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Jiro comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:
Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:
^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.
^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are "good" or "bad" is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.
^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they're an elitist when they're just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn't prove anything about your personality.
So, why doesn't Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn't he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?
We have a million excuses for this. "People feel threatened by intellect." Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn't excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn't excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.
"That's just not polite." <- This is an interesting excuse. I'll explain why:
Imagine you go into a room and say "Hi, I'm white." (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)
Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.
If someone tells you "That's just not polite." why are they saying that? They're probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They're assuming that you're prejudiced.
What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn't happen frequently, they'd probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.
Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They'd wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety - after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they're upset. They'd start to hide hints that they're white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they're prejudiced, just the same way that they'd be oppressed by an assumption that they're all criminals.
Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That's prejudging them based on some trait that they can't control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.
I'm glad you think it's okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that's okay. But a looooooot of people don't!
Saying you're proud of your Native American ancestry often won't be interpreted as a claim of superiority because such statements are saiid in a social context where everyone knows that Native Americans have suffered and saying you're proud of your ancestry is not asserting that you're superior, but rather than you're not inferior.
Furthermore, to the extent that it is a claim of superiority but objecting to it will be called racist, that's a problem with the ease of making accusations of racism, not a problem with the objection.
There isn't prejudice against people with a high IQ. There's prejudice against stating that you have a high IQ, unlike for minorities, where even minorities that try to "pass" for the majority will be the target of prejudice if found out.
And there's only prejudice against stating you have a high IQ because stating you have a high IQ is stating that you are superior based on flimsy reasons. (And no, you can't state your IQ without claiming you're superior, since you can't escape the social context.)
Perhaps you intended that within a specific context from the comment above like "These introduction examples don't cause a problem because of prejudice, but because they sound like claims to superiority", in which case I'd agree with you. However, I disagree about whether there exists prejudice against people with high IQs in the broader context. If that's truly what you meant, I'd be happy to elaborate, but please specify so I am not accidentally arguing with a strawman.
I am very interested in this concept of superiority, because "superiority" seems to be an important key here. What does it mean to you? If a person is superior, is it okay to treat them differently? What sort of differently and why? If someone makes a claim to superiority, how do you think people should react, and why?
I'm sure you could find one specific example in the world of someone prejudiced against someone because of high IQ, but I'd say that in general, there isn't such prejudice. There may be prejudice against intelligence, but that's not the same thing, and even that only exists in a few limited situations.
I don't see the relevance. A claim of superiority (especially an unwarranted one) isn't the same thing as actual superiority.
I'm not clear what the difference here is between being prejudiced against someone because of IQ, and because of intelligence; since IQ is a pretty good measure of intelligence, it'd be pretty hard to be prejudiced against one and not the other...
In any case, there do seem to be historically a lot of cases of anti-intellectualism (I like the Khmer Rouge targeting people with glasses), and traditional societies do favor high Openness a lot less than modern societies (see Miller).
That subclause is doing an awful lot of work in your argument.
I'd say that IQ measures part of what most people consider intelligence, but isn't the same as it, and even as a measure of that it isn't an exact measure.
Well, it's a good thing we've got a century or so of work on the positive manifold/g. I wouldn't want to make anything but one of the best established tests do so much work in my argument!
It does not measure all cognitive traits, no, and as a measure it has a pretty precisely known amount of unreliability in it.
Yet I fail to see how either of your sentences are a reply to my comment.