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Re:Urbit by zozbot234 on Sunday December 01, 2019 @12:06PM (#21676412)
What's especially ironic about this is that we do a terrible job of educating even people of entirely average intelligence, never mind 'morons'. But of course this has nothing to do with purported genetic bases of intelligence, and everything with how our "budget(s) devoted to education" are used.
Re:Urbit by pron on Sunday December 01, 2019 @11:47AM (#21676280)
> A dollar wasted on trying to educate a moron could be invested in military R&D.

How would you know if that's a dollar better-spent? All humans are pretty bad at flying, yet airplanes are pretty useful. All of technology is spending on the respective meaning of "educating morons." Military R&D is a great example. A weakling with a gun can easily beat a strong sword-wielding knight. In fact, the difference between a strong fighter with a sword and a weakling with a sword is pretty much erased by guns.

> Do you mean Napoleon? Or von Bismarck?

I meant Hitler. Napoleon was a different story, but WWI was also very much a product of Romanticism.

> you outed yourself as a non-European

Well, I'm Jewish.

> You're implying that a hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural society and an industrialized society select for the same traits.

Traits? Have we already established that natural selection in the past ~10000 years since the agricultural revolution has had any significant impact in shaping human society? (To be clear, that was a rhetorical question; no, we have not established that).

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Re:Urbit by pron on Sunday December 01, 2019 @12:26PM (#21676569)
Whoa, I don't know if I would start by teaching you history or the basic mathematics of natural selection. I'm always impressed by how the ability to form coherent explanatory narratives is inversely proportional to the amount of factual knowledge possessed (of course it is -- fewer points require a lower-degree polynomial -- but still, it does require some level of oblivious confidence that I've never had). I'm sorry, but I completely misjudged the nature of this conversation. Stepping away now, and I hope you get better.

By the way, my great grandparents weren't elites so much as they were poor tradesmen, except maybe in the addled minds of the followers of ignorant "great men," armed with a romantic ideology of an imagined past and pseudo-science -- and, of course, guns -- who brutally murdered them. Apparently, my great-grandparent's "superior Ashkenazi cognition" wasn't enough to ensure their survival -- maybe because of some other "weaknesses associated with their race," but I think that the more plausible explanation is that it was because of racism, a force that seems to trump intelligence time and again.