Coming to grips with a frustrating truth

I’d heard about Mensa many years ago, and for many years I was kind of interested in it. Every once in a while I’d see “intelligence quizzes,” which were supposed to get one interested in the group (it worked). Mensa requires an IQ test, and a minimum score, to join. Nevertheless, I looked at some samples of the discussions members had on topics related to societal issues, though, and it all looked pretty mundane. It wasn’t the intelligent discussion I expected, which was surprising. Later, I found out I’m below their entrance threshold. Based on taking a peek, though, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

I came upon the following video by Stefan Molyneux recently (it was made in 2012), and it seems to explain what I’ve been seeing generally for more than ten years in the same sort of societal discussions (though I can’t say what the IQ level of the participants was). I’ve frequently run into people who seem to have some proactive mental ability, and yet what they come out with when thinking about the society they live in is way below par. I see it on Quora all the time. Most of the answers to political questions are the dregs of the site–really bad. I’ve had no explanation for this inconsistency, other than perhaps certain people with less than stellar intelligence are drawn to the political questions, until I saw this analysis. Molyneux said it’s the result of a kind of cognitive abuse.

The reason I’m bothering with this at all is seeing what he described play out has bothered me for many years, though I’ve assumed it’s due to popular ignorance. It’s part of what’s driven my desire to get into education, though now I feel I have to be more humble about whether that’s really a good answer to this.

I found his rational explanation for this confusing. I’ve needed to listen to it a few times, and take notes. I’ll attempt to summarize.

This is a generalization, but the point is to apply it to people who are more intelligent than average, and refuse to allow inquiry into their beliefs about society:

Children who are in the “gifted” categories of IQ are told a certain moral message when they’re young, about how they are to behave. However, when those same children try to apply that morality to their parents, and the adults around them–in other words, demand consistency–they are punished, humiliated, and/or shamed for it. They eventually figure out that morality has been used to control them, not teach them. (This gave me the thought, based on other material by Molyneux, that perhaps this is one reason atheism is so prevalent among this IQ category. Rather than morality being a tool to uplift people to a higher state of being, it’s seen purely as a cynical means of control, which they understandably reject.) As soon as they try to treat morality as morality, in other words, as a universal set of rules by which everyone in their society is governed, they are attacked as immoral, uncaring, brutish, wrong, and are slandered. This is traumatic to a young mind trying to make sense of their world.

The contradiction they encounter is they’re told they’re evil for not following these rules as a child, and then they’re told they’re evil for attempting to apply those same rules to other adults when they grow up. They are punished for attempting to tell the truth, even though they were told when they were young that telling the truth is a virtue (and that lying is evil). If they attempt to tell the truth about their society, they are punished by the same adults who cared for them.

The image he paints is, to me, analogous to Pavlov’s dog, where all of its attempts to follow its instincts in a productive way are punished, leading to it quivering in a corner, confused, afraid, and despondent, unable to respond at all in the presence of food. In this case, all attempts to apply a moral code consistently are punished, leading to a disabled sense of social morality, and a rejection of inquiry into this battered belief system, in an attempt to protect the wound.

Molyneux comes to an ugly truth of this situation. This inability to question one’s societal beliefs is the product of a master-slave society: In slave societies, rules are applied to the slaves that are not applied to the masters. They operate by a different set of rules. Morality that is dispensed to the ignorant is used as a cynical cover for control. Those subjected to this inconsistent reality deal with it by trying their best to not look at it. Instead of pushing through the shaming, and demanding consistency, risking the rejection that entails from the society in which they grew up, they blindly accept the master-slave dichotomy, and say, “That’s just the way it is.” Those who question it are attacked by these same people, because engaging in that leads them back to the pain they suffered when they did that themselves.

He also addressed a psychological phenomenon called “projection.” He said,

… they must take the horrors of their own soul and project them upon the naive and honest questioner. Every term that is used as an attack against you for engaging in these conversations is an apt and deeply known description of their own souls, or what’s left of them.

I also found this summary video helpful in understanding motivated reasoning, why we’re wired to reject rational thought, and evidence, and to prefer beliefs that are inculcated and reinforced through our social groups, and their authority figures.

Molyneux sort of addressed the evolutionary reasons for it, but I have liked Jonathan Haidt’s explanation for it better, since he gets into the group dynamic of shared beliefs, and justifies them, saying that they played some role in the survival of our species, up until recently: Those who had this group-belief trait lived to reproduce. Those who did not died out. That isn’t to say that it’s essential to our survival today, but that it deserves our respectful treatment, since it was a trait that got what we are here.

What’s also interesting is that Molyneux relates the trait of motivated reasoning to the practice of science, quoting Max Planck (I’ve heard scientists talk about this) in saying that science really only advances when the older generation of scientists dies. This creates room for other ideas, supported by evidence, and critical analysis, to flourish, perhaps setting a new paradigm. If so, it becomes a new sort of orthodoxy in a scientific discipline for another generation or so, until it (the orthodoxy), too, dies away with the scientists who came up with it, repeating the cycle.

Related posts:

Psychic elephants and evolutionary psychology


Trying to arrive at clarity on the state of higher education

I’ve been exploring issues in higher education over the last 10 years, trying to understand what I’ve been seeing with both the political discourse that’s been happening in the Western world for the past 12 or so years, and what’s been happening with campus politics for as long, which has been having severe consequences on the humanities, and has been making its way into the academic fields of math and science.

Rob Montz, a Brown University graduate, has done the best job I’ve seen anywhere of both getting deep into a severe problem at many universities, and condensing his analysis down to something that many people can understand. I think there is more to the problem than what Montz has pointed out, but he has put his finger on something that I haven’t seen anyone else talk about, and it really has to do with this question:

Are students going to school to learn something, or are they just there to get a piece of paper that they think will increase their socio-economic status?

I’m not objecting if they are there to do both. What I’m asking is if education is even in the equation in students’ experience. You would think that it is, since we think of universities as places of learning. However, think back to your college experience (if you went to college). Do you remember that the popular stereotype was that they were places to “party, drink, and lose your virginity”? That didn’t have to be your experience, but there was some truth to that perception. What Montz revealed is that perception has grown into the main expectation of going to college, not a “side benefit,” though students still expect that there’s a degree at the end of it. There’s just no expectation that they’ll need to learn anything to get it.

What I asked above is a serious question, because it has profound implications for the kind of society we will live in going forward. A student body and education system that does not care about instilling the ideas that have made Western civilization possible will not live in a free society in the future. This means that we can forget about our rights to live our lives as we see fit, and we can forget about having our own ideas about the world. Further, we can forget about having the privilege of living in a society where our ideas can be corrected through considering challenges to them. That won’t be allowed. How would ideas change instead, you might ask? Look at history. It’s bloody…

We are not born with the ideas that make a free society possible. They are passed down from generation to generation. If that process is interrupted, because society has taken them for granted, and doesn’t want the responsibility of learning them, then we can expect a more autocratic society and political system to result, because that is the kind of society that humans naturally create.

A key thing that Montz talked about is what I’ve heard Alan Kay raise a red flag about, which is that universities are not “guarding their subjects,” by which he means they are not guarding what it means to be educated. They are, in effect, selling undergraduate degrees to the highest bidders, because that’s all most parents and students want. An indicator of this that Kay used is that literacy scores of college graduates have been declining rapidly for decades. In other words, you can get a college degree, and not know how to comprehend anything more complex than street signs, or labels on a prescription bottle, and not know how to critically analyze an argument, or debate it. These are not just skills that are “nice to have.” They are essential to a functioning free society.

What Montz revealed is if you don’t want to learn anything, that’s fine by many universities now. Not that it’s fine with many of the professors who teach there, but it’s fine by the administrations who run them. They’re happy to get your tuition.

Montz has been producing a series of videos on this issue, coming out with a new one every year, starting in 2016. He started his journey at his alma mater, Brown University:

In the next installment, Montz went to Yale, and revealed that it’s turning into a country club. While, as he said, there are still pockets of genuine intellectual discipline taking place there, you’re more likely to find that young people are there for the extracurricular activities, not to learn something develop their minds and character. What’s scandalous about this is that the school is not resisting this. It is encouraging it!

The thing is, this is not just happening at Yale. It is developing at universities across the country. There are even signs of it at my alma mater, Colorado State University (see the video below).

Next, Montz went to the University of Chicago to see why they’re not quite turning out like many other universities. They still believe in the pursuit of truth, though there is a question that lingers about how long that’s going to hold up.

Canadian Prof. Gad Saad describing events at Colorado State University, from February 2017:

Dr. Frank Furedi talked about the attitudes of students towards principles that in the West are considered fundamental, and how universities are treating students. In short, as the video title says, students “think freedom is not a big deal.” They prefer comfort, because they’re not there to learn. Universities used to expect that students were entering adulthood, and were expected to take on more adult responsibilities while in school. Now, he says, students are treated like “biologically mature … clever children.” Others have put this another way, that an undergraduate education now is just an extension of high school. It’s not up to par with what a university education was, say, when I went to college.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt has revealed that another part of what has been happening is that universities that used to be devoted to a search for truth are in the process of being converted into a new kind of religious school that is pursuing a doctrine of politically defined social justice. Parents who are sending their children off to college have a choice to make about what they want them to pursue (this goes beyond the student’s major). However, universities are not always up front about this. They may in their promotions talk about education in the traditional way, but in fact may be inculcating this doctrine. Haidt has set up a website called Heterodox Academy to show which universities are in fact pursuing which goals, in the hopes that it will help people choose accordingly. They don’t just show universities that they might prefer. If you want a religious education, of whatever variety, they’ll list schools that do that as well, but they rank them according to principles outlined by the University of Chicago re. whether they are pursuing truth, or some kind of orthodoxy.

For people who are trying to understand this subject, I highly recommend an old book, written by the late Allan Bloom, called “The Closing of the American Mind.” He doesn’t exactly describe what’s going on now on college campuses, because he wrote it over 30 years ago, but it will sound familiar. I found it really valuable for contrasting what the philosophy of the university was at the time that he wrote the book, as opposed to what it had been in the prior decades. He preferred the latter, though he acknowledged that it was incomplete, and needed revision. He suggested a course of action for revising what the university should be, which apparently modern academics have completely rejected. I still think it’s worth trying.

Edit 6/26/2019: I wrote the paragraph below with the original blog post (which I’ve crossed out). I’ve had second thoughts about it since then. I thought maybe universities could be replaced by online course curricula, but listening to educators, that’s been tried, and the results are not usually up to par. Most people don’t have the discipline at home for the focused learning that’s needed for what a traditional university education requires. So, the only reasonable choice is the universities need to reform themselves, returning to the pursuit of truth. If that doesn’t happen, then the choice is either their orthodoxy takes over, or our society does without them. Both of which are terrible options.

I don’t know if this will come to fruition in my lifetime, but I can see the possibility that someday the physical university as we have known it will disappear, and accreditation will take a new form, because of the internet. In that way, a recovery of the quality of higher education might be possible. I have my doubts that getting the old form back is possible. It may not even be desirable.

Related articles:

Brendan O’Neill on the zeitgeist of the anti-modern West

For high school students, and their parents: Some things to consider before applying for college

Edit 11/6/2018: What Happened to Our Universities?, by Philip Carl Salzman


Alan Kay: Rethinking CS education





This is from 2015:


The bicycle



Radiation vs. nouns



Cooperation and competition in society







What we are, to the best of our knowledge


The raison d’être of computer science


Shipping the design





Don’t be fooled by large efforts below threshold















Erosion gullies






Edit 2/9/2019: I highly recommend watching the last episode of a 1985 PBS/BBC mini-series by James Burke, called “The Day The Universe Changed.” The episode is called “Worlds Without End.” Burke gave a nice, long-form exposition of what our “erosion gullies” are like (he called them structures), and made clear that they are a fundamental part of our how brains work. Part of what he demonstrated was the same as what Kay demonstrates about how our perceptual systems distort reality to fit what our brains believe should exist. That’s part of what “erosion gullies” are. We can’t get away from them. Burke also explained that they are the only way that we can understand things. So, the idea is not to reject them, but to understand that they exist, and gain skill in getting out of one and into another one, which is hopefully more accurate, and/or leads to greater human flourishing.

An implication of this is that we can really be certain of nothing, but an important caveat that I can’t stress enough is that we can gain useful knowledge out of that uncertainty that is reliable, within constraints (which is to say “within a structure,” to use Burke’s term, or a “gulley,” using Kay’s term). This is the essence of modern science, and our modern society.

“Fast” vs. “slow”















“Getting there”


Related post:

Reviving programming as literacy

The necessary ingredients for computer science

—Mark Miller,

The best summation of what I have hoped for my country









The true promise of Interactive Computing: Leveraging our Collective IQ

The true promise of Interactive Computing: Leveraging our Collective IQ


Collective IQ Review

dce-jcnprofiles-interviewInteractive computing pioneer Doug Engelbart
coined the term Collective IQ
to inform the IT research agenda



View original post 1,949 more words

Brendan O’Neill on the zeitgeist of the anti-modern West









Which computer icons no longer make sense to a modern user?



Which computer icons no longer make sense to a modern user?


Psychic elephants and evolutionary psychology













Central to Foster’s argument is that “climate change” is a moral crusade, a moral argument–not a scientific one, that uses the authority that our society gives to science to push aside skepticism and caution regarding the actions in “climate policy” that are taken in its name.





Back in 2009 I wrote a post called “Getting an education in America.” I went through a litany of facts which indicated we as a society were missing the point of education, and wasting a lot of time and money on useless activity. I made reference to a segment with John Stossel, back when he was still a host on ABC’s 20/20, talking about the obsession we have that “everyone must go to college.” One of the people Stossel interviewed was Marty Nemko, who made a few points:

  • The bachelor’s degree is the most overvalued product in America today.
  • The idea marketed by universities that you will earn a million dollars more over a lifetime with a bachelor’s than with a high school diploma is grossly misleading.
  • The “million dollar” figure is based solely on accurate stats of ambitious high achievers, who just so happened to have gone to college, but didn’t require the education to be successful. It’s misattributed to their education, and it’s unethical that universities continue to use it in their sales pitch, saying, “It doesn’t matter what you major in.”

It turns out Nemko has had his own channel on YouTube. I happened to find a video of his from 2011 that really fleshes out the points he made in the 20/20 segment. What he says sounds very practical to me, and I encourage high school students, and their parents, to watch it before proceeding with a decision to go to college.

Nemko talks about what college really is these days: a business. He talks about how this idea that “everyone must go to college” has created a self-defeating proposition: Now that so many more people, in proportion to the general population, are getting bachelors’ degrees, getting one is not a distinction anymore. It doesn’t set you apart as someone who is uniquely skilled. He advises now that if you want the distinction that used to come from a bachelor’s, you should get a master’s degree. He talks about the economics of universities, and where undergraduates fit into their cost structure. This is valuable information to know, since students are going to have to deal with these realities if they go to college.

It’s not an issue of rejecting college, but of assessing whether it’s really worth it for you. He also outlines some other possibilities that could serve you a lot better, if what motivates you is not well suited to a 4-year program.

Nemko lays out his credentials. He’s gotten a few university degrees himself, and he’s worked at high levels within universities. He’s not just some gadfly who badmouths them. I think he knows of what he speaks. Take a listen.

A new visiting scholar comes to CU Boulder

The University of Colorado at Boulder started up a visiting scholar program for conservative thought last year. I had my doubts about it. I don’t like the idea of “affirmative action for certain ideologies.” One would think that if a university’s mission was to educate they wouldn’t care what one’s political leanings were. That’s a private matter. I would think a university, fully cognizant of its role in society, would look for people who are not only highly qualified, and show a dedication to academic work, but also seek a philosophical balance, not ideological. However, it has been noted many times how politically slanted university faculty is, at least in their political party registration. Looking at the stats, one would think that the institutions have in fact become bastions for one political party or another, and listening to the accounts from some scholars and students, you’d think that the arts & humanities colleges have become training grounds for political agitators and propagandists. I don’t find that encouraging. The fact that for many years universities have not used this apparent tilt toward ideological purity as an opportunity for introspection about what they are actually teaching, but seem to rather take it as a mark pride, is also troubling. All of the excuses I’ve heard over the years sound like prejudices against classical thought. I’d like to ask them, “Can you come up with anything qualitatively better” (if they’ve even thought about that), but I’m afraid I will be disappointed by the answer while they high-five each other.

Having actually witnessed a bit of the conservative thought program at CU (seeing a couple of the guest speakers), I’m pleased with it. It has an academically conservative slant, and, from what I’ve seen, avoids the “sales pitch” for itself. Instead, it argues from a philosophical perspective that is identified as conservative by society. The most refreshing thing is it’s open to dialogue.

The first professor in the program, Dr. Steven Hayward, wrote a couple excellent speeches I read on political discourse.

I thought I would highlight the profile that was written for the next professor in the program, Dr. Bradley Pirzer. He appears to be a man after my own heart on these matters. I’m looking forward to what he will present.








