Certain topics have revealed themselves to be IQ tests on social media. It’s become clear that, as a society, we are being held back by people who can’t understand basic concepts like averages and standard deviations or compound interest. When I’m reading an online conversation these days, I’m starting to see the IQ test behind the point more often and more quickly; the logical pitfall which, if you don’t avoid, will cause you to conclude the wrong things, and land on the opposite side of the solution.
Failing these tests wouldn’t be harmful, except that the people failing them have full access to society through voting and being present when adults are talking, and they fight against rules, regulations, and policies which would help everyone in the long run due to their limitations. Our progress as a country is being thwarted because our politicians cater to their fears and misunderstanding in order to get their votes, and this absolutely happens on both sides. Society can be mapped onto a 2D graph with left/right political leanings on the horizontal axis, and IQ on the vertical, with 100 on the crossing.
This is our world. There’s about 25% of the population in each quadrant, and we’re all just trying to “figure it out.” Societally, the people below the line haven’t really had a lot of impact until the invention of the internet. In the early days, the internet felt egalitarian and promising because it took a certain amount of intelligence and resources (working as a proxy for intelligence) to get on and say something, and the results were quick, amazing, and impactful. Now “the internet” has been reduced to a dozen web sites, and everyone is on it. Now they have full access to whatever “news” they want to consume, and they have full access to the town square in various forms of social media. (And, no, for the purposes of this discussion, I’m not going anywhere near the debate about the First Amendment, or political or racial biases.)
So now the people above the line are trying to “figure it out” while the people below — who will never “figure it out” — make it more and more difficult for the rest, as they flail about in their own doomed efforts, confident in their Dunning-Krugerring that their input and understanding is equal to every else’s, and, after all, why shouldn’t they sit on city councils and school boards and be middle managers at large companies, and implement all the dumbest stuff imaginable?
A lot of the IQ tests are failed due to modern liberalism, by which I mean the tendency to ignore facts — or, especially, ignore certain facts in favor of others — while focusing on intents and feelings. You can’t save the Titanic by caring about the feelings of the iceberg, but that’s exactly what a large portion of our society would be concerned with these days. So there’s a concentration of society-sabatoging effort going on in the left half of the quadrant that mixes with the problems in the lower half. Hence the red line. (I really wanted to draw it going up asymptotically on the left side, showing that after a certain amount of liberalism, no amount of IQ can save you, but working Photoshop is not one of my skills, and, ironically, I’m apparently not smart enough to figure it out after 30 years.) It’s the people to the top and right who could help society the best over the longest terms, and they’re being clawed at by the people to the left and below, like crabs in bucket pulling down the ones smart enough climb up and over to escape.
