is like being a 100, while 700 is like being a 150). Reminds me very much of your IQ-comprehension comment.
I think you are almost absolutely right on 'judging only up to their own' intelligence. It's just a kind of glass ceiling. Observed this over the course of my three children's 'education' in public school.
Great comment, thanks
I think that the arguments proposed here by you are correct. However, there is I think a missing crucial ingredient necessary to make it work, namely the framework of a high trust society. Western and central European countries have traditionally been high-trust societies and in particular in the post-war era (at least until quite recently) the political leadership has continually delivered on unprecedented material comfort and peace. The crowd of above-average-but-not-brilliant people has been a demographic that has so far been rewarded disproportionately by the post-war system offering managerial and professional jobs to bright and industrious people who may have come from more humble backgrounds. I think it is particularly this history and the cultural context which makes these people especially susceptible to manipulation from authorities. And of course it is exceedingly treacherous by the powers that be to abuse the trust that has been built up over so many generations in this nefarious way.
Yes this trusting nature is key here. Where did it come from? They 100% believed that the virus was dangerous and the shot less so and the Govt was trying to help. Believed every bit of it. Incomprehensible to them that the authorities were wrong, incompetent or outright lying. That sounds like crazy paranoia to them! Obviously they personally have never been harmed by a Govt or doctor or expert. Charmed lives!
Excellent point. People do tend to trust "experts" in the USA, which has prided itself on being a meritocracy--most people think that people get important jobs because they deserve them (if they know people who don't deserve them, they think those are exceptions). Very few people don't trust doctors. Almost no one, amazingly, questions public school teachers and administrators. We want to live in a world where people are all trustworthy and deserve their positions of authority. But Americans have been working to destroy any mechanism for this outcome for several decades now, so in addition to the crooks and conmen who always manage to get in, we now have large numbers of outright frauds, as well as a lot of people who did not really do the work to earn the degrees and things they've been awarded.
First-rate comment, thanks!
I know that in my case, I already had a long experience with the medical system and its shortcomings prior to covid. Therefore I was skeptical, to say the least, of the promises made by megacorps like Pfizer. I knew the history of these criminal corporations and the many poisons they sell as medications. I don't know where I fall on the IQ charts and don't really care. I know what I know and no set of GIGO studies from interested parties (which includes those getting directly funded by big pharma and those whose careers are predicated on running with the herd) will convince me to take any recently productized "medicine" from these monsters. If a medication doesn't have a solid 10-20 year track record of doing no harm these days I just don't take it. I recommend that approach to anyone who isn't near death and desperate to try anything.
Excellent point regarding the communications barrier. I don't think it's entirely accurate in all cases: there are highly intelligent people who can make themselves understood to anyone, but this is a skill in itself that not all possess. There's also a strong dependence on subject matter. Take Chris Langan. On political subjects he's very easy to follow; once he gets into metaphysics it becomes quite difficult. However, those caveats aside, my experience is that this principle generally holds. There's about a 1 SD separation beyond which communication becomes increasingly difficult.
I suspect this is the source of a great deal of the ennui of the sensitive young men of the dissident right. As a group, they are highly intelligent. Ideally they would want to find wives who are comparable. However, women tend to be a bit lower in intelligence at that end of the distribution (greater male variability), and they're additionally more susceptible to social pressure regarding beliefs for reasons of personality; these two factors mean that the majority of bright young women are quite thoroughly indoctrinated with the new religion of Woke, which renders them utterly unsuitable as wives. Result is an extremely small pool of potential romantic partners, and a consequent epidemic of loneliness.
Simonton considers whether the highly intelligent may also have the superior ability to make themselves more comprehensible and thus transcend their "range of comprehension." For various reasons (some more persuasive than others) he thinks their capacity to do so will be limited. Of course, when they do, they'll be competing with many lower cognitive tiers also pitching their ideas, and the less intelligent consumers of this production won't be able to sort out the IQ 160 from the IQ 120 ideas. This is his conceptual framework, anyway.
Inability of lower tiers to evaluate truth claims from higher but non-equivalent intellectual tiers sounds like it could be a significant effect.
Richard Dawkins is a good example of an exceptional communicator. I don't know his IQ but it won't be low. Some of his written work is outstanding and easily understood I would imagine.
Richard Dawkins is a superb communicator but in my personal experience, if you draw him off his talking points, he doesn't have anything really illuminating to say. It's kind of jarring, actually. His strength might very well be that he's just enough of a midwit to have a much larger effective audience than most of his peers.
Perhaps, although I find his writing fluent and persuasive. But I can't comment on his off-topic abilities. Hard to judge someone's IQ.
I think you can learn and train yourself to communicate effectively with those outside your 1 SD ideal communication range, but it will always be a more artificial form of communication. You are kind of running your actual thoughts and ideas through a translator and they are coming out lower resolution. Doing this takes brainpower though in trying to model the mind of the other person and adjust your communication appropriately (assuming you don't just memorize scripts to recite). The midwit will have the natural advantage communicating with the normie, because it is still within their natural communication range.
I do think the high IQ person is better able to communicate with a grug-brain than a midwit is though. In this scenario both the high IQ and the midwit are outside their natural range but midwit lacks the IQ to translate their communication.
Midwit is also not *accustomed* to needing to translate their ideas. High IQ people have spent a lifetime in that mode.
White liberal women in the US seem to be the main drivers of wokesterism. And I agree, absolutely not wife material as it comes with a fatal dose of radical feminism and the associated adoption of masculine behaviours over time which just seals their fate. Could all be a plot by the cat food industry mind you 😜
Big Box Wine strikes again.
The Spinster Industrial Complex as it will soon become. Misery loves company.
Ironically, the rise of the Spinster Industrial Complex will mean the end of industry.
Netflix will clean up though.
Sadly, that is my granddaughter who is now an expat who will not marry or have children. She's a cute, bright person who used to have a quick wit. I ache for what her life will be when she is 80+, alone in a foreign country.
It all comes down to your definition of “smart”
No matter what their IQ is--the vaxxed lost the competition.
I dont think we should discount the impact that "high trust" has on society. Sweden especially, has historically been one the highest, and in fact it was that trust which guided much of their initial pandemic response
I know Sweden very well. That trust continues to this day. I think it is why they never had lockdowns, masks, or mandates. The perps didn’t need them and they still got a voluntary vaxx rate higher than the US with all its coercion. Scary because the Swedish pols can do almost anything and expect compliance.
Well they are certainly destroying that high trust, so it won't be a problem for them in the future.
With the data available in early 2021, anyone of average intelligence could have figured out that the risks outweigh the benefit. The myocarditis, the new technology, the adverse effects, the low IFR, none of this required a very smart person to notice.
When we look at a graph of vaccine uptake, all we're really looking at is a graph of trust in the technocracy. I think you'll find that's what explains almost all the variance. Either you trust the technocracy, or you don't. On average high IQ people will tend to trust the technocracy more, because life tends to work out better for them.
High IQ people will come up with very elaborate reasons for their decision, low IQ people will come up with none or just some paranoid rambling about how the WEF wants to kill us all. But the reasons are just data you grab from the ocean of information available to us, after you already made your decision. We don't decide whether we grow up to trust the technocracy, circumstances beyond our control decide that for us.
If the vaccines just contained plutonium and nothing else, Pete Buttigieg would have still signed up for them. If we had received a live codon deoptimized intranasal vaccine, Alex Jones would have still thought it's part of a secret plot to kill us all.
"anyone of average intelligence could have figured out that the risks outweigh the benefit."
That's it in a nutshell. I was following all the pandemic info from the beginning, because none of us knew what to expect. I was hesitant of a vaccine, and put it off until a non-mRNA vax was produced. But by then the CDC had released the percentage of survival by age group and mine had a 99.5% chance of surviving Sars-CoV2. That's when I knew I didn't need any vaccine because the vaccine risks weren't worth .5%. And that was before all the vaccine adverse events were widely spoken of.
Exactly! And the jab didn't eliminate that 0.5% risk....
"low IQ people will come up with none or just some paranoid rambling about how the WEF wants to kill us all." You are right... that's crazy... they only want to kill most of us ... got to be some slaves...I mean workers left..
Senpai reads eugyppius! I love your work. -LSWM from Canada.
This is the best analysis of the "midwit" class I have seen.
I’ll take my common sense and BS meter over any IQ points or pile of degrees any day.
Fascinating... and it confirms my anecdotal experience (as an outlier of course).
Excellent analysis. It also explains why PhDs and the highly university educated are more easily convinced by propaganda than the street smart without tertiary degrees. They have a social investment in always being right, on being smarter than almost everybody else, about everything - it is their identity.
That is my experience. My common sense good-hearted relative heard Naomi Wolf reading from the Pfizer documents at Hillsdale College and decided never to take another shot. Among my very liberal, very educated relatives and friends, not the case. But there are really many parameters, seems to me. People who are dependent on the healthcare system to live or who have loved ones that are, no matter their IQ, cannot have their faith in it challenged without destructive effects. There's also the "who has their head together" factor, as some people are totally un-self-aware and others have done psychological work. Also, who has prior experience with the pattern. In Sunnyvale CA, realm of Apple, near Google, and close to Facebook, there are many immigrants from China. When the DIE CRT curriculums were instituted, they saw them as indoctrination immediately as they knew the pattern. In America, World History hasn't been taught in a very long time. A few years back, on YA (Young Adult) twitter, there was a pile on witch hunt against a woman who had gotten a lucrative book deal as her characters had bronze skin. She was accused of cultural appropriation, though it was a science fiction novel drawing from Russian indigenous history. One of the attackers said she was appropriating slavery as "nothing like slavery ever happened in Russia" It can't be an accident that none of us are ever taught the history of medicine or pharma. I don't know if pattern recognition is part of what is measured as cognitive ability, but I am sure we are living in the dark ages of analogic thinking.
When I was young - a long time ago - I wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was a dedicated student but very quiet and introverted and standing out from the crowd terrified me. But as I’ve got older I’ve changed. I’ve also done things backwards. I finally got my degree at 58 having changed my mind about university two weeks before my course was due to begin. The advantage of this was that I could see when I was being taught BS and could spout what was needed to pass without believing in it. Along the way I have become ‘bolshy’ and I don’t like being told what to do. The covid jab was a giant exercise in being told what to do by a government and people I had little respect for. I smelt BS from around April 2020 and no way was I falling for their tactics.
I don’t believe I am particularly smart but I’m not that stupid either!
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RWers need to stop fetishizing IQ
its utility is mainly that it outright sinks a great many liberal delusions about human biology, but it's not the key to higher and greater things.
This is true, I just think that if IQ studies (which represent the most widely replicated findings in all of social sciences) were going to convince the public at large, they would have already done so. People's willingness to believe in Occam's Butterknife (to borrow a Steve Sailer-ism) when it comes to population differences is religious in nature. I'd have an easier time convincing an early Christian martyr of the non-divinity of Christ than I would in getting my shitlib cousin to affirm the findings of Charles Murray.
Shitlib-- that’s hilarious!!
Perhaps if it was not inappropriately condemned for narrative maintenance reasons the Right would indeed tone it down. Alas, the clampdown on IQ has triggered a kind of arms race. It is so condemned by academia the IQ researchers have been forced to upgrade much of their source data from merely very good to excellent. It is hard to ignore, although may not explain everything.