Philosophy

This discussion has gone off on a wonderful tangent :)

This I feel deserves its own separate reply. THIS is what Reddit (supposedly, though before I joined it) was supposed to be about - connecting people so that they could have enjoyable conversations about topics of interest. Ofc, as with any wide open playground area, it quickly became overrun by both cyberbullies and literal children, who now derail every attempt at conversation over there, with smarty-sounding (to them) replies like "show your references", "no You show Your references", "NO, ~why~ ~am~ ~I~ ~shouting~?, YOU SHOW YOUR REFERENCES", and now there basically is no reason to ever go to Reddit, as it is merely an energy-draining profound waste of time. (I am speaking from one POV ofc, which is obviously biased, as I did not traverse the entirety of Reddit so can only say what I saw, and inferred from others talking, and anyway speaking of a general trend, which does not imply that there were not some small corners acting as pocket hold-outs against the general trends.)

This is the hope that the Fediverse offers: after Huffman did... what he did, those of us with a conscience and/or who could see the writing on the wall left (+ those of us who were going to leave anyway b/c there simply was no longer any point to remaining).

These types of conversations - with respect, with intellectual curiosity, based on facts - are sadly rare even here. But they do happen, unlike Reddit, which is really notable, imho.

Before we go any further into the vector idea, I have to return to the thought of "health". I mentioned that a supremely intelligent person, lets say a genius of 250 IQ (yeah I know, we'll get to that term in a moment but ignoring it for now...:-), commits suicide, after first lets say his partner leaving him b/c he ignored them and focused too much on work - i.e., low EI. But importantly that's only one small component: what if he had not only perfect IQ, but also perfect EI as well, yet still committed suicide... and yet that only b/c he had a terminal illness that would have killed him painfully within weeks? Or perhaps he has perfect health, in that moment, yet his oxygen supply is running out, and will be dead in mere minutes, where his IQ, EI, or physical health cannot save him? Now we begin to start recapitulating Maslov's hierarchy of needs, where some things - like intellectual curiosity - only become important after our other, more basal needs are met, air being one of the prime ones, but also food, water, shelter, security, and the like.

And then sex is an oddity, arguably more primal than most others, since someone will give up access to most of those - if not air then food, water, shelter, security etc., in order to have even a chance at a sexual encounter. Which we know is important, nay crucial, to the survival of the species, even if fairly low on the scale of importance to an individual's survival - i.e. someone can die at 100+ years of age as a complete virgin, so it is not necessary at all, at least for the individual. But that does show the interconnectedness of concepts that we claim to be "more foundational" (like food), yet that sometimes shift positions and at least temporarily become dispensable in exchange for something that is, as I just mentioned, not important at all.

So if IQ is less foundational than EI, and both are less foundational than health, then that means... what? I don't even know, but perhaps they don't need to be on the same dimensional plane at all, maybe it means that we really can talk about "intelligence" separately from other matters, such as emotional acuity? But while that may sound nice in theory, I really don't think that works out in practice, b/c sometimes the absolute smartest people can do just the absolute DUMBEST things!:-P And it's b/c they really, truly are less "intelligent", in that particular area, e.g. perhaps they can solve mathematical equations that nobody has figured out for hundreds of years, but for the life of them they cannot remember their wife's anniversary date and after missing it the 5th time in a row, is now reading divorce papers handed to them.

So whether it's a vector, or two vectors, or no vectors, any particular theory about this aspect of humanity could be challenged in terms of its specifics, and be either partially or even wholly wrong, but the main TLDR is this: intelligence is COMPLEX, and therefore as you brought up, not so readily judged.

Knowledge I would argue is not even in the same category as Intelligence at all - knowledge can be written in a book, or carved into stone, so mere "knowledge" is a collection of messages, which requires zero intelligence at all, especially if a computer that is dumb as a rock can handle it.

But I know what you meant: "Intelligence is not the same as IQ" - the latter is a specific attempt to measure the former, and is hella wrong, in all manner of ways. I recall a similar discussion about the SAT involving essays written up describing yacht trips - a poor person, or perhaps even a wealthy(-ish) one living in the midwestern states, VERY far away from any kind of ocean, may have never been yachting in their entire life, or even know of someone else doing so either. It is an "unfair" (as in: unequally biased) type of question that favors elitism at the expense of others who may be just as smart, yet not know those particular cultural matters quite as well (and therefore btw those kinds of questions were removed, though I am happy to see the trend continuing - although I would hope that everyone would know "ruby", e.g. in one of the earliest and most revered films of all time Wizard of Oz they talk about "ruby red slippers"... although then again, how many people know of e.g. Charlie Chaplan, so I can kinda see from several POVs there; but I did want to point out that you don't need to have SEEN a ruby, as in irl, b/c movies, TV, and the internet do exist!).

So... Intelligence is all things to all people, yet not equally so, and in particular there is a stigma among people who lack it who feel poorly about that, perhaps having been chided in the past for something related. But high-IQ (or EI) people are no "better" than those of low status... (imho at least) and yet they are more "powerful", in that they can accomplish more things. As too can someone with greater musculature, and yet that is less rare, plus less valuable for other reasons too in this era of machines.

Though imagine this: 1000 years from now, when people have literal computer chips placed into their heads (probably biotech at that point rather than plastic+metal, or even spiritual-tech if we find a way to tap into something outside of our physical realm, like if this is The Matrix and we can even temporarily tap into sudo commands from "above" the normal rules:-), at that point will "intelligence" be of any value whatsoever? And yet even in that distant future, "character" still seems like it will be of great value b/c it is far more foundational than anything else (in my hypothetical imaginings, plus many sci-fi books, e.g. Greg Bear's "Moving Mars" explores this).

We start to see glimmerings of this even now: e.g. what use is "memory" when we have pocket internet + calendar + insta-communication? In ye olden days, winning arguments could be done by deploying a fact that the other side did not know yet. Not so today, as the recent debate with Trump v. Kamala Harris showed... or as the debate with Nixon v. JFK identically showed >60 years ago. One of them says something that rattles the other, who then "wins", based almost totally on EI considerations and almost none at all of IQ ones. IQ has no "power" to solve things in that arena... though with computer assistance, high-EI people can do things that even the highest-IQ ones of the past would never have been able to (or perhaps requiring months, decades, or would have required millennia under some theoretical condition that they could survive and remain focused on the issue all that time).

So anyway... yeah, it's complicated. :-)