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:

• Hi, I'm Joe and the main thing I'm good at is art.
• Hi, I'm Joe and I'm proud of my Native American ancestry.
• Hi, I'm Joe and my IQ is 170.

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:

• Hey, don't say you've got Native American blood, that's socially inept.

^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.

• Hey, don't say you're good at art, you're a liar.

^ 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.

• Hey, don't say your IQ is 170, don't be an elitist.

^ 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!

On the whole a very good post. But here --

The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. (For example, quite recently, several respected geneticists declared that there was no such thing as race - an idea that not even the dimmest kid I knew back in Detroit would have fallen for.)

-- you misunderstand the position that you're criticizing. The claim of the geneticists is not that race does not exist, but rather that it doesn't map to the joints at which geneticists, qua geneticists, find it particularly useful to carve reality. But when trying to understand the social world, within which your kid in Detroit is steeped, Race is certainly a useful way to carve reality. And this is all that people mean when they say that Race is a social concept, not a genetic one.

That's a possibility, but it's one under which I would antipredict findings like this.

Different nations may have different gut flora, but my past googling indicates a degree of national weight average and national caloric intake which would be awfully conspicuous if gut flora were the real mechanism at work.

I don't believe in male bisexuality, though I do believe in it for women.

The decriminalization of drugs in Portugal has seen a scant increase in drug use. QED

So you think an increase in drug use following decriminalization supports your view? And you were upvoted?

The problem isn't that it can't be meaningfully defined or quantified. The problem is that it hasn't been. I have no idea how hard it is to do that. It may very well be beyond anything any human can do, but it's theoretically possible.

In the hypothetic universe, addition certainly could be defined, it's just that nobody in that universe knew how.

I find it much more convenient to, instead of lying, simply using ambiguous phrases to plant the false idea into someone else's mind. The important part is to make the phrase ambiguous in such a way that it can be plausibly interpreted truthfully. Say you don't want someone to know you went up the stairs, then you say "I didn't walk up the stairs" because you in fact ran up the stairs. Even if your lie is found out, this reduces the social cost since, if you are political enough, you can convince others that you didn't actually lie. And if you are very good at it, you can tailor the deception so that only a minority of people (which includes the addressee) would interpret it falsely; and you can then let the majority construe it as misunderstanding on behalf of the deceived.

doesn't the fact that these scenarios include self-referencing components bring Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem into play somehow?

Self-reference and the like is necessary for Goedel sentences but not sufficient. It's certainly plausible that this scenario could have a Goedel sentence, but whether the current problem is isomorphic to a Goedel sentence is not obvious, and seems unlikely.

Someone may already have mentioned this, but doesn't the fact that these scenarios include self-referencing components bring Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem into play somehow? I.e. As soon as we let decision theories become self-referencing, it is impossible for a "best" decision theory to exist at all.