There seems to be a weird need in this community to over argue obvious conclusions.
This whole post seems to boil down to:
You are altruistic and smart.
You want more altruistic and smart people.
Therefore, you should propagate your genes.
Similar to the recent “Dragon Army Baracks”, which seems to boil down to:
We want an effective group organization.
Most effective groups seem to be hierarchical with a clear leader.
Therefore, it might make sense for us to try being hierarchical with a clear leader..
I mean, I get that there’s a lot of mental models that led to these conclusions, and you want to share the mental models as well… but it seems like separating out the teaching of the mental models and the arguments themselves into separate pieces of content might make sense.
I’ve thought about the meta issue you’re raising before, so to respond to it directly:
The trouble is most people’s thinking is teleological, viz. motivated to certain ends. As such writing about an idea without addressing the teleological aspects of an idea is going to be a failure to anticipate the reader’s needs and answer their questions. Thus when presenting an idea it’s generally necessary to take both teleological and non-teleological approaches. To address teleology alone you need not concern yourself with substance, and to address non-teleology is to ignore your (very human) reader, thus both must be considered simultaneously.
To put this another way, having a theory is literally useless if you don’t know what to use it for or how to use it. Not addressing use leads to difficulty in sharing ideas, such as in academic writing in journals that has expunged all teleos and consequently fails to often engage many readers with ideas.
Even more succinctly: people come for the arguments/ideas and stay for the ideas/arguments.
As for your main point, see gworley’s reply, though I’m not at all opposed to making the distinction more clear.
You are altruistic and smart.
You want more altruistic and smart people.
Therefore, you should propagate your genes.
The post itself very emphatically states that this is NOT the chain of reasoning that I find compelling. In particular, its point would stand even if children of smart people were somehow exactly as smart as the population average.
There seems to be a weird need in this community to over argue obvious conclusions.
This whole post seems to boil down to:
You are altruistic and smart.
You want more altruistic and smart people.
Therefore, you should propagate your genes.
Similar to the recent “Dragon Army Baracks”, which seems to boil down to:
We want an effective group organization.
Most effective groups seem to be hierarchical with a clear leader.
Therefore, it might make sense for us to try being hierarchical with a clear leader..
I mean, I get that there’s a lot of mental models that led to these conclusions, and you want to share the mental models as well… but it seems like separating out the teaching of the mental models and the arguments themselves into separate pieces of content might make sense.
I’ve thought about the meta issue you’re raising before, so to respond to it directly:
The trouble is most people’s thinking is teleological, viz. motivated to certain ends. As such writing about an idea without addressing the teleological aspects of an idea is going to be a failure to anticipate the reader’s needs and answer their questions. Thus when presenting an idea it’s generally necessary to take both teleological and non-teleological approaches. To address teleology alone you need not concern yourself with substance, and to address non-teleology is to ignore your (very human) reader, thus both must be considered simultaneously.
To put this another way, having a theory is literally useless if you don’t know what to use it for or how to use it. Not addressing use leads to difficulty in sharing ideas, such as in academic writing in journals that has expunged all teleos and consequently fails to often engage many readers with ideas.
Even more succinctly: people come for the arguments/ideas and stay for the ideas/arguments.
As for your main point, see gworley’s reply, though I’m not at all opposed to making the distinction more clear.
The post itself very emphatically states that this is NOT the chain of reasoning that I find compelling. In particular, its point would stand even if children of smart people were somehow exactly as smart as the population average.