Theme: Incentives

WHY IS THERE WHITE TRASH?

—Curt: Can you explain the whole white trash phenomenon? How can a country so wealthy and full of opportunities have white trash? I anticipate that your answer is likely to be “it’s all IQ” or something along these lines, but aren’t there opportunities for dumb people as well?—-

“All happy families are the same. All unhappy families are different”

“All domesticate-able animals are the same. All un-domesticate-able animals are different”

“All ‘good’ people are the same, all ‘bad’ people are different”

IQ is correlative, but insufficient explanation for cause. But personality is sufficient.

If we take all these variables:

Visualization challenged vs Visualization/spatial intelligence

Communication challenged vs Verbal intelligence

autistic vs solipsistic

introversion vs extroversion

constancy vs novelty

disciplined vs undisciplined

secure/calm vs nervous/sensitive

compassionate/cooperative vs suspicious/antagonistic

Impulsivity vs non-impulsivity

submissive vs aggressive

With just these variables, we humans have the ability to construct cooperative, disciplined and satisfied minds, or aggressive, undisciplined and unsatisfied minds.

The reason people in the bottom classes are generally difficult to employ MIGHT be intelligence, but all research I have read of late (when we see pseudoscience slowly receding in social science) is pretty consistent in stating that the unemployable people are just ‘bad personalities’. Much of the time it is that they constantly get negative feedback for their behaviors, and this effectively drives all of us into frustration.

White trash is a minority in western civilization but in many cultures it’s the majority. Our culture systematically eliminated these people over many centuries. So they are smaller in number, but now rapidly breeding.

It’s not all IQ. It is just that IQ and ‘good’ behaviors very often increase accordingly. Or that IQ allows us to COMPENSATE for our bad behaviors while lack of it forces us to give into those bad behaviors.

INFORMATINO

I use the information model to study human behavior. And so I focus on the fact that all of these behaviors are constructed by the ability to organize and process information that gives us hormonal (chemical) rewards. Broken people have less ability to gain psychic rewards. Healthy people have more opportunity to gain psychic rewards.

Each of us has a frustration budget.

People at the bottom burn through that budget pretty frequently.

you can have a dumb person with all good traits, and a smart person with all bad traits. It just isn’t that common.