WHY IT’S NOT MY JOB TO MAKE IT SIMPLE FOR SIMPLE FOLK: THE DIVISION OF COGNITIVE

WHY IT’S NOT MY JOB TO MAKE IT SIMPLE FOR SIMPLE FOLK: THE DIVISION OF COGNITIVE LABOR

(a) Have you read bacon, Locke, smith, hume, darwin, spencer, hayek and nietzsche? What about Marx, Engels, Boaz, Freud, Adorno, Foucault, Derrida? What about Cantor Poincare Hilbert, and keynes? Of course not. You don’t read original material. You probably don’t even read the people who translate their ideas into common context in intellectual history. It’s possible you read simplifications written by those that simplify the work of the translators into intellectual history. Its most likely that you ‘hear’ the rules of thumb that interested or educated people have learned from the simplifiers.

(b) Do you ask questions morally? Meaning do you ask how something CAN be true, or do you ask how you might err in how you think today? Especially given the evidence of what you know, have read, and have achieved in your life? No, you are another silly young male.

(c) Just as there is an occupational hierarchy of politicians > financiers > entrepreneurs > executives > professionals > managers > craftsmen > laborers > underclass, there is an intellectual occupational hierarchy of inventors of ideas (140+) > communicators of ideas (130+) > adapters of ideas(120+) > users of adapted ideas(110+) > users of instructions provided by adopters of ideas (100+) > imitators of instructions provided by adapters of ideas (100-) > and below 100 we get into rumours, parables, and sayings rather than the ideas themselves.

So ideas degrade with every generation downward. Common examples are that evolution is non-directional, other than the exploitation of niches, and the ludic fallacy that we can calculate probabilities of non-closed distributions.

So you know, I don’t take criticisms from dimwits seriously and I’m unkind to dimwits because I’ve found that most dimwits are either not worth my time, or they are just young men who haven’t learned how to ask questions using good manners. The way I test young men, is by shaming them. And that separates the moral young men, from the dimwits.