Leisure And Desire Required For Intelligence, Knowledge And Progress

[SuperiorFatties]

What I find strange about this post is that education level is associated with higher IQ, PhDs have very high IQs depending on the type of degree. Yet given your other posts (about, say, the Flynn effect) it is clear you do not think IQ is bunk. Do you realize Ray Peat is a PhD?

 

[haidut]

What I find strange about this post is that education level is associated with higher IQ, PhDs have very high IQs depending on the type of degree. Yet given your other posts (about, say, the Flynn effect) it is clear you do not think IQ is bunk. Do you realize Ray Peat is a PhD?

That does not mean modern education made these Ph.D. candidates have high IQ. Could very well be the other way around - people with high IQ tend to have higher degrees. Not sure what your point is though and how it relates to the post about modern education creating mindless robots with very little real useful knowledge. Can you please clarify?

 

[SuperiorFatties]

I was partly responding to the guy claiming PhDs to be stupid. Is there any evidence showing that it is schools that are responsible for the decline in IQ? Most of the things you share here come from academics.

 

[theLaw]

"..."Uber is the waste product of the service economy," Hyman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, a podcast. "It relies on a bunch of people who don't have an alternative." Hyman told Recode that the number of people who have to rely on temporary, freelance or other "alternative work arrangements" has been growing since the 1970s, when the era of bloated corporations gave way to businesses that optimized for short-term profits and began treating workers as disposable. "The alternative to driving for Uber is not a good job in a factory with a union wage or working in a stable office job, it's slinging coffee at a Starbucks where you may or may not get the hours you need," he said. "That is what people are shoring up. They're shoring up getting enough hours, trying to make ends meet. Oftentimes, people talk about the gig economy as 'supplementary income' ... It's not supplemental if you need it to pay for your kids' braces, or food, or rent." Hyman argued that this phenomenon could be traced back to the legions of undocumented migrant laborers who built early computers, before those manufacturing jobs moved overseas."

Unfortunately, it's actually far worse than this. The federal guidelines for a tax write-off for standard mileage deduction is around .54 cents per mile, and although Uber/Lyft pay $1-2.5 per mile, they don't count dead-miles (to the customer), and many pickups can be several miles away. In the end this destroys most of the profit from drivers, many of whom are basically borrowing from their car to pay rent. There are ways of making it profitable for drivers, but Uber/Lyft know that there will always be more new people willing to drive, so they simply don't care.

Uber has also begun to scam drivers by changing the language presented to pax (customers) by using the term "fare estimate", which leaves many drivers with only around 50% of the fare as opposed to 80% as per their agreement. This is because they can't figure out how to make the service profitable, so raising prices is all they have left. Apparently, they were counting on driver-less-vehicles much sooner, and are now stuck. Look for a public evaluation in the next 18 months to save them ($100 billion is the current estimate).

Sadly, there are still tons of well-paying jobs involving physical labor (like house-cleaning/painting), but many Americans simply don't want to do that type of work. It's not a sense of entitlement, but more just a complete lack of ambition + low expectations for their life.

 

[haidut]

just a complete lack of ambition + low expectations for their life

This is probably not their fault. If all companies optimize for short-term profit (as the article said) and treat workers like disposable units then how could anyone have ambition for anything work-related or even decent expectations for their lives? But I am seeing some good change in the younger generations (the ones coming after Millenials). They do not seem to shun physical work and in fact seem to like it more than an office job in a soul-crushing environment.

 

[theLaw]

This is probably not their fault. If all companies optimize for short-term profit (as the article said) and treat workers like disposable units then how could anyone have ambition for anything work-related or even decent expectations for their lives? But I am seeing some good change in the younger generations (the ones coming after Millenials). They do not seem to shun physical work and in fact seem to like it more than an office job in a soul-crushing environment.

Not sure I'm prepared to go that far, only because I was stuck in a bunch of dead-end jobs until I created higher-paying work for myself.

Until those well-paying manual-labor jobs dry-up, I'm still going to be optimistic that people have the opportunity to change regardless of how any industry is structured.

 

[Regina]

Actually an interesting interview:
"an arms race of being noticed"

 

[Hugh Johnson]

I was partly responding to the guy claiming PhDs to be stupid. Is there any evidence showing that it is schools that are responsible for the decline in IQ? Most of the things you share here come from academics.

That would be me? I did not claim they are stupid, I claimed they make arguments that even I can see are stupid. Look, if you go and actually read the studies being published you will find many of them to be just plain ridiculous. You will even find that the results section occasionally contradicts the abstract or the title.

When I was 16 I tried to build an understanding about how to eat healthy. Even back then as a very troubled teenager, I could not make heads or tails about the dietary recommendations given by the tenured professors etc. It's not that the recommendations were difficult, it's just that everything was self-contradictory. Of course back then I figured I was too uneducated to understand them, leading me to destroy my health. People often complain about Peat making complex argument, but I have never seen anyone make simpler, easier to understand arguments about health and diet. Because Peat is internally consistent, and his conclusions are consistent with the research he quotes.

There is a published paper I remember, some researchers had shut down a part of the human brain, leading to unconciousness. They concluded that the conciousness must therefore be constructed by that part of the brain. Of course, a person without a PhD (meaning anyone not completely incoherent) could point out that cutting the carotid artery would also shut down conciousness.

PhDs are not stupid. But they can't seem to think because they have had to accept countless false assumptions, which means they must constantly explain away reality in order to maintain their models of the world. Of course, since most of those models (you might look into NO being suddenly considered a good thing after Viagra came out) have plenty of money invested in products and research any criticism of the false assumptions is shut down.

 

[bdawg]

If intelligence requires thyroid/ATP then it is not at all surprising that exhausted people can't be very bright, regardless of their levels of education. Given that leisure in academia is basically a sacrilege (e.g. "publish or perish" rule) the only other option available to these poor souls is pharma drugs to keep the slave labor going. As such, stimulant drugs like Ritalin and AdderAll are most abused in higher education. The sad thing is that even with those drugs it is a losing proposition from the start because they destroy the brain with continued use to the people using them have to stay on them for life or quickly turn into mindless zombies upon stopping. If the current trend continues I think there will be a wave of suicides in academia similar to the homicidal wave caused by SSRI drugs.

@haidut doesn't ritalin have the same sides from prolonged use that D2 agonists like Lisuride have?

 

[Jem Oz]

Huge thank you for posting this thread @haidut it's an 'area' I'm keenly interested in. Great links.

 

[Broken man]

And curiosity is mother of desire.

 

[cjm]

"The hardest thing in the world for a person may be to free himself of his double, his automatic tendency to see himself, his faults, his shortcomings, his secret deviance in everyone he meets... And only from the moment when the double is overcome is the road open to free communication with another!" - Ukhtomskii on Dostojewski (taken from this site but it's from Mind and Tissue)

So many people don't even know they have a double, let alone the fortitude to face it and assimilate it.

"He (Ray Peat) understands that vision is a collective act, a communal work: not the romantic solitary hero working alone to save the work, but a community of persons moved by a vision shared among them and theirs by nature, by virtue of their humanity." (author's personal remarks from the quoted site)

Something about good intentions paving a road somewhere...

 

[Wolf]

That does not mean modern education made these Ph.D. candidates have high IQ. Could very well be the other way around - people with high IQ tend to have higher degrees. Not sure what your point is though and how it relates to the post about modern education creating mindless robots with very little real useful knowledge. Can you please clarify?

Counterpoint: For many of the more intensive degrees such as engineering, it actually makes more sense from a lifetime earnings perspective to work for 4-6 more years than to go back. Additionally, independent of education, being a manager tends to net you more money over being more educated. Experience(sticking around) is king.

My personal experience is that everyone who either needed some form of citizenship for the US or did not get hired due to poor grades/skillsets went into a PhD. Of course you can't generalize this to other STEM related disciplines, imagine going to school for 4 years and your job out of school pays a dollar above minimum wage and all you do is run urine tests....