It’s very easy to notice, even if you’ve managed to live the lives many xo users have of pervasive IQ-based social segregation is that many people from the left-hand think people from the right-hand are engaging in pure bullshit. At the most basic level, this defect is a failure of theory of mind.

A mistake that even smart children often make is to equate knowledge of any empirical facts with being smart. So a child can think it’s a huge coup over an adult that she knows where she hid something and they do not. This is in spite of the fact that the child is sophisticated enough to pass the basic theory of mind test, where Person A places an object in a room, and Person B hides it in another space, and they are suprised if Person A immediately looks for the object in the new location they should be unaware of. This is because understanding that the engine of reasoning power is the essence of intelligence rather than the objects it runs on (and can generate) is another level of abstraction in the theory of mind altogether.

Left-hand adults, however, can make the same mistake as the child, and often think intelligent people are hopelessly stupid for not knowing facts that they might have no reasonable access to. Another level is failing to understand that certain facts might not be relevant or useful to the other person, or likely to have been casually encountered. Beyond this is being able to understand how lacking certain facts might be indicators of intelligence (given certain conditions) and competence while others may not be— yet note how each level of intelligence-assessment sophistication relies on more layers of counterfactual reasoning.

Once you understand this necessity of counterfactual reasoning in so many important tasks, and the fact that the capacity for this is not evenly distributed, other traits associated with IQ begin to make sense, such as time-preference, morality, and curiosity; the first two have been explored before, but the underpinnings of curiosity in particular less-so, so to address this briefly:

The most basic form of curiosity is investigating the alien object in your immediate environment. Even relatively unintelligent animals engage in this behavior, and it may be wholly instinctual. However, it can also be abstracted (and likely often is for the right-handers) in the following way: “What will I be like if I know this object/its origins?” Of course, there are levels of counterfactual reasoning that can occur after the more instinctual noticing/observation of the alien, but the question is what sort of thing lies at the basis of the more sophisticated forms of curiosity.

Intellectual curiosity, in particular, requires the capacity to imagine what it would be like to know something one doesn’t know, and at the more philosophical level it involves some capacity to imagine what it would be like to be the person who has engaged in speculation about this unknown and decide whether or not this is pleasurable, valuable, etc. Chiding the left-hander for his failure to be curious about things is fruitless; he might fail at the basic level of even being able to imagine that knowing something else is possible, much less be able to appreciate the fact that there might be something to know. (I can’t even blame Ta-Nehisi Coates so much for being a normie who is put forth as a public intellectual despite not even knowing St. Augustine existed – and not being sophisticated enough to be embarrassed by this fact – so much as I am by the negrophiliacs who put him in the situation in the first place.)

My experience trying to work with poors and so forth is that counterfactuals should always be as grounded in the everyday as possible, and avoided entirely when possible. If I were to advise anyone here about budgeting, my instruction would largely consist of if/then statements and generalized rules. Working in social work, I found that such advice wasn’t just generally useless, it was often dangerous; it was far better to just instruct clients on actions with no openings for the exercise of judgment. Trying to get the client to envision a counterfactual such as an emergency or repair expense was often impossible, and generally only worked if I could at least be certain they had experienced the particular problem before (note: every prole woman has smashed her phone).

But still: the conversation of the right-hand largely exists in the realm of possible worlds. The right-hander might even attribute to these an ontic status (ljl David Lewis ljl), but only world (and maybe its near-twins) ever exists for the normie. The gap is bigger than you imagine, and charity demands you recognize this.

I’ve talked elsewhere on Are Great Bort about the problems social structures relying on excessive abstraction produce for the mass of humanity. I even believe they are bad for the intelligent, as abstraction is effortful and easily short-cutted (low energy boomers are generally idiots for this reason). But it is frightening in particular to realize that counterfactual reasoning is the essence of political decision-making, and we freely admit everyone to this process without any sense of what we’re actually doing thereby.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4372898&forum_id=2#39047238)

like you, oooh

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=4372898&forum_id=2#45072671)