Comment by bonoboTP
1 day ago
There's less consensus around what you're talking about that you imagine, which was my initial point. Smart people aren't just this academic bubble that you think it is. Not seeing such views made you develop this association of "smart" has to mean "interprets cultural products according to my political ideology". My reactive reaction was to point out that this isn't so.
I didn't make any claim about being smart or not aside from brief mockery of people who care about the word and things like IQ tests
I'd personally trust a rigorous, well-evinced, and methodical dissection of a topic by someone with completely average intelligence over a lazy broad generalization by someone who scored high on a paper test that people (wrongly) assume maps onto the ability to assess and analyze the world [0]. which isn't to say there isn't any clinical significance from something like the Stanford-Binet, it's just that there's a wide gulf between the lay person's understanding of 'high IQ' and clinical applications [1]. and, accordingly, I am someone who did score high enough on a psychologist administered IQ test when I was but a wee lad that universities were sending my family letters requesting that I be a part of their high-IQ child studies but you're convinced I'm middle of the curve so how valid is it, even?
the thing I value from academia is predominantly peer review and constant critique by people whose entire job is to perform epistemically rigorous analysis. this is something that's very uncommon when it comes to culture warriors on social media. and you must be very far removed from any kind of academia if you think they all universally agree - put a post-structuralist in a room with someone who still favors deconstructionism and you won't hear the end of it
funnily enough, clinical psychology is the research I linked to about toxic masculinity that you broadly generalized as worthless ivory tower ideology. so it wouldn't make sense then to value something like 'smarts' or 'IQ' since those, too, are concepts that emerged from the very same ivory towers, in those exact departments rife with ideological bias
[0] https://som.yale.edu/news/2009/11/why-high-iq-doesnt-mean-yo...
[1] https://opened.cuny.edu/courseware/lesson/48/student/?sectio...
I've participated in peer review from both sides, and it's much less impressive than people imagine from the outside.
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