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J_Taylor comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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I enjoy your precision.
You make my verbiage look sloppy. (:
Sorry for seeming to ignore this comment for a few weeks. I was busy.
Right now the way I'm seeing this is that because IQ differences are not seen as something that can cause a person a prolific number of differences that are socially relevant for lots of things other than status, it's often perceived as a status grab when it's not.
There are also a whole bunch of other problems that, combined, paint a picture of oppression. OrphanWilde did an experiment in this very thread, asking "Actually, let's try an experiment: My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220. What is your reaction?"
The result was that he was accused (in the context of the experiment, by people who, I realize, probably do not literally believe these things) of lying by Alicorn and gwern and later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux.
I was the only one that showed willingness to entertain the idea that OrphanWilde might not be a liar or a psychopath. I suppose, technically that's not oppression against people you believe to be gifted, it's discouragement toward people you believe not to be gifted. However, what happens when people have the same attitude of not believing other types of people about their differences? "Oh you're not really homosexual, let's send you to the psychologist and have that fixed." They may have good intentions but the result is definitely oppressive. If people jump to conclusions about a group of people - even the conclusion that the specific individuals in question aren't part of the group - then those assumptions can oppress the group in question.
Then there's the fact that 50% of gifted children in America are never given an IQ test, yet they require special education to prevent them from developing problems like learned helplessness due to being placed in the wrong environment.
Terman did a study that challenged commonly held beliefs that gifted people tended to be ugly, and have a lot of problems, and revealed various myths. That was in 1921, but there are still echos of that mentality - people frequently associate negative things with giftedness as if trying to balance things out and make everyone equal again on some imaginary scale - when we shouldn't be viewing our equality any differently regardless of intellectual differences anyway.
As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.
This leads them to oppress.
Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective, supportive or unsupportive?
If gwern suspected OrphanWilde of being a sociopath, surely he would have made a PredictionBook post.
But seriously, I've read the posts I think you are talking about. Nobody has such suspicions.
OrphanWilde was only doing an experiment. I didn't mean to say those guys were serious about their accusations. They behaved that way in the context of the experiment. Most likely they do know better than to take the experiment literally. I realize this. (:
I hate pointing out the obvious, but I guess I have to now. edits my post
I apologize for my lack of explicitness.
Here gwern states that someone possessing transcendent charm is not sufficient evidence for one to conclude that they possess a 200+ IQ. (He mentions other possibilities of them having a "mere" 140+ IQ or them being a psychopath.)
Here gwern states that the world contains more psychopaths than geniuses.
Here is a well-done ramble about the overlap between psychopathy and genius.
I cannot find any post by schminux that would explain why you think he was pretending to accuse OrphanWilde of being a psychopath.
Now to clarify: I am holding that gwern and schminux never publicly suspected OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. I am further holding that gwern and schminux never publicly pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. These events did not occur, nor did events resembling them occur. Thus, this:
is almost a complete non sequitur, apropos of nothing.
You can't find those because some wonderfully helpful person decided to hide my post. Search for "comment score below threshold" and look inside of there for "psychopath".
Ctrl-F is helpful if you didn't know about it.
There's likely no single individual involved, wonderfully helpful or otherwise. If a comment dropped below the default display threshold, it's probably because three more people operating independently downvoted the comment than upvoted it.
Considering that the posts I linked to were descendents of your post (I assume you were referring to this one?), it would be safe for you to assume that I had read it. (I also do not filter posts by karma value.)
Is there, in fact, a post that you think would support the claim:
? If so, could you please post a hyperlink?
I can't be certain, but it's possible that the post which led to shminux' inclusion on that list was this one - in which shminux quoted gwerm's conclusion that a gifted conversationalist is at least as likely to be a psychopath as a genius.