[Richard Dawkins is an excellent example. He is a dogmatic bully who claims in principle to value free thinking and scientific skepticism, but who in point of fact has dedicated his life to advancing an empirically wrong, and morally pernicious world view. He spoke out recently about how mild pedophilia was not a bad thing, I think he has some serious underlying emotional issues which he has not only not processed, but in repressing which he has made a career for himself, and won the admiration of uncritical thinkers everywhere.]
Be all that as it may, our task, the goal of our thinking, ought to be to figure out how to build a better society. To build a better society, you build better individuals. This amounts to developing emotional and then mental health. Put in a more felicitous way, it amounts to developing methods people are encouraged to follow which we know as scientists will lead to optimal outcomes. Nobody “does” anything to anybody. That is what socialists and utopian bullies do. We create an environment and an opportunity. The environment is created through political and economic freedom, and the opportunity through freedom of action and conscience.
I am meandering. I do that sometimes. Let us take a concrete example, the ghettos. A black kid born in the ghetto is some large multiple more likely to kill or be killed, be put in jail, suffer a variety of mental and physical health ailments, suffer from addiction, etc. You know the drill. We all do. We just live in nice places, and forget how perhaps 1 in 15 Americans lives.
Are these outcomes their fault? Yes and no. To take a specific example, you can’t just tell these kids to get a job. First, there aren’t many jobs available to them with the skill sets they typically bring to the interview. They are in many cases worth less than the Minimum Wage, at least until they get trained up. The perceived lack of a way forward, and in many cases the reality of a lack of a way forward, readily breeds frustration and violence.
Further, black people are just not as smart as white people, on average. IQ tests do a good job of measuring things like the abstract ability to anticipate outcomes, to perform symbolic operations, and in my understanding persons of African ancestry typically score about 15 points lower than white people, which is quite significant.
This is a practical problem. You cannot expect the same pay if you are not as smart as other people. Is this their fault, though? Their birth certainly isn’t, but it’s unclear how much of this is mutable, and sensitive to the unstable and violent places they grow up.
Have we ever done an experiment on trying to raise IQ’s? For example, I personally would support making a brain building program like Lumosity available for free to anyone who earns less than, say, $30,000 a year.
I have things to do. I’m not making my point well, but what I am trying to point to, clumsily, is that in any sort of purposive activity–and the main goal of thinking is problem solving, since our sense of satisfaction and contentment is not dependent on it,and frankly often disrupted by it–is not categorize, but to move. Where do we want to go? What would a better world look like? What tools do we have? What do we know, what do we think we know, and how do we go about exploring the huge dark areas of things we don’t know?
Oi. that isn’t it either. I’m going to stop now, and try again later. I am being foggy.