Head girls, speed vs. caliber, reductionism, all this and more presented to you the reader in the form of meandering nonsense

[Note: It may be slow around here for the next week or so.]

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By the way, I’ve figured out our disconnect re the speed/caliber distinction
I was thinking about how intelelcts might diverge past a certain level of shared capability
whereas your point was that they’d generally track across the full spectrum of talents
which is true

That’s the idea of g, but you’re saying you have a nuance to add to that?

well we’ve hypothesized that past the 130 mark or so intelligence begins to specialize re: verbal, visuospatial, mathematical…etc

My specialty is being right every time.

I was conceiving of a similar pattern where the minds tends more toward solivng mid-tier probelms quickly or towards very complicated problems

Oh, nice.
That’s probably rooted in a few things other than mere capability.
To be clear, I think you’re obviously and absolutely right.
And I imagine some people could get stuck on easy mode.
Arguably that’s one of the common high-IQ pitfalls.

it does seem to be a midwit tendency to treat everything as a simple problem, even when complex
but I also see it in people who should know better and are certainly smart enough to know better

And for some reason the latter archetype is obviously a neoliberal.

lmao

“All things reduce to an already existing checklist because we have SCIENCE.”

“all human behavior is politico-economic”
“Nothing exists that we haven’t thought of already”

So we have the same person in mind.
Another interesting thing is that this is the smart person who tends to be working on hard problems, relative to their IQ.
Arguably a victim solely of their own success and uninterrupted prosperity.
Robert McNamara being the poster child.

the tragedy of the head girl

Don’t cut off your boobs Hermione!

corollary to the peter principle: we all rise to the level of problem too complex for us to understand

I think the conceit that leads to treating hard problems as fundamentally easy ones comes from an unbroken string of formal successes.
The head girl has no Bs on her life’s report card. Maybe she’s a cat lady on pills, but those things are A-pluses. [Ed: in the sense that it’s what teacher, the textbook, and the internet said to do.]
It’s also the envy thing.
“No level exists above mine.”
There’s also an egalitarian angle to it, again driven by envy and striving.
And last, there’s the inability to detect a difference between charlatanry and good poetry.

And people tend to think in positive terms, not negative terms
the thinking is” what have I done before that would work in this situation”, not “what new insights/perspectives/algorithsm/skills do I need to tackle this new problem?”

Right, and the latter is especially compounded by a failure of rationalists to make the jump to post-rationalism.
But the fact is, you can get answers for most things today by Googling them. So people think they have a philosopher’s stone in their pockets.
But then you Google “solutions for brainfog” and it doesn’t tell you “everything you believe is a lie”.
It tells you to take your SSRIs and take a nap.
We could describe this as ossification.
Oh, oh! Another thing.
There’s also abdicating via specialization.
Tell a head girl “Write great poetry” and she can opt out by saying “I’m a doctor”.
Alternatively, she might take the egalitarian angle that “All poetry is great because there are no right answers.”
Whereas I’d be inclined to say that poetry is above my skill level.
It’s the highest of the arts.
I complain about that a lot. People think the soft things like politics and poetry are easier than physics.
Nope. They are much harder.
And I don’t just say that because I’m a sperg.
I think you need to have an IQ of 150 to write poetry.
135 is enough to do physics.
Moldbug is a great example of a head girl, now I think about it.
He apparently thinks you write poetry by being intentionally obtuse.
“Poetry is measured in footnotes per line.”

this is not an uncommon perception
confusing obscurity for artistry is a pretty common mistake in most arts
though poetry seems to be particularly susceptible to this

That makes me think of Evangelion knockoffs in anime.
Pursuing edification via obfuscation.

definitely the same principle

It makes sense that head girls wouldn’t understand the nature of profundity because for them, profound equals “authority said it”.
You really never understand the value of wisdom until you’re making your own judgment calls. And you never understand the relative importance of things until you’re playing with big stakes.
These things are opaque to women because they have no sense of accountability.
They are also less appreciative of conciseness because they have better attention spans.
I.e. Why not 1,000 pages where 1,000 words would suffice? I love reading great big books, like Hermione!
I like that Hermione ended up with a ginger. It feels like justice was served.

lol
as shakespeare put it “brevity is the soul of wit, ergo women aren’t funny”

That’s the great poet for you.
Why is Shakespeare great? Because teacher said so.

that gets more vicious the more I read it

Maybe I need to back it off a bit. I don’t dislike women, but right now they’re very frustrating.
It’s like living with someone who doesn’t know how to take care of their dog.
And refuses to learn.
Anyway, I think we’re running out of track for this rant.

some are less of a delight than others, it’s true, but it does make you appreciate the good ones
And despite everything, I do beleive that a world with women in it is infinitely better than one without any

On the bright side, if you don’t want to pay for porn you can just go to the gym.

also, counterexample to “women aren’t funny”:
https://nitter.1d4.us/ccmembersonly/status/1497290878683074560#m

Yeah, I’ll give you that one.
While it’s not true that individuals get what they deserve, it’s generally true that humanity has the company it deserves.
^That’s almost good enough to replace the old blergh header.

we must have done something really good to deserve dogs, and something very morally complicated to get cats

I like ’em.
People who like animals more than people are like an artistic expression of the burned idealist.

and people who claim to like animals more than people aspire to be seen as that type?

Yup.

perhaps not consciously or intientionally…

Self-presentation is funny that way.