I really don’t see why Epiphany is so obsessed with IQ. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is not much of a correlation between IQ and intellect beyond the first two standard deviations above the mean anyway. I have come across more than a handful of people who don’t excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights. Does it matter to me that their IQ is 132 instead of 139? No. Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?
It is also possible to inflate your IQ score by taking tests repeatedly. “One meta-analysis reports that a person who scores in the 50th percentile on their first test will be to the 80th by their third”, according to this page: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/High_IQ_society. If you are vain and think that doing well on an IQ test is a really important way of signalling intellect, then go ahead and keep doing exercises in Mensa practice books, though that would not make you more capable of critical thinking or logical argumentation.
I have come across more than a handful of people who don’t excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights. Does it matter to me that their IQ is 132 instead of 139? No. Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?
Another possibility here is that your perceptions of intelligence levels are really off. This isn’t too unlikely as I see it:
I’ve heard reports that people with super high IQs have trouble making distinctions between normal and bright, or even between moderately gifted and mentally challenged. I frequently observe that the gifted people I’ve met experience their own intelligence level as normal, and accidentally mistake normal people for stupid ones, or mistakenly interpret malice when only ignorance is present (because they’re assuming the other person is as smart as they are and would therefore never make such an ignorant mistake).
If the intelligence difference you experience every day is 70 points wide, your perceptions are probably more geared to find some way to make sense of conflicting information, not geared to be sensitive to ten point differences.
As a person who has spent a lot of time learning about intelligence differences, I’d say it’s fairly hard to perceive intelligence differences smaller than 15 points anyway. The 30 point differences are fairly easy to spot. A large part of this may be because of the wide gaps in abilities that gifted people tend to have between their different areas of intelligence. So, you’ve got to figure that IQ 130 might be an average of four abilities that are quite different from each other, and so the person’s abilities will likely overlap with some of the abilities of a person with IQ 120 or IQ 140. However, a person with an IQ of 160 will most likely have their abilities spread out across a higher up range of ability levels, so they’re more likely to seem to have completely different abilities from people who have IQs around 130.
The reason why a few points of difference is important in this context is because the loss appears to be continuing. If we lose a few points each year, then over time, LessWrong would trend toward the mean and the culture here may die as a result.
The reason why a few points of difference is important in this context is because the loss appears to be continuing. If we lose a few points each year, then over time, LessWrong would trend toward the mean and the culture here may die as a result.
Ok, FYI, if you see the words “appears to be” and “if” in my sentences, it means I am acknowledging the ambiguity. If you do not want to annoy me, please wait until I’m using words like “definitely” and “when” or direct your “could not resist” comments at someone else.
If you want to discuss how we may determine the probability of a consistent and continuing downward trend, that would be constructive and I’d be very interested. Please do not waste my time by pointing out the obvious.
If you want to discuss how we may determine the probability of a consistent and continuing downward trend, that would be constructive and I’d be very interested. Please do not waste my time by pointing out the obvious.
(First of all, as I might have already mentioned, I don’t think that the average of (IQ − 132) over all readers is a terribly interesting metric; the total number of active contributors with IQ above 132 or something like that might be better.)
I’d guess that the decline in average IQ is mostly due to lower-IQ people arriving rather than to higher-IQ people leaving (EDIT: applying the intraocular trauma test to this graph appears to confirm that), and the population growth appears to have tapered off (there were fewer respondents in the 2012 survey than in the 2011 one, even though the 2011 one was open for longer). I’d guess the average IQ of readers is decreasing with time as a reversed logistic function, but we’d have to fit a four-parameter curve to three data points to test that.
the total number of active contributors with IQ above 132 or something like that might be better
Actually, a similar concern was brought up in response to my IQ Accuracy comment and Vaniver discovered that the average IQs of the active members and lurkers was almost exactly the same:
165 out of 549 responses without reported positive karma (30%) self-reported an IQ score; the average response was 138.44.
181 out of 518 responses with reported positive karma (34%) self-reported an IQ score; the average response was 138.25.
We could separate the lurkers from the active members and do the analysis again, but I’m not sure it would be worth the effort as it looks to me like active members and lurkers are giving similar answers. If you’d like to do that, I’d certainly be interested in any surprises you uncover, but I don’t expect it to be worthwhile enough to do it myself.
I’d guess that the decline in average IQ is mostly due to lower-IQ people arriving rather than to higher-IQ people leaving (EDIT: applying the intraocular trauma test to this graph appears to confirm that)
The sample set for the highest IQ groups is, of course, rather small, but what’s been happening with the highest IQ groups is not encouraging. The specific graph in question (although I very much doubt that Gwern would intend to make that graph misleading in any way) is just not designed to clearly illustrate that particular aspect of the results visually.
Here are a few things you wouldn’t guess without looking at the numbers:
Exceptionally gifted people used to be 18% of the IQ respondents. Now they are 6%.
The total number of highly and exceptionally gifted respondents decreased in 2012, while normal and moderately gifted respondents increased.
or mistakenly interpret malice when only ignorance is present (because they’re assuming the other person is as smart as they are and would therefore never make such an ignorant mistake)
I’m under the impression that a substantial part of Hanson’s Homo hypocritus observations fall prey to this failure mode.
Is there a name for this failure mode? For clarity: The one where people use themselves as a map of other people and are frequently incorrect. That would be good to have.
Sorry about my tardiness when responding to comments. I don’t visit LessWrong very often. Maybe in future I should refrain from posting comments unless I am sure that I have the time and diligence to participate satisfactorily in any discussion that my comments might generate, since I wouldn’t want to come across as rude.
Another possibility here is that your perceptions of intelligence levels are really off.
After reading and thinking a bit about this comment, I think you might be right, especially regarding the point that gifted people might often
mistakenly interpret malice when only ignorance is present.
I am rather bad at reading other people. I am not diagnosed with any degree of autism, but I am rather socially stunted nevertheless. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I can be socially inept. This self-assessment was the conclusion of many instances where I was informed that I had grossly misunderstood certain social situations or inadvertently committed some kind of faux pas.
It is also generally difficult for me to gauge whether specific comments of mine might be construed as passive-aggressive/condescending. When you asked if my intention was to insult you, my response was “No, but I am sorry that you feel that way”. In the past, when I did not know any better, I would have said, “No, and don’t be so sensitive.” As you can imagine, that response usually escalated things instead of calming people down. It is a long and ongoing learning process for me to understand how to react appropriately in social contexts in order to avoid hurt feelings.
In short, it seems like I commit the mind projection fallacy a lot when interacting with other people: If I wouldn’t feel offended by certain ways of phrasing things, I assume that other people wouldn’t either. If I wouldn’t make such an ignorant mistake, I assume that other people wouldn’t either.
The reason why a few points of difference is important in this context is because the loss appears to be continuing.
When you put it like this, I can understand your concern.
I really don’t see why Epiphany is so obsessed with IQ. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is not much of a correlation between IQ and intellect beyond the first two standard deviations above the mean anyway.
Try reading this response to Slade’s suicidal post and you will begin to understand why giftedness is relevant, in a general sense. Gifted people, especially highly gifted people, are very different from most. If you haven’t seen that for yourself, then perhaps:
A. You haven’t met someone with an IQ like 160 or 180. Those people tend to be very, very different so maybe you are only comparing people with much smaller IQ differences with each other.
B. The people you’ve met with super high IQs behave in a way that blends in when they’re with you and minimize social contact so that you don’t notice the differences. The ones that I know tend to do that. They don’t just barge into a room and solve unsolvable science problems for all to see. They tend to be quiet, or away hiding in their caves.
C. You never asked the IQs of the smartest people you know and therefore haven’t seen the difference.
D. You feel strongly that we should express egalitarianism by treating everyone as if they are all intellectually exactly the same. There’s a movement of people who want to believe everyone is gifted, that giftedness does not exist, that it goes away, or that gifted people have some horrible flaw that “balances” them out, that they should be stifled in schooling environments in order to destroy their giftedness so that they’re intellectually equal to everybody else, and all kinds of other things. Many people hate inequality and cannot deal with the scientifically proven fact that intellectual inequalities do exist. Wanting to solve inequalities is great, but it’s important that we don’t deny that intellectual inequalities exist, and it’s absolutely, undeniably wrong to stifle a person, especially a child, in the name of “equality”. I care a lot about this cause. I hope you read this PDF by developmental psychologist Linda Silverman (I want everyone to read it):
I have come across more than a handful of people who don’t excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights.
One in six gifted people has a learning disorder. About one in three are creative. Some of them have mental disorders or physical conditions. All three of these can reduce one’s IQ score and should be compensated for on an IQ test. Unfortunately, a lot of the IQ tests that are administered (by Mensa for instance) do not include any sort of evaluation for multiple exceptionalities (jargon for when you’ve got multiple differences that affect learning).
Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?
You missed my point. My point was: “LessWrong may be headed toward cultural collapse so we need some way to determine whether this is a real threat. Do we have numbers? Yes we do. We have IQ numbers.” The IQ blurb was a data point for an ongoing discussion on the controversial yet critical topic of whether LessWrong’s subculture is dying. My point was not “Oh no, we cannot lose IQ points!”
Let me ask you this: If you were attempting to determine whether LessWrong is headed for cultural collapse, and you knew that the average IQ at LessWrong was decreasing, and you knew that you needed to supply the group with all related data, would you justify omitting that? You would have to include it if you want to be thorough, as it was related. That point is at the top because it’s new—most of the other points have been presented before. I couldn’t present the IQ data until it had been thoroughly analyzed.
I’m a psychology enthusiast with a special interest in developmental psychology, specifically in gifted adults. When I go to the trouble of thoroughly analyzing some data and sharing information that I gathered while pursuing a main interest of mine, I very much prefer respectful comments in return such as “I don’t see the relevance of IQ in this context, would you mind explaining?” as opposed to being called “obsessed”. I prefer it even more if the person double checks their own perceptions to clear up any confusion on their own before responding to me.
I have a passion for learning which is not pathological. The term “obsessed” is inappropriate and offensive. Try this: Gwern, one of LessWrong’s most prominent and most appreciated members, also has a passion for learning. Check out his website. If you do not appreciate the thoroughness with which he pursues truth—a major element of LessWrong culture—then perhaps it’s time to consider whether this is a compatible hang out spot.
If you are vain and think that doing well on an IQ test is a really important way of signalling intellect, then go ahead and keep doing exercises in Mensa practice books, though that would not make you more capable of critical thinking or logical argumentation.
You haven’t met someone with an IQ like 160 or 180. Those people tend to be very, very different so maybe you are only comparing people with much smaller IQ differences with each other.
To the extent that IQ tests are reliable, my IQ is actually measured to be 170 (no re-takes or prior training; assessed by a psychometrician). (Just supplying information here; please don’t construe this as an act of defensiveness or showing off, because that is not my intention.) I was also not only comparing people with smaller IQ differences—I have encountered people with 10+ points of IQ difference and yet who are not significantly different in terms of their abilities to contribute meaningfully to dialogues. But, of course, my sample size is not huge.
Was your intent to insult me?
No, but I am sorry that you feel that way. I can be socially inept.
To the extent that IQ tests are reliable, my IQ is actually measured to be 170 (no re-takes or prior training). (Just supplying information here; please don’t construe this as an act of defensiveness.)
Well that was unexpected. I’m open-minded enough to consider that this is possibly the case.
FYI: Claims like this are likely to trigger a fit of “overconfident pessimism” (referring to Luke’s article) in some of the members. IQ appears to be a consistent pessimism trigger.
Was your intent to insult me?
No, but I am sorry that you feel that way. I can be socially inept.
Admitting that is big of you. Thanks for that. My subjective faith in humanity indicator has been incremented a tick in the upward direction.
I see you’re new, so I’ll inform you: There are a lot of people like us here, meaning, people who know better than to game an IQ test and then delude themselves with the “results”.
I won’t say there are no status games, but that you will find a lot of people that frown on them as much as you appear to in your last comment. I don’t even believe in status.
It’s really hard to leave the outside world outside. I keep perceiving irrational B.S. everywhere, even though I’ve been participating here since August. Not going to say that there’s no irrational B.S. here or that I haven’t adjusted at all but that my perceptions still haven’t entirely adjusted.
It appears that you may have a similar issue of perceiving B.S. in comments where no such B.S. exists.
It’s best to be aware of such a tendency if you have it, as this kind of response is, for obvious reasons, kind of alienating to others. Not blaming you for it (I have the same problem). Just trying to help.
Now that we’ve established that there was a misunderstanding here, would you like to start over by choosing and clarifying a point you want to make, or telling me that you’ve reinterpreted things? That would tie up this loose end of a conversation.
Out of curiosity, do you feel significantly different from those in the IQ 130 range?
I’m open-minded enough to consider that this is possibly the case.
This sounds like identity-driven reasoning. (Antipattern: “Do I accept the claim X? I’m open-minded. Open-minded people would accept X. Therefore I accept X.”) The conclusions you draw about something should be given by your understanding of that thing, not by your identity.
You have written me several comments today. One that was fairly constructive, one that was admittedly a “sorry could not resist” and now this. This comment makes me feel nit-picked at.
I really don’t see why Epiphany is so obsessed with IQ. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is not much of a correlation between IQ and intellect beyond the first two standard deviations above the mean anyway. I have come across more than a handful of people who don’t excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights. Does it matter to me that their IQ is 132 instead of 139? No. Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?
It is also possible to inflate your IQ score by taking tests repeatedly. “One meta-analysis reports that a person who scores in the 50th percentile on their first test will be to the 80th by their third”, according to this page: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/High_IQ_society. If you are vain and think that doing well on an IQ test is a really important way of signalling intellect, then go ahead and keep doing exercises in Mensa practice books, though that would not make you more capable of critical thinking or logical argumentation.
Another possibility here is that your perceptions of intelligence levels are really off. This isn’t too unlikely as I see it:
I’ve heard reports that people with super high IQs have trouble making distinctions between normal and bright, or even between moderately gifted and mentally challenged. I frequently observe that the gifted people I’ve met experience their own intelligence level as normal, and accidentally mistake normal people for stupid ones, or mistakenly interpret malice when only ignorance is present (because they’re assuming the other person is as smart as they are and would therefore never make such an ignorant mistake).
If the intelligence difference you experience every day is 70 points wide, your perceptions are probably more geared to find some way to make sense of conflicting information, not geared to be sensitive to ten point differences.
As a person who has spent a lot of time learning about intelligence differences, I’d say it’s fairly hard to perceive intelligence differences smaller than 15 points anyway. The 30 point differences are fairly easy to spot. A large part of this may be because of the wide gaps in abilities that gifted people tend to have between their different areas of intelligence. So, you’ve got to figure that IQ 130 might be an average of four abilities that are quite different from each other, and so the person’s abilities will likely overlap with some of the abilities of a person with IQ 120 or IQ 140. However, a person with an IQ of 160 will most likely have their abilities spread out across a higher up range of ability levels, so they’re more likely to seem to have completely different abilities from people who have IQs around 130.
The reason why a few points of difference is important in this context is because the loss appears to be continuing. If we lose a few points each year, then over time, LessWrong would trend toward the mean and the culture here may die as a result.
http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/1007/
(SCNR.)
Ok, FYI, if you see the words “appears to be” and “if” in my sentences, it means I am acknowledging the ambiguity. If you do not want to annoy me, please wait until I’m using words like “definitely” and “when” or direct your “could not resist” comments at someone else.
If you want to discuss how we may determine the probability of a consistent and continuing downward trend, that would be constructive and I’d be very interested. Please do not waste my time by pointing out the obvious.
(First of all, as I might have already mentioned, I don’t think that the average of (IQ − 132) over all readers is a terribly interesting metric; the total number of active contributors with IQ above 132 or something like that might be better.)
I’d guess that the decline in average IQ is mostly due to lower-IQ people arriving rather than to higher-IQ people leaving (EDIT: applying the intraocular trauma test to this graph appears to confirm that), and the population growth appears to have tapered off (there were fewer respondents in the 2012 survey than in the 2011 one, even though the 2011 one was open for longer). I’d guess the average IQ of readers is decreasing with time as a reversed logistic function, but we’d have to fit a four-parameter curve to three data points to test that.
Actually, a similar concern was brought up in response to my IQ Accuracy comment and Vaniver discovered that the average IQs of the active members and lurkers was almost exactly the same:
We could separate the lurkers from the active members and do the analysis again, but I’m not sure it would be worth the effort as it looks to me like active members and lurkers are giving similar answers. If you’d like to do that, I’d certainly be interested in any surprises you uncover, but I don’t expect it to be worthwhile enough to do it myself.
The sample set for the highest IQ groups is, of course, rather small, but what’s been happening with the highest IQ groups is not encouraging. The specific graph in question (although I very much doubt that Gwern would intend to make that graph misleading in any way) is just not designed to clearly illustrate that particular aspect of the results visually.
Here are a few things you wouldn’t guess without looking at the numbers:
Exceptionally gifted people used to be 18% of the IQ respondents. Now they are 6%.
The total number of highly and exceptionally gifted respondents decreased in 2012, while normal and moderately gifted respondents increased.
I did some analysis here
I’m under the impression that a substantial part of Hanson’s Homo hypocritus observations fall prey to this failure mode.
Is there a name for this failure mode? For clarity: The one where people use themselves as a map of other people and are frequently incorrect. That would be good to have.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy
Sorry about my tardiness when responding to comments. I don’t visit LessWrong very often. Maybe in future I should refrain from posting comments unless I am sure that I have the time and diligence to participate satisfactorily in any discussion that my comments might generate, since I wouldn’t want to come across as rude.
After reading and thinking a bit about this comment, I think you might be right, especially regarding the point that gifted people might often
I am rather bad at reading other people. I am not diagnosed with any degree of autism, but I am rather socially stunted nevertheless. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I can be socially inept. This self-assessment was the conclusion of many instances where I was informed that I had grossly misunderstood certain social situations or inadvertently committed some kind of faux pas.
It is also generally difficult for me to gauge whether specific comments of mine might be construed as passive-aggressive/condescending. When you asked if my intention was to insult you, my response was “No, but I am sorry that you feel that way”. In the past, when I did not know any better, I would have said, “No, and don’t be so sensitive.” As you can imagine, that response usually escalated things instead of calming people down. It is a long and ongoing learning process for me to understand how to react appropriately in social contexts in order to avoid hurt feelings.
In short, it seems like I commit the mind projection fallacy a lot when interacting with other people: If I wouldn’t feel offended by certain ways of phrasing things, I assume that other people wouldn’t either. If I wouldn’t make such an ignorant mistake, I assume that other people wouldn’t either.
When you put it like this, I can understand your concern.
Try reading this response to Slade’s suicidal post and you will begin to understand why giftedness is relevant, in a general sense. Gifted people, especially highly gifted people, are very different from most. If you haven’t seen that for yourself, then perhaps:
A. You haven’t met someone with an IQ like 160 or 180. Those people tend to be very, very different so maybe you are only comparing people with much smaller IQ differences with each other.
B. The people you’ve met with super high IQs behave in a way that blends in when they’re with you and minimize social contact so that you don’t notice the differences. The ones that I know tend to do that. They don’t just barge into a room and solve unsolvable science problems for all to see. They tend to be quiet, or away hiding in their caves.
C. You never asked the IQs of the smartest people you know and therefore haven’t seen the difference.
D. You feel strongly that we should express egalitarianism by treating everyone as if they are all intellectually exactly the same. There’s a movement of people who want to believe everyone is gifted, that giftedness does not exist, that it goes away, or that gifted people have some horrible flaw that “balances” them out, that they should be stifled in schooling environments in order to destroy their giftedness so that they’re intellectually equal to everybody else, and all kinds of other things. Many people hate inequality and cannot deal with the scientifically proven fact that intellectual inequalities do exist. Wanting to solve inequalities is great, but it’s important that we don’t deny that intellectual inequalities exist, and it’s absolutely, undeniably wrong to stifle a person, especially a child, in the name of “equality”. I care a lot about this cause. I hope you read this PDF by developmental psychologist Linda Silverman (I want everyone to read it):
Myths about the Gifted
One in six gifted people has a learning disorder. About one in three are creative. Some of them have mental disorders or physical conditions. All three of these can reduce one’s IQ score and should be compensated for on an IQ test. Unfortunately, a lot of the IQ tests that are administered (by Mensa for instance) do not include any sort of evaluation for multiple exceptionalities (jargon for when you’ve got multiple differences that affect learning).
You missed my point. My point was: “LessWrong may be headed toward cultural collapse so we need some way to determine whether this is a real threat. Do we have numbers? Yes we do. We have IQ numbers.” The IQ blurb was a data point for an ongoing discussion on the controversial yet critical topic of whether LessWrong’s subculture is dying. My point was not “Oh no, we cannot lose IQ points!”
Let me ask you this: If you were attempting to determine whether LessWrong is headed for cultural collapse, and you knew that the average IQ at LessWrong was decreasing, and you knew that you needed to supply the group with all related data, would you justify omitting that? You would have to include it if you want to be thorough, as it was related. That point is at the top because it’s new—most of the other points have been presented before. I couldn’t present the IQ data until it had been thoroughly analyzed.
I’m a psychology enthusiast with a special interest in developmental psychology, specifically in gifted adults. When I go to the trouble of thoroughly analyzing some data and sharing information that I gathered while pursuing a main interest of mine, I very much prefer respectful comments in return such as “I don’t see the relevance of IQ in this context, would you mind explaining?” as opposed to being called “obsessed”. I prefer it even more if the person double checks their own perceptions to clear up any confusion on their own before responding to me.
I have a passion for learning which is not pathological. The term “obsessed” is inappropriate and offensive. Try this: Gwern, one of LessWrong’s most prominent and most appreciated members, also has a passion for learning. Check out his website. If you do not appreciate the thoroughness with which he pursues truth—a major element of LessWrong culture—then perhaps it’s time to consider whether this is a compatible hang out spot.
Was your intent to insult me?
To the extent that IQ tests are reliable, my IQ is actually measured to be 170 (no re-takes or prior training; assessed by a psychometrician). (Just supplying information here; please don’t construe this as an act of defensiveness or showing off, because that is not my intention.) I was also not only comparing people with smaller IQ differences—I have encountered people with 10+ points of IQ difference and yet who are not significantly different in terms of their abilities to contribute meaningfully to dialogues. But, of course, my sample size is not huge.
No, but I am sorry that you feel that way. I can be socially inept.
Well that was unexpected. I’m open-minded enough to consider that this is possibly the case.
FYI: Claims like this are likely to trigger a fit of “overconfident pessimism” (referring to Luke’s article) in some of the members. IQ appears to be a consistent pessimism trigger.
Admitting that is big of you. Thanks for that. My subjective faith in humanity indicator has been incremented a tick in the upward direction.
I see you’re new, so I’ll inform you: There are a lot of people like us here, meaning, people who know better than to game an IQ test and then delude themselves with the “results”.
I won’t say there are no status games, but that you will find a lot of people that frown on them as much as you appear to in your last comment. I don’t even believe in status.
It’s really hard to leave the outside world outside. I keep perceiving irrational B.S. everywhere, even though I’ve been participating here since August. Not going to say that there’s no irrational B.S. here or that I haven’t adjusted at all but that my perceptions still haven’t entirely adjusted.
It appears that you may have a similar issue of perceiving B.S. in comments where no such B.S. exists.
It’s best to be aware of such a tendency if you have it, as this kind of response is, for obvious reasons, kind of alienating to others. Not blaming you for it (I have the same problem). Just trying to help.
Now that we’ve established that there was a misunderstanding here, would you like to start over by choosing and clarifying a point you want to make, or telling me that you’ve reinterpreted things? That would tie up this loose end of a conversation.
Out of curiosity, do you feel significantly different from those in the IQ 130 range?
This sounds like identity-driven reasoning. (Antipattern: “Do I accept the claim X? I’m open-minded. Open-minded people would accept X. Therefore I accept X.”) The conclusions you draw about something should be given by your understanding of that thing, not by your identity.
Isn’t creativity a continuum? Such a sentence sounds as weird as “about one in three is tall” to me.
You have written me several comments today. One that was fairly constructive, one that was admittedly a “sorry could not resist” and now this. This comment makes me feel nit-picked at.
I started implementing this policy, and while I’m there I sometimes also glance at aunts/cousins of the comment I’m considering replying to.