Reality Doug: http://realitydoug.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/why-stupid-is-outsmarting-you/ Prison Weapons: http://www.correctionsone.com/contraband/articles/1961780-15-deadly-improvised-prison-weapons-and-tools/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/
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| Do not underestimate stupid people. | |
| Now, I trust with this audience that you are well aware of the science behind IQ testing. | |
| You already know that it is the most accurate diagnostic tool, the most useful one ever invented by modern psychology. | |
| That it predicts life outcomes, the probability that you'll have a good income, the probability that you'll go to prison. | |
| It predicts so many vital things. | |
| And despite so many people attempting to denigrate it, to say that it just measures how well you do it, testing, or it doesn't measure emotional IQ, even though it does correlate to that. | |
| Saying that it's just a culturally learned trait, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| You know the science on it. | |
| You know that IQ is genetic. | |
| I trust I don't need to go over all of that anymore. | |
| The fact of the matter is that the importance of IQ should not be understated. | |
| However, it's also quite easy to overstate the importance of IQ. | |
| For instance, the following slideshow, these are weapons that were designed in prison. | |
| Now, I'm sure there's going to be some naysayers saying that this was a German prisoner, a German prison. | |
| Well, that's because it was a German photographer. | |
| The fact of the matter is that inmates, despite not being particularly intelligent, can show some incredible ingenuity, some incredible creativeness, cleverness. | |
| They can do things that will absolutely shock you. | |
| Things that they would never do on the outside world. | |
| As Reality Doug recently pointed out, it's not that stupid people are stupid per se. | |
| When we see them laying about, having irresponsible children, collecting welfare, so on and so forth, when we see all of this, they look completely incompetent, completely obedient, slavish to the system. | |
| They look like a product, not a person to us. | |
| You're only seeing the surface. | |
| What you are actually getting with this huge and ever-growing underclass of welfare recipients is a highly, highly adapted organism. | |
| The same people that are completely useless outside of prison will do amazing things in prison because all of a sudden there's a purpose to it. | |
| These people are not about to get any Nobel Prizes. | |
| You know, they're not going to learn how to do differential calculus. | |
| But yet, yet, these people are capable of some pretty amazing things under the right circumstances. | |
| Don't underestimate them. | |
| They're dangerous. | |
| But also, don't underestimate them as potential allies either. | |
| You know, when you're explaining basic economics to students, you start with the analogy of the desert island. | |
| You're explaining to them why trade benefits everybody. | |
| Because you take Joe and you take Bill. | |
| And you take it that there's only two products to make on this island, apples and oranges. | |
| And so you've got Joe. | |
| He can make 10 apples in an hour or eight oranges. | |
| Got Bill, he can make 10 oranges or 8 apples. | |
| And so if each of these guys just focuses on what they're good at, one will have five apples and four or if they completely stay separate. | |
| One will have five apples and four oranges. | |
| The other will have four apples and five oranges. | |
| Whereas if they trade, they now have five of each. | |
| By trading, they are both better off. | |
| But see, economics, as with any true science, when you start looking into it, starts coming up with some very counterintuitive and very surprising outcomes. | |
| So you take the same situation. | |
| You take Joe and Bill on the desert island, except this time around, you make Joe absolutely better at everything. | |
| He is a genius, whereas Bill, Bill took the short bus to school. | |
| So Joe, he can make 20 apples or 15 oranges in an hour. | |
| Whereas with Bill, he can only make, just toss some numbers out there, five oranges or three apples. | |
| So Joe is clearly superior in all facets, and yet, and yet, if they trade, they will both still be better off. | |
| Because there is a differentiation between the skills. | |
| This is called comparative advantage. | |
| Even though Joe is absolutely better at everything, their skills are not perfectly aligned. | |
| And so by trading, by each focusing on their specialty, they are still better off than if they didn't trade. | |
| It's important to remember that with the human species, that as divergent as our brains are, as different as we are from one another, you know, you have the, in all of human mind space, you've got the greatest tyrants and the greatest humanitarians. | |
| You have a huge amount of space on the one hand, until you start comparing human minds to animal minds. | |
| And the difference between a genius and a retard, assuming we're talking about somebody with a low IQ, not somebody with brain damage or an extra chromosome, the difference between those two minds is absolutely minuscule, as between that human mind and a dog, or a chimpanzee, or a dolphin. | |
| You see, you take the chimpanzees. | |
| You put them on an island. | |
| You run an experiment to see what happens. | |
| You run that experiment a thousand times. | |
| Each time you're going to get the same result. | |
| The chimpanzees never rise above basic animal behavior. | |
| They can learn to use a stick to poke an anthill, but they can never conceptualize grammar, the order of thought. | |
| And they can never find a way to overcome their animal natures to maximize their animals' natures. | |
| They just can't conceive of it. | |
| Whereas humanity can. | |
| Humanity can build civilizations. | |
| Now, there is an element that you do need a certain percentage of the population with an IQ above a set number to achieve any level of civilization, absolutely. | |
| But the thing is, once you get that, once you have enough people with an IQ of over 120, or enough people with an IQ over 140, they can show all the other humans how to do it, how to be constructive members of society. | |
| You get that divine spark of creativity that rises above the base nature of reality, that, in a metaphysical way, goes against thermodynamics. | |
| You're getting something new, something different, something building upon itself. | |
| And that thing does involve the stupid people. | |
| So don't write them off. | |
| If you're on a desert island with a person that's a stupid person, you are still better off working with that person than working all by yourself. | |
| The stupid people have a lot of untapped human potential in them. | |
| And it says quite a bit about our society that the only time that potential gets tapped is once they're in prison and being slothful no longer benefits them. | |
| So don't underestimate them. | |
| On the one hand, they're extremely dangerous. | |
| They are clever. | |
| What you're seeing right now is a very highly adapted organism who's benefiting from sloth and laziness. | |
| They could be a major threat, but at the same time, don't discount them as potential allies because they do have that spark of creativity, that ability to do things that are just absolutely amazing, to absorb knowledge and to build technological products. | |
| Stuff they maybe couldn't invent. | |
| They maybe need somebody sharper to invent it. | |
| But they can figure out how once they've been shown. | |
| Keep your powder dry, folks, and do not underestimate people or write them off. | |
| Because if you do, you're only harming yourself. |