Is intelligence important?

[History_Buff]

I disagrees.

When you subsidize a product or service, you hide the true costs. Consumers' cost-benefit judgements become less reflective of reality, producers have less incentive to deliver a better product or service, and the product or service in question gets over-consumed, leading to it being over-produced as well in response to demand. Ergo, a plague of philosophy majors working behind the counter at Starbucks.

Look, I'm not saying that a philosophy degree is a bad thing to have. If someone wants to pay $120,000 for their philosophy degree, then hey, whatever floats their boat. Similarly, if someone wants to pay $120,000 for a Lamborghini, then that's cool with me. But just like we shouldn't expect the taxpayers to fork out money for a luxury car, we shouldn't expect them to fork out money for what is essentially a luxury education.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have science, math, and engineering degrees: extremely useful to any sort of modern economy. This same usefulness means that people who have these degrees will earn crap tons of money, which in turn means that it's quite viable for them to simply take out a loan from a bank or work their way through college.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some incense to burn at the altar of the free market.

This ignores the fact that education is, in general, a social good. If the US (or Canada, or wherever) had the exact same demographic makeup, but everybody had been to a major college for four years, even if they all got liberal arts degrees, I strongly believe that country would be a much better place.

In fact, even if they didn't remember a word a professor said, that would probably be true. Just having people in an environment where they are exposed to many different types of people is enormously helpful in building a welcoming, cosmopolitan society.

Now, I'm not advocating forcing people to go, but it really should be free.

 

[Hygro]

hahaha what

I'm surprised you find this weird. It's becoming increasingly the mainstream view on what intelligence is. That natural preference leads to natural practice which appears as talent and intelligence.

 

[Quackers]

I agree that intelligence is not a fixed attribute.

People who are traumatized can exhibit behaviours indistinguishable from those of people who have severe learning difficulties.

how does that work?

 

[Borachio]

I'm not very sure. It's certainly happened to me - to a limited extent.

I suppose the brain just gets overloaded with information - and internal churning - and can't process external inputs too well.

I first came across it through the work of that Instrumental Enrichment guy (I forget his name) working in Israel with holocaust survivors.

edit: Reuven Feuerstein

His methods made sense to me at the time. Though I've since heard his reputation amongst mainstream educators is very low.