Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the seating area to the left of the Valu Mart at 7pm. From there we'll hang out for 15 minutes to catch attendees, and then head over to my apartment nearby.

Going forward, there will no longer be time blocked off for Having Dinner at the meetups, but feel free to bring food for yourself or healthy snacks to share.

Topic

This week, let’s talk about innate capability.

About social class, Siderea says:

Because people gravitate to people of their own class, and their daily lives tend to bring them into social contact predominantly with people who are members of the social classes one degree above and below, most people are very ignorant of the norms and values of the social classes more than one degree above or below their own.

This means that when people do encounter others from more distant classes, culture clash and hostility is a reasonably likely outcome. It is my suspicion that a substantial amount of the challenges of dealing with that most dread military commander, the General Public, are owing to culture clash. If in your job duties you work with the general public, whatever class you belong to, a lot of the people you encounter on the job don't belong to that class. Depending on which swath of the general public patronize of one's workplace, and which class one comes from – the waiter from Revere who works at a fancy steakhouse downtown, the doctor from Cambridge who works at the Boston Medical Center ER – it may be approximately none at all.

Working with the general public is widely seen as terrible, and I suspect this is a large part of why.

I suspect that a similar thing goes on with innate capability in its various forms, so let’s try to unpack that today.

Primary Readings: 

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/01/talents-part-2-attitude-vs-altitude/

After reading the primary readings, you can optionally choose to go down one or more of these paths of supplementary readings:

Supplementary – Intelligence

https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-of-african-hunters

https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara

Supplementary – Schooling

https://archive.fo/U3zXp [WSJ: ‘How Schools Work’ Review: The Worm in the Apple]

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/by-request-the-cult-of-smart

Some questions to consider:

• What is your initial emotional response to the readings? How much do you endorse that emotional response?
• Scott says at the end of talents pt. 2 that he had more to say, but there hasn't actually been any update on this sequence since. What do you think is missing from this sequence that could be valuable to have in an additional essay?