This is actually why insulting people’s intelligence is generally just lazy and inaccurate, aside from any problematic aspect. Because many people who believe wrong things are actually quite intelligent, and they apply that intelligence quite cleverly to defending wrong positions. I would have hoped that someone like you, with all your pretenses of being an enlightened progressive, wouldn’t resort to attributing every disagreement to your opponents’ innate mental inferiority.
For example, the reason you come to wrong conclusions like this has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence or any innate characteristic, it’s because you’re full of yourself. You don’t bother to understand people’s actual reasons for coming to the conclusions that they do. I suspect that I have a pretty decent read on you, actually - you’re probably rather sharp and grew up a big fish in a small intellectual pond, the people around you generally were wrong and uninformed, so there was little value in listening to them. I can recognize this psychological profile because I fit it myself. Eventually, you find a room that you’re no longer the smartest person in, and you either learn to listen or you burn out and avoid it (for me, I aced every test through high school and undergrad and then hit upper division physics and realized that I couldn’t just instantly grasp it like I could with other stuff and suddenly had to learn how to study with others). Because the thing is that actually good ideas and conclusions come from cooperative, collective effort, beyond what even the sharpest person in the world could come up with on their own - it’s why the peer-review process is such an essential part of science.
Like, have you ever considered the possibility that a disagreement might not stem from one side being deficient, misinformed, or developmentally impaired, but rather from people having different values, experiences, and priorities? Is it possible that you haven’t actually solved philosophy with objectively correct positions that a person would have to be brain damaged to disagree with? Can reasonable people ever disagree?
They’re very good at excuses, fallacies, and mental gymnastics. Those are reasoning too. Just not very advanced reasoning.
This is actually why insulting people’s intelligence is generally just lazy and inaccurate, aside from any problematic aspect. Because many people who believe wrong things are actually quite intelligent, and they apply that intelligence quite cleverly to defending wrong positions. I would have hoped that someone like you, with all your pretenses of being an enlightened progressive, wouldn’t resort to attributing every disagreement to your opponents’ innate mental inferiority.
For example, the reason you come to wrong conclusions like this has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence or any innate characteristic, it’s because you’re full of yourself. You don’t bother to understand people’s actual reasons for coming to the conclusions that they do. I suspect that I have a pretty decent read on you, actually - you’re probably rather sharp and grew up a big fish in a small intellectual pond, the people around you generally were wrong and uninformed, so there was little value in listening to them. I can recognize this psychological profile because I fit it myself. Eventually, you find a room that you’re no longer the smartest person in, and you either learn to listen or you burn out and avoid it (for me, I aced every test through high school and undergrad and then hit upper division physics and realized that I couldn’t just instantly grasp it like I could with other stuff and suddenly had to learn how to study with others). Because the thing is that actually good ideas and conclusions come from cooperative, collective effort, beyond what even the sharpest person in the world could come up with on their own - it’s why the peer-review process is such an essential part of science.
Like, have you ever considered the possibility that a disagreement might not stem from one side being deficient, misinformed, or developmentally impaired, but rather from people having different values, experiences, and priorities? Is it possible that you haven’t actually solved philosophy with objectively correct positions that a person would have to be brain damaged to disagree with? Can reasonable people ever disagree?