What do rising IQs really show? I remain undecided, but here’s an argument that strongly inclines me to pessimism. To wit: When I read the smartest thinkers from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, they seem roughly as smart as the smartest thinkers from the 20th century. In fact, the same goes for the smartest Greeks from the 4th and 5th centuries B.C.
Tag: class
Education and Its Discontents
What is taught to the students at school is basically: “You have no choice in where you will be. If you do not do as I tell you, worse things will happen to you. If you follow orders, better things will happen to you.” The subject here is learning to accept the basic context of being in a prison and to follow orders to escape a worse fate. The kind of learning environment that I support can more or less fit under the category of unschooling.
International Adoption: The Personal Side
To take the case of international adoption: We’re paranoid about the microscopic risk of accidentally snatching a poor family’s wanted baby – and barely cognizant of the fantastic opportunity regulation snatches from the hands of orphans around the world.
How to Form the Decisiveness Habit
People who are plagued with indecisiveness generally know they don’t want to be that way, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s not fun, and I feel compassion for those who have this difficulty. So how can we form the habit of being decisive instead?
Disobedience is a Virtue
When we spend most of our formative years being bombarded with the message—from parents, teachers, the media, agents of the state, etc.—that obedience is a virtue and disobedience is a sin, we “learn” that lie at a very deep psychological level, way beyond merely an intellectual understanding.
Voluntary Provision of a So-called Public Good
This is the trouble with neoclassical welfare economics, amigos: it’s not a decent theory, but it’s a dandy rationale for government to coerce people right and left ostensibly in order to supply valuable public goods, many of which are mere boondoggles for government contractors and magnets for corruption of the legislators and bureaucrats who impose the projects on an often-unwilling public.
Words Poorly Used #117 — Apology
Nowadays, third parties such as pundits bully the supposed aggressor into making a statement of apology to the supposed injured party, where more often than not the bully has imagined some substantial class of people for whom the apology must do multiple duty.
Authority Easily Leads to Abuse
This was a shitty circumstance. It isn’t “fair” that it happened. However, this happens with most teachers, and most people in places of unquestioned authority. In fact, the situation that occurred in college was a situation I had vastly more leverage than in previous similar situations.
The Rule of Law
Today, I attended the second of half a dozen Lifelong Learning classes on the Bill of Rights of the U. S. Constitution. After four hours, we students are still on the First Amendment, Freedom of Religion clause. And after 100 years, we citizens are still stuck with the phrase, “clear and present danger.”
Words Poorly Used #116 — Right
A way of achieving lawlessness is to have too many laws. A way of gaining inarticulation is to overload words with too many meanings. The word, “right,” is overloaded beyond recognition.