Comment by godelski

You were the one who interpreted "Here's examples of smart peaceful people" as "smart == peaceful". I was never attempting to make such a claim and did say that. The whole thread is about bad assumptions and bad logic.

  > is not the most effective strategy of communicating that.

The difficulty of talking on the internet is you can't know your audience and your audience is everybody. Yes, this should make us more aware about how we communicate but it also means we need to be more aware how we interpret. The problem was created because you made bad assumptions about what I was trying to communicate. There are multiple ways to interpret what I said, I'm not denying that, it'd be silly to because this is true for ANY thing you say. But the clues are there to get everything I said and when I apologize and try to clarify do you go back and reread what I wrote with the new understanding or do you just pull from memory what I wrote? Probably isn't good to do the latter because clearly it was misinterpreted the first time, right? Even if that is entirely my fault and not yours. That's why I'm telling you to reread. Because

  >>>> So we can't conclude that greater intelligence results in greater malice.

Is not equivalent to

  >>> assuming that intelligence will necessarily and inherently lead to (good) morality

We can see that this is incorrect with a silly example. Suppose someone says "All apples are red" and then someone says "but look at this apple, it is green. In fact, most apples are green." Forget the truthiness of this claim and focus on the logic. Did I claim that red apples don't exist? Did I say that only green exists? Did I forget about yellow, pink, or white ones? No! Yet this is the same logic pattern as above. You will not find the sentence "all smart people are good" (all apples are green).

Let's rewrite your comment with apples

  > If that was what you meant to say though, you've gotta admit that opening a paragraph with "The other weird assumption I hear is about how all apples are red", and then spending the rest of the paragraph giving examples of different types of green apples, is not the most effective strategy of communicating that.
 

Do you agree with your conclusion now? We only changed the subject, the logic is in tact. So, how about them apples?

And forgive my tone, but both you and empiricus are double commenting and so I'm repeating myself. You're also saying very similar things, we don't need to fracture a conversation and repeat. We can just talk human to human.