From: Randall Randall (randall@randallsquared.com)
Date: Mon Feb 07 2005 - 15:51:38 MST
On Feb 7, 2005, at 4:05 PM, David Clark wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Phil Goetz" <philgoetz@yahoo.com>
> To: <sl4@sl4.org>
> Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 10:45 AM
> Subject: Re: Ethics, IQ
>
>> Would our current problems with democracy be better
>> solved by narrowing the IQ gap, or by boosting all
>> IQ equally?
>
> Do you think that most people either have the mental capacity or the
> will to
> increase their IQ? I don't think so.
What could you possibly mean by a statement about having
the mental capacity to increase mental capacity? The
idea that one could increase one's intelligence by an
act of will, likewise, seems so obviously wrong that it
seems to indicate that you and others on this list are
not using the term "IQ" to mean the same things. In
any case, Phil's question is apparently predicated on
the assumption that there is some technology available
to perform the narrowing or boosting required, as is
the nature of a thought experiment.
For everyone involved in this argument and others
recently: Please make an effort to understand what
your opponents are trying to communicate. Even where
I agree with one side or the other of some of the
ongoing debates here, it's clear that you all spend
much of your time talking past each other rather than
discussing differences of substance.
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work." -- Richard Hamming
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:50 MDT