The problem is that it’s not a question of intelligence.
Not specifically intelligence, but I can make a very strong case that a lot of the problem comes from language. Or specifically the lack of language abilities in a percentage of the population who have missed important developmental milestones growing up.
Not speaking out my ass on this one, I have been researching the connections between learning language at an early enough age and being able to form complex or non-linear thoughts.
It’s been studied in human children who were raised by animals (this has happened more times than people realize) that even when they were taken into human society, given shelter and taught how to be a human, they are never able to learn more than the most basic language skills, using single nouns to indicate wants, but nothing more complex than that. This has led to the understanding that if language isn’t learned at an early enough age, we “pave over” parts of the brain that could have been used to learn how to turn complex ideas into abstractions, a way to view alternate perspectives and understand the views of others.
So what about the less extreme cases? What about people who just didn’t have adequate education in language skills, or were raised in an environment that squelched talking, reading, asking questions or thinking broadly. (Such as poor communities, religious upbringing, conservative policing of thought and identity, and so on.)
This is creating an entire segment of society that aren’t just kinda dim, they are actually incapable of anything other than linear, reactive thought patterns. Memories, associations, feelings… no mental “story” to explain their lives, just whatever they’re told they go along with.
You can see great evidence of this trend in the abysmal reading scores that Americans have. Nearly a quarter of our adult population is functionally illiterate and this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, people who can read a few words and understand a text message if the sender is using simple enough language and emojis. People who pretend to discard the instruction manual because they “already know how to do it” but really they just can’t form mental narratives from paragraphs of information. This is really, really bad. This is why we have Trump. This is why our market is crashing.
You make a lot of important points. I’d like to also add that those same communities actively discourage critical thinking.
We all enter the world without knowing how it works. We spend our early childhood learning the rules of reality, sometimes testing them. Consider an infant in a high chair that repeatedly drops their spoon - will the spoon fall to the ground again? Is this a consistent thing? What if it just hovers in the air this time? Gotta drop it again and find out.
Our brains not only build a set of “rules” about how the world works, but our imaginations help us fill in what we don’t know. Like how having scared feelings at night can be interpreted by children as a monster hiding in the corner. They don’t know the world with any sort of certainty, but their emotions are strong, so of course the existence of a monster makes sense.
Now imagine that nobody ever told you that monsters aren’t real. Imagine, instead, that the adults around you reinforced such fears, by using words like “demons” or “devils” to describe the creature you should be afraid of. These same adults can’t answer the “Why?” questions that kids have, except to say “God did it.” Natural scientists get blocked from information that can help them accurately understand the world.
But it goes beyond simply maintaining ignorance. When kids are raised to sustain their magical thinking past the point where it is developmentally appropriate, they never acquire the mental scaffolding upon which reasoning is built. The logical way to connect concept A to concept B is obvious to you or me, but doesn’t stand out for them. Why? Because magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality. If there are no rules to making things make sense, or if everything is some invisible creature’s “mysterious plan,” then what you or I would call a “logical conclusion” becomes just one of many, equally-valid possibilities.
magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality.
Every point you made is correct, this as well. I want to add the nuance here though, that I have considered this but it’s not final. That is to say, it’s not an impassable wall that a child can’t break through on their own. Namely because this is my origin story and I have been asked many times how I got out of it and escaped a cult-like family environment with a compound in the wilderness and everything. I had the very same magical thinking fed to me after being denied an education in any capacity for the first couple decades of my life. But I at least broke the mental spell a lot earlier, and I did it completely on my own by reaching out into the world with curiosity.
And again I think it starts with language. Because even though I was being fed magic, I have distinct memories of wrestling that magic against logic and things I understood about the world. I couldn’t tell what was real or not, and even though I was scared of “questioning faith” I was also able to use logic/language to create reasoning for my inquisitiveness. IE: “God would want me to learn about his creation.” “Maybe this science stuff can exist alongside the god stuff” and so on.
The reason I was able to have these mental debates in my head at all was I was an avid reader and my family didn’t ban comic books for my siblings, and I used those to teach myself to read. Then I learned that I could buy and horde paperbacks because I was the only one who could really read things without pictures. Most of my family was also functionally illiterate. I however had a deeply visual and story-oriented mental landscape from before puberty.
I just think if there’s any antidote to ALL OF THIS gesturing broadly then it has to be language and reading, and not reading screens but things that force your brain to construct from abstraction. That act is what makes that scaffolding you reference. You can’t logic your way into new ways of viewing the world if you don’t have a sense for logic to begin with. Yes, A to B. A child can see it for themselves if they are given that framework to start building their structured thinking.
Not putting enough money into education of the population is a crime against humanity done by the wealthy class. It’s a tragedy and it’s infuriating and it’s well understood, yet nothing ever changes, because education threatens the power of capital, while all that capital needs is cheap labor and stupid cattle consumers to support their “infinite growth”.
On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We’ve apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.
Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you’re alluding to, bad at language simply won’t show up on a platform like this that’s all text. That’s probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.
people who are, as you’re alluding to, bad at language simply won’t show up on a platform like this that’s all text
I absolutely agree, this is making for another related problem, which is it’s dividing people. We’re not all seeing the same things, we’re not understanding each other, we’re moving to wildly different spaces from each other, and it’s creating bubble universes where we view each other as separate species.
People who adore language and reading and writing are going to soak up the world’s diverse perspectives and ideas like a sponge, and will seek out other infonauts in the world and will have much broader perspectives that may in fact become exclusionary quite easily.
I don’t think someone with a more… lets call it “visual” intelligence system is a lost cause, I honestly think if you’re someone who hates reading and can’t write you’re handicapped, but we have a modern society that is supposed to at least, take care of the handicapped like we’ve been doing for millenia. There are ways you can understand the world and abstractify information, but it’s going to be a much greater challenge, and people like this are more likely to stay in their own family units and social circles of people just like them so they avoid ridicule or embarrassment.
Yes, I think we are both in agreement that there is a distinction between intelligence and education. And - while these two points often get thrown together - it matters in political contexts, particularly because the Trumpists attempt to destroy the education system which they see as an obstacle to their rule. Critical thinking and language skills matter.
Not specifically intelligence, but I can make a very strong case that a lot of the problem comes from language. Or specifically the lack of language abilities in a percentage of the population who have missed important developmental milestones growing up.
Not speaking out my ass on this one, I have been researching the connections between learning language at an early enough age and being able to form complex or non-linear thoughts.
It’s been studied in human children who were raised by animals (this has happened more times than people realize) that even when they were taken into human society, given shelter and taught how to be a human, they are never able to learn more than the most basic language skills, using single nouns to indicate wants, but nothing more complex than that. This has led to the understanding that if language isn’t learned at an early enough age, we “pave over” parts of the brain that could have been used to learn how to turn complex ideas into abstractions, a way to view alternate perspectives and understand the views of others.
So what about the less extreme cases? What about people who just didn’t have adequate education in language skills, or were raised in an environment that squelched talking, reading, asking questions or thinking broadly. (Such as poor communities, religious upbringing, conservative policing of thought and identity, and so on.)
This is creating an entire segment of society that aren’t just kinda dim, they are actually incapable of anything other than linear, reactive thought patterns. Memories, associations, feelings… no mental “story” to explain their lives, just whatever they’re told they go along with.
You can see great evidence of this trend in the abysmal reading scores that Americans have. Nearly a quarter of our adult population is functionally illiterate and this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, people who can read a few words and understand a text message if the sender is using simple enough language and emojis. People who pretend to discard the instruction manual because they “already know how to do it” but really they just can’t form mental narratives from paragraphs of information. This is really, really bad. This is why we have Trump. This is why our market is crashing.
You make a lot of important points. I’d like to also add that those same communities actively discourage critical thinking.
We all enter the world without knowing how it works. We spend our early childhood learning the rules of reality, sometimes testing them. Consider an infant in a high chair that repeatedly drops their spoon - will the spoon fall to the ground again? Is this a consistent thing? What if it just hovers in the air this time? Gotta drop it again and find out.
Our brains not only build a set of “rules” about how the world works, but our imaginations help us fill in what we don’t know. Like how having scared feelings at night can be interpreted by children as a monster hiding in the corner. They don’t know the world with any sort of certainty, but their emotions are strong, so of course the existence of a monster makes sense.
Now imagine that nobody ever told you that monsters aren’t real. Imagine, instead, that the adults around you reinforced such fears, by using words like “demons” or “devils” to describe the creature you should be afraid of. These same adults can’t answer the “Why?” questions that kids have, except to say “God did it.” Natural scientists get blocked from information that can help them accurately understand the world.
But it goes beyond simply maintaining ignorance. When kids are raised to sustain their magical thinking past the point where it is developmentally appropriate, they never acquire the mental scaffolding upon which reasoning is built. The logical way to connect concept A to concept B is obvious to you or me, but doesn’t stand out for them. Why? Because magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality. If there are no rules to making things make sense, or if everything is some invisible creature’s “mysterious plan,” then what you or I would call a “logical conclusion” becomes just one of many, equally-valid possibilities.
Every point you made is correct, this as well. I want to add the nuance here though, that I have considered this but it’s not final. That is to say, it’s not an impassable wall that a child can’t break through on their own. Namely because this is my origin story and I have been asked many times how I got out of it and escaped a cult-like family environment with a compound in the wilderness and everything. I had the very same magical thinking fed to me after being denied an education in any capacity for the first couple decades of my life. But I at least broke the mental spell a lot earlier, and I did it completely on my own by reaching out into the world with curiosity.
And again I think it starts with language. Because even though I was being fed magic, I have distinct memories of wrestling that magic against logic and things I understood about the world. I couldn’t tell what was real or not, and even though I was scared of “questioning faith” I was also able to use logic/language to create reasoning for my inquisitiveness. IE: “God would want me to learn about his creation.” “Maybe this science stuff can exist alongside the god stuff” and so on.
The reason I was able to have these mental debates in my head at all was I was an avid reader and my family didn’t ban comic books for my siblings, and I used those to teach myself to read. Then I learned that I could buy and horde paperbacks because I was the only one who could really read things without pictures. Most of my family was also functionally illiterate. I however had a deeply visual and story-oriented mental landscape from before puberty.
I just think if there’s any antidote to ALL OF THIS gesturing broadly then it has to be language and reading, and not reading screens but things that force your brain to construct from abstraction. That act is what makes that scaffolding you reference. You can’t logic your way into new ways of viewing the world if you don’t have a sense for logic to begin with. Yes, A to B. A child can see it for themselves if they are given that framework to start building their structured thinking.
Not putting enough money into education of the population is a crime against humanity done by the wealthy class. It’s a tragedy and it’s infuriating and it’s well understood, yet nothing ever changes, because education threatens the power of capital, while all that capital needs is cheap labor and stupid cattle consumers to support their “infinite growth”.
On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We’ve apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.
Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you’re alluding to, bad at language simply won’t show up on a platform like this that’s all text. That’s probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.
I absolutely agree, this is making for another related problem, which is it’s dividing people. We’re not all seeing the same things, we’re not understanding each other, we’re moving to wildly different spaces from each other, and it’s creating bubble universes where we view each other as separate species.
People who adore language and reading and writing are going to soak up the world’s diverse perspectives and ideas like a sponge, and will seek out other infonauts in the world and will have much broader perspectives that may in fact become exclusionary quite easily.
I don’t think someone with a more… lets call it “visual” intelligence system is a lost cause, I honestly think if you’re someone who hates reading and can’t write you’re handicapped, but we have a modern society that is supposed to at least, take care of the handicapped like we’ve been doing for millenia. There are ways you can understand the world and abstractify information, but it’s going to be a much greater challenge, and people like this are more likely to stay in their own family units and social circles of people just like them so they avoid ridicule or embarrassment.
Yes, I think we are both in agreement that there is a distinction between intelligence and education. And - while these two points often get thrown together - it matters in political contexts, particularly because the Trumpists attempt to destroy the education system which they see as an obstacle to their rule. Critical thinking and language skills matter.