Leo D.M.J. Aurini - June 17, 2014


Do Not Underestimate Stupid People

Topics
do not underestimate people
Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Bill
The Difference Between Good Narrative and Great Narrative Justice Versus Social Justice

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

118.57

Word count

1,248

Sentence count

108

Harmful content

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the importance of IQ, and why you should never underestimate stupid people. I use the analogy of a desert island, where there are only two products to make: apples and oranges, and one person can only make a certain number of them. And yet, if they trade, they will both be better off.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Do not underestimate stupid people. 1.00
00:00:05.680 Now, I trust with this audience that you are well aware of the science behind IQ testing. 1.00
00:00:12.600 You already know that it is the most accurate diagnostic tool, the most useful one ever invented by modern psychology.
00:00:20.820 That it predicts life outcomes, the probability that you'll have a good income, the probability that you'll go to prison.
00:00:27.640 It predicts so many vital things.
00:00:31.660 And despite so many people attempting to denigrate it, to say that it just measures how well you do at testing,
00:00:37.620 or it doesn't measure emotional IQ, even though it does correlate to that,
00:00:41.860 saying that it's just a culturally learned trait, etc., etc.
00:00:46.060 You know the science on it. You know that IQ is genetic.
00:00:49.380 I trust I don't need to go over all of that anymore.
00:00:52.200 The fact of the matter is that the importance of IQ should not be understated.
00:00:57.640 However, it's also quite easy to overstate the importance of IQ.
00:01:07.160 For instance, the following slideshow.
00:01:12.060 These are weapons that were designed in prison.
00:01:16.740 Now, I'm sure there's going to be some naysayers saying that this was a German prisoner, a German prison.
00:01:23.000 Well, that's because it was a German photographer.
00:01:26.760 The fact of the matter is that inmates, despite not being particularly intelligent,
00:01:32.140 can show some incredible ingenuity, some incredible creativeness, cleverness.
00:01:38.260 They can do things that will absolutely shock you.
00:01:41.000 Things that they would never do on the outside world.
00:01:47.340 As Reality Doug recently pointed out, 1.00
00:01:50.860 it's not that stupid people are stupid, per se. 1.00
00:01:55.260 When we see them laying about, having irresponsible children, collecting welfare, so on and so forth. 1.00
00:02:03.220 When we see all of this, they look completely incompetent, completely obedient, slavish to the system. 1.00
00:02:10.900 They look like a product, not a person to us.
00:02:16.480 You're only seeing the surface.
00:02:17.980 What you are actually getting with this huge and ever-growing underclass of welfare recipients
00:02:25.300 is a highly, highly adapted organism.
00:02:29.940 The same people that are completely useless outside of prison will do amazing things in prison
00:02:35.680 because all of a sudden there's a purpose to it.
00:02:39.120 These people are not about to get any Nobel Prizes.
00:02:42.160 You know, they're not going to learn how to do differential calculus.
00:02:45.100 But yet, yet, these people are capable of some pretty amazing things under the right circumstances.
00:02:53.600 Don't underestimate them.
00:02:55.440 They're dangerous.
00:02:57.660 But also, don't underestimate them as potential allies either.
00:03:03.320 You know, when you're explaining basic economics to students, you start with the analogy of the desert island.
00:03:16.300 You're explaining to them why trade benefits everybody.
00:03:21.100 Because you take Joe and you take Bill.
00:03:25.300 And you take it that there's only two products to make on this island.
00:03:28.800 Apples and oranges.
00:03:29.520 And so, you've got Joe.
00:03:33.180 He can make ten apples in an hour or eight oranges.
00:03:39.000 You've got Bill.
00:03:40.380 He can make ten oranges or eight apples.
00:03:43.540 And so, if each of these guys just focuses on what they're good at, one will have five apples and four.
00:03:51.720 Or if they completely stay separate, one will have five apples and four oranges.
00:03:56.220 The other will have four apples and five oranges.
00:04:00.160 Where areas, if they trade, they now have five of each.
00:04:05.160 By trading, they are both better off.
00:04:08.400 But see, economics, as with any true science, when you start looking into it, starts coming up with some very counterintuitive and very surprising outcomes.
00:04:23.800 So, you take the same situation.
00:04:27.140 You take Joe and Bill on the desert island.
00:04:30.460 Except this time around, you make Joe absolutely better at everything.
00:04:36.320 He is a genius.
00:04:39.040 Whereas Bill, Bill took the short bus to school.
00:04:42.720 So, Joe, he can make 20 apples or 15 oranges in an hour.
00:04:49.300 Whereas with Bill, he can make, he can only make, just tossing numbers out there, five oranges or three apples.
00:05:01.760 So, Joe is clearly superior in all facets.
00:05:04.780 And yet, and yet, if they trade, they will both still be better off.
00:05:12.880 Because there's a differentiation between the skills.
00:05:16.640 This is called comparative advantage.
00:05:18.000 Even though Joe is absolutely better at everything, their skills are not perfectly aligned.
00:05:28.880 And so, by trading, by each focusing on their specialty, they are still better off than if they didn't trade.
00:05:38.000 It's important to remember that with the human species, that as divergent as our brains are, as different as we are from one another.
00:05:53.400 You know, you have the, in all of human mind space, you've got the greatest tyrants and the greatest humanitarians.
00:06:03.200 You have a huge amount of space, on the one hand, until you start comparing human minds to animal minds.
00:06:10.800 And the difference between a genius and a retard, assuming we're, we're talking about somebody with a low IQ, not somebody with brain damage or an extra chromosome. 0.99
00:06:24.300 The difference between those two minds is absolutely minuscule, as between that human mind and a dog, or a chimpanzee, or a dolphin.
00:06:36.160 You see, you take the chimpanzees, you put them on an island, you run an experiment to see what happens.
00:06:47.540 You run that experiment a thousand times, each time you're going to get the same result.
00:06:52.940 The chimpanzees never rise above basic animal behavior.
00:06:58.260 They can learn to use a stick to poke an anthill, but they can never conceptualize grammar, the order of thought.
00:07:05.640 And they can never, they can never find a way to overcome their animal natures, to maximize their animal natures.
00:07:17.840 They just can't conceive of it.
00:07:20.900 Whereas humanity can.
00:07:22.940 Humanity can build civilizations.
00:07:27.860 Now there is, there is an element that you do need a certain percentage of the population with an IQ above a set number to achieve any level of civilization.
00:07:40.420 Absolutely.
00:07:41.840 But the thing is, once you get that, once you have enough people with an IQ of over 120, or enough people with an IQ over 140,
00:07:49.900 they can show all the other humans how to do it.
00:07:54.220 How to be constructive members of society.
00:07:57.460 You get that divine spark of creativity that rises, rises above the base nature of reality.
00:08:06.140 That, in a metaphysical way, goes against thermodynamics.
00:08:11.120 You're getting something new, something different, something building upon itself. 1.00
00:08:19.240 And that thing does involve the stupid people. 1.00
00:08:23.580 So don't write them off. 1.00
00:08:26.860 If you're on a desert island with a person that's a stupid person, you are still better off working with that person than working all by yourself. 1.00
00:08:36.880 The stupid people have a lot of untapped human potential in them. 1.00
00:08:42.340 And it says quite a bit about our society that the only time that potential gets tapped is once they're in prison and being slothful no longer benefits them. 1.00
00:08:55.660 So don't underestimate them.
00:08:57.640 On the one hand, they're extremely dangerous.
00:09:00.520 They are clever.
00:09:01.820 What you're seeing right now is a very highly adapted organism who's benefiting from sloth and laziness.
00:09:09.540 They could be a major threat.
00:09:13.440 But at the same time, don't discount them as potential allies.
00:09:18.120 Because they do have that spark of creativity.
00:09:21.460 That ability to do things that are just absolutely amazing.
00:09:25.580 To absorb knowledge and to build technological products.
00:09:31.240 Stuff they maybe couldn't invent.
00:09:33.580 They maybe need somebody sharper to invent it.
00:09:39.540 But they can figure out how once they've been shown.
00:09:47.600 Keep your powder dry, folks.
00:09:49.460 And do not underestimate people.
00:09:53.020 Or write them off.
00:09:55.220 Because if you do, you're only harming yourself.
00:09:59.940 Arini out.
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