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07/01/2005: "admirable traits"
it seems that good character is valued over intelligence. could this be because a sizeable amount of intelligence is directly exogenous (given semi-randomly [or by genetics or some other deterministic force]), while character is often developed through harder-to-trace personal histories? this means character has more of an unexplained (or at least, not as easily explained) component than does intelligence.
if we think it has a larger unexplained component, this means it might be more likely to be percieved as magical and mysterious, or ultimately, "human" - like "souls" and "consciousness" (the latter until recently). we tend to value things that make it hard to reduce things to their mechanical underpinnings because we feel special.
blammo! we value character over intellect.
Replies: 5 Comments
on Friday, July 1st, Jesse said
I think we value character over intelligence because the latter does not necessarily determine a person's actions or beliefs, whereas character is a deciding factor in these, if not the most influential.
I think most people have a hard time trusting high intelligence. Maybe this is because they trust their intuition more than their logic, at least when the two are in conflict, maybe character is more "human", more "natural" to understand. I do think character is a more easily measured trait - to me it seems more reliable as a measure of what someone is going to do than does intelligence. Character is grounding.
Maybe there is something lost in reducing things to their mechanical natures - we may benefit from such reductions via science and logic, but maybe we miss out on the larger picture, the emergent properties resulting from synergies we do not yet understand, or may never understand. There has been much discussion in science over reductionism vs. the holistic approach - the main question being (as to my last understanding): are we missing out by reducing things too much?
This is a good one :)
on Friday, July 1st, bin ladin's typing hand said
i already see one thing i'd like "fixed" with this setup: threaded comments. i feel like i'd want this response to your entry on my main page as a standalone, though it's going to be a reply to your comment. at least, i'd like a threaded comment dialogue, which is what phpbbblogs provide (so i now realize why they're useful)
intuition vs intelligence, intuition vs reductionism, intuition vs mechanical universe, souls vs. rational processes...
i'm skeptical about intuition, partially because i feel that i lack it and also because i feel that there are impressive rational (maybe unconscious rules) processes at hand that we don't undertstand, and labelling them "intuition" is fine, as long as people are also open to thinking about how they might work instead of lumping them into a residual category
on Monday, July 4th, Jesse said
I think it's because we don't understand them that we need to lump them into that category, maybe it gives us a sense of closure, or allows us to think we understand the universe enough to live and not have to worry about it too much.
I guess until we do understand them (through science or whatever) we'll just have to do the best we can, right? :)
You're right, this non-threaded format sucks.
on Monday, July 4th, fartbreath said
alright, so my friend trask suggested the following to get started with the blog map (that's what i'm calling the contextual blog visualization thing that organizes distrbuted blogs into converstations - if you've a better name that's fine by me)
steps:
1. write out exactly what we (i?) want
2. think about how it would look
3. find open source jank close to it
4. make changes to such jank
5. blammo!
easy, no? um...
so does this mean we'd adapt a phpbbblog dealie? i haven't really looked at them since coming to my revelation that blogs are tough to deal with without threaded stuff. it doesn't seem like it would be all that hard to build something like this from the ground up.
maybe in a few days (i'm kinda travelling now) i'll post exactly what it is i'd like. until then, i probably won't post much more.
on Wednesday, July 6th, Jesse said
I think I get the idea. I too don't think it would be that hard to build something from the ground up. Maybe starting with phpbb blog would work.
