Thursday, May 9, 2013

Rude awakening

The scale ends at 156, said the psychologist, pausing, waiting for a reaction.

Oh, and a timid smile was all he got.

The above exchange was verbatim, told to us by a friend of the K-landnews. I was relieved, and I was scared, the friend said.

You liked "The useless IQ" post very much, so we decided to drive a triplet of sharp, shiny nails into the coffin of social darwinism.

As a thank you to the friend, we offer a cheerful greeting to the proponents of social darwinism and the knowledge economy: fuck off.

We did some research and found that educators and psychologists have truly good intentions, they want to nurture the gifted children and they are trying to get away from the measure of the IQ as the number that embodies intellectual horsepower.

What we dislike are many of the mainstream discussions and articles about the exotics.

Many schools do not provide a good environment for them
Many schools do not provide a good environment for average kids either, right? If you have limited resources, why not invest them for the "average" kids who need them most? They do, really.

Modern society needs them more than ever
To fix what folks up until now have thoroughly messed up? To somehow manage to convince the average that you don't kill people for sport or religion? Or because you want resources? Or for unbridled competition with other countries? Do you really need examples of how average people have achieved things that a couple of exotics can not? No, thanks.

The knowledge economy needs more of them
That one, okay. We could have used the following reminder in the previous paragraph, but we love our "threes" as much as you do. The knowledge economy does not require anything - only people do, as long we we do not have intelligent, fully autonomous computers.
More capability of abstract thinking is nice. But all previous tech civilizations were knowledge economies, too. To us, the blood offerings to the gods are not fundamentally different from today's superstitious behaviors and the everyday brutality on the modern shop floor.

X-Men, Unabomber, Dr. Evil
We don't fault you for that, say the exotics, we are just people, too, with desires, faults, phobias, and illusions.

Great Expectations
We believe to have noticed an undercurrent of "they are not pulling their weight" in the mainstream discussions when they talked about the gifted missing their socially demanded career goals or moving furniture for a living. We hate being exploited, maybe even more than everybody hates it, said our friend. We tend to move at our own pace. If you cannot understand why Stephen Hawking declines to participate in a certain conference, you may never get it. Sorry, really.


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