I am no longer sure real intelligence exists, only pattern matching.
Watch: I bet you cannot define analytical and critical thinking in a way that distinguishes it from non critical and non analytical thinking.
It simply means being able to understand things by yourself by understanding the difference between plausible and implausible, instead of being spoon feed by mass media propaganda and other authoritarian sources.
I don't find this a convincing description in the least. Every single person in the Slashdot thread thinks they are thinking for them selves.
How do you know you are critically thinking instead of not critically thinking? Or thinking for your self versus simply justifying an opinion you have already invested so much into that it would hurt too much to let go?
I used to think I was smart. Now I just see groupings of behaviours in individuals and cannot really tell smart from dumb people because I cannot tell if their wetware is deficient, their internal database is lacking data or they have been programmed as social animals to beleive what they beleive.
What I am starting to see are groupings of behaviour and beleif systems across broad segments of the population in some interesting ways.
What is unique about the Poal (and Voats) of the world is that because we beleive we are small in number we get to see their behaviour patterns and ours at the same time. They only see their own behaviour and beleif patters and are blind to other possible permutations.
In other words, we aren't smarter or better at critical thinking, we are simply seeing more patterns than them because of our relative position in society currently.
If we were in power, the inverse would be true, we would only see our self selected behaviour patterns and they would see theirs and ours.
Thats a function of disparities in power mostly, would be my guess.
A government for example, which has the ability to totally suppress it's citizens, has therefore, no need for compromising with them.
And wherefore citizens had the true means to match a standing army, what use would there be for peaceful protest?
As I said before, intelligence is only inborn. You won't become intelligent only by getting information. You need to be able to analyse the information you have and be able to distinguish facts from fiction. If you are only repeating information from other sources, you are not intelligent, you are just a believer, like anybody else weak minded from any existing faction.
(post is archived)