nin137

Quantification

In our rationalistic pragmatic scientific society we LOVE
and i mean LOVE to quantify things. Anything. Well what
about intelligence and stupidity?
You know you and everyone else quantifies these two
aspects of human life. You look at others and think "wow
she's smarter than him, i'm smarter than both of them."
i'm here to say that you can't quantify intelligence but
you can loosely quantify stupidity, for the sole purpose
that we can quantify the amount of chaos in a system
(entropy) but not the amount of cohesion. We quantify the
amount of lost lives and destruction of a war but not the
assonance of ideas in peace time.
Stupidity can therefore be quantified. that's how we
realize bad shit's about to go down. take hitler for
example. stupid. one dumb move after the other and we
could have and should have stopped him much earlier.
another example.
shooting off fireworks drunk........stupid.
shooting off fireworks drunk in an enclosed
area.........stupider.
harboring hate for someone and wanting to kill
them......stupid.
actually killing them.........stupider.
basically there are varying degrees/levels of stupidity.
the further we see an individual digress through these
levels the more dire the need for action becomes, and
either we act or the stupidity blows up in our face (world
war 2).
Intelligence can not be quantified.
You are no more intelligent than anyone else, you're just
not as dumb. Now you may be asking yourself, well what's
the difference? very simply, intelligence is the
attainment and enactment of information in a beneficial
way. being dumb is either a.) not bothering with
information or b.) using it in a non-beneficial way. now
you may say well it's kind of arbitrary as to what is
benevolent and what is not........no it's not. we ALL know
when we're about to do some dumb shit.
an example of how intelligence CAN NOT be quantified is
like so:
if one has a tremendous amount of information/knowledge in
chemistry and another has the same in german, then they
are equal in intelligence.
if one person knows merely the fundamentals of calculus
but not hte more complex varieties thereof it doesn't mean
he/she is stupider than the person with more knowledge,
mainly because he/she can attain the knew knowledge. to
resort to cliche 'anyone can learn', those that chose not
to are stupid for they launch themselves down a spiral of
ignorance and regress.
now of course our views of stupidity are quite different
and a liberal will think things stupid that a conservative
thinks brilliant.....but hopefully they can both agree
that the intelligence lies in a non-arbitrary ability to
exhange information for a common good.
ok i'm done.