I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is much more intelligent than I am. I don't know why there's such a taboo over saying some people are more intelligent than others. It's not a moral judgment or a be-all-and-end-all of a person's value.
> I don't know why there's such a taboo over saying some people are more intelligent than others.
Makes it easier to seed resentment and division. There's a notable cohort of ideologically-possessed individuals whose mission in life seems to be flatly denying the existence of meritocracy. If everyone is as smart as the smartest people in the world (and we'll repeat this until it's accepted as true), then some injustice logically must be taking place. Our ideology just so happens to have a solution to address this, so you should give us power. It's a pattern that's been playing out for a while now.
> It's not a moral judgment or a be-all-and-end-all of a person's value.
But it is, even though it actually means nothing at all. Let me try and explain.
Our society prides itself on being both rational and egalitarian at the same time. Its most basic ideological paradigm basically says: "everyone is equal". Of course, that is a meaningless statement - people themselves are not quantities to be measured and compared; "everyone is equal" is just a shorthand for "everyone is just as much a human being as everyone else, regardless of the physical characteristics of their body, and deserves to be treated with equal dignity, because every person has a human mind."
Now imagine a trait, "intelligence", which basically says "this person has more mind than that person". This is in contradiction with the premise of equality; in the rationalist paradigm, this is more or less equivalent to saying "this person is inherently superior than that person". So either differences in intelligence do not exist and intelligence is a meaningless signifier (perhaps a performative role ascribed by particular situations)... or rational egalitarianism is in contradiction with itself (and therefore factually wrong by the rules of its own logic).
Either option is enough of a bummer that a normal person would be driven to ignore the matter entirely. Hence, the taboo.
> this is more or less equivalent to saying "this person is inherently superior than that person"
Strong disagree. Intelligence is not a more valuable attribute than any other.
Concrete example: there's no point being a more intelligent officer in the Army if you aren't able to physically get yourself to the fight in time and someone else who's less intelligent but is more fit is there on time to have an impact.
>a "more intelligent" person is defined as "having more consciousness" which, in a system that ascribes value to humanity and consciousness, is equivalent to saying that a more intelligent person is "more of a person", and therefore inherently "superior in value"
This is what I meant. Do you still disagree with this statement?
And, well... should I make my posts more detailed or less, considering they fail to communicate the idea? Or should I go back to just saying nothing?
This definition of "rational" strangely excludes values such as reliability, endurance, initiative, charm, beauty, or leadership. But when has it ever been the case in any society for people to simply bow down to geniuses? Hasn't intelligence often taken a backseat to charm and beauty?
Intelligence is but one value competing in an ecology of values.
I'm not trying to redefine rationality. I'm referring to [Rationalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism), a system of values which is fundamental to the modern Western world, and trying to point out that it is inherently flawed and essentially self-contradictory exactly because its hinges on notions like "rationality" and "intelligence" but in practice anyone is free to redefine those to whatever suits the situation.
I'm not trying to put "intelligence" or "geniuses" on a pedestal, though I would argue they're already being put there by our culture's norms. If they were really so important, wouldn't people be a lot more outraged about faulty definitions and fallacious reasoning?
Instead, we get sarcastic variants of the "well, ackshyually" meme any time anyone insists that correct reasoning is a prerequisite for a meaningful conversation, and indeed colloquial language doesn't really optimize for the use case of honest, unambiguous representations of reality
So what you're saying is that given the exact set of capital, connections, knowledge and market conditions that Musk initially had you wouldn't be able to make business decisions like he did because you're not intelligent enough?
Cannot answer for the parent commenter, but I know I wouldn't be able to make decisions like he did.
Just for one specific example: even if I was in his exact situation back then, I wouldn't mortgage out my house, ask friends and family for loans, cash out all of my savings, and then dump it all into my failing green energy startup during its "make it or break it moment". But he did, and none of what Tesla/SpaceX are presently would have been possible if he didn't make that decision.
And that's just one extreme thing that he did that I know for a fact I wouldn't have been able to do, even with the resources and everything else he had.
I doubt it. It takes intelligence to make the best of those resources to create a success.
What's so unlikely to you about the idea that he's relatively intelligent and that's played a part in his success?
People want to pretend it's all luck and connections. I don't think it is, and I think people pretend that to make themselves feel like they could have done it if only they had the same resources.
> What's so unlikely to you about the idea that he's relatively intelligent and that's played a part in his success?
Nothing, I haven't even questioned his intelligence or said anything about him at all.
I just don't have a slightest clue in how to assess his intelligence and compare it to mine based on what I know about him, which makes me wonder what's making it so obvious to you. Especially when talking about things so blurry as "business decisions", since there are so many outside factors at play in any business that one's intelligence is never a single thing that determines business success.
Would you characterize Donald Trump as smarter than yourself? I mean, he made it all the way to President of the United States, have you ever been President? Hell, Einstein never was President, nor was he ever a Billionaire...
Trump was smarter than Einstein apparently. (Well, Einstein was German, bad example...
They never made it to president, or billionaire status though I don't think... It could be said Trump was more "successful"...
Does success === intelligence? God, I hope not or we're doomed as a species.
I think you're making a silly argument and you already know it. Einstein and Trump weren't working in the same fields so you can't compare their achievements.
Is Donald Trump smart? Well I think it's a non-partisan fact that he outsmarted the entire US political establishment in 2016. You decide how smart that is for yourself.