Would they have all still fought against him?
Isaac Asimov, a very intelligent person, wrote a lengthy essay to the effect that he had no idea what intelligence was. He talked about how society would generally consider him more intelligent than the nearly illiterate man who repaired his car, and yet whenever something went wrong with his car he would go to his mechanic and listen to his advice as if it was being handed down from the mountaintop by Moses himself, because Isaac Asimov knew fuck all about car repair. He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent. Isaac Asimov, who has been published in literally every section of the Dewey Decimal System, concluded that he had no firm idea as to what exactly “intelligence” even was.
In short, how could one even define “the dumbest 50%”?
And that’s why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.
He talked about how he thought that supposedly objective IQ tests were generally a series of gates designed by people already considered intelligent to keep themselves in power, and that they totally disregarded huge swaths of indispensable human knowledge and talent.
Modern psychology supports this, too. IQ tests are bullshit, and intelligence is not something that can be reasonably quantified in any meaningful sense without an insane amount of asterisks.
Also…are we counting kids? Because you’d probably find kids are consistently beneath the 50% line on any generic intelligence measuring criteria someone makes up.
I agree, I took a few IQ tests and scored high and initially it made me wonder is if everyone else was as concerned as I was watching our species being driven into early graves for yearly profit projections.
Suffice to say, most people I met who scored high lacked the foresight to even think we might be screwed. Which led me to a swift conclusion that your IQ doesn’t mean jack squat, it was a biased system that was simply a biased form of dick measuring.
Perhaps I’m disillusioned, but the best summary of our species is that old video of a chimpanzee in a zoo pissing in its mouth.
Many IQ tests, even ones that claim to be scientific, and especially free ones, artificially inflate the scores they give, to encourage the people taking them to purchase an in-depth analysis of their results.
Like, “Your IQ is 135! That’s well above average! For $39.99, we’ll give you this in-depth, 18 page question by question analysis showing how you stacked up against everyone else, and what your answers mean!”
snort “modern psychology” calls pseudoscience on someone? That’s my laugh of the day. Thank you!
Ahhhh the GOAT. Seriously, as a smart kid everything else about me was ignored. Something wrong at school? You CAN do it, so just do it. D&D breaks up mental stats, but there’s even more out there. Int, Wis, Cha to start. Then there’s motivation, happiness, and empathy, and more. The mind is super complex and an int score of 18 being all that matters is like the saying “this hammer solves my nail problem, it will surely solve my window problem.”
Lol dude is asking for scientific way to define “dumbness” in a world with infinity stones and flying people
Thanos selected the 50% luckiest people. That’s good for everyone!
Larry Niven enters the chat
I can’t get past how weirdly horny Niven was… had to stop reading the second ringworld. That being said Asimov get weirdly horny in the later foundation novels too. Both of them really liked writing in way older men dating way younger women that just comes off as creepy now.
I really appreciate Asimov’s thoughts. Ethical hat off for a second - I would suggest removing the most destructive 50%. If someone is truly stupid they might just as well be harmless. However, removing the swathe of the population that engage in violence, greed, etc. would be a far better use of the finger snap than some metric of stupidity.
Multiverse Thanos where he tries to wipe out the 50% most destructive, but snaps himself out of existence first because even by trying he made himself the most destructive person in the universe.
The definition for intelligence changed over the last 2 centuries because we keep discovering how an animal can fit the definition, and intelligence was used to separate humans from animals. Now it’s even worse because people are trying to separate AI from humans.
I like the concept laid out by Delany: in a novel he describe 3 levels of intelligence based on the understanding of various point of views, but it’s not a ranking.
The first stage is simplex: people don’t understand the science of the world, so everything is kind of magical but this concept of magic make the world hold itself and they can grasp everything and use everything with this conception of magic.
Second stage is complex: people have an understanding of science and they can explain many things, but not everything. And when they can’t explain something, they can’t cope with it, because they don’t have the conceptual tools for it. Thus they will either deny this thing existence of plug it into their existing concepts by ignoring the feature that can’t fit.
Third and last stage is multiplex : people can accept that there are theories different than the ones they know, ideas also. Point of views can shape the way you see the world, and even the scientific theories you have to explain the world can be seen as a point of view on the world, so changing this point of view can bring a new or different understanding of a phenomenon or thing or person. These points of view all coexist at the same time, none of them is more true than the other. Like the concept of magic, this allows to grasp, use or accept even the ununderstandable and the unknown, but with a better ability to understand than the simplex stage.
I like this model. But it’s more a model for open-mindedness than intelligence. But maybe that’s the thing.
Good questions from Asimov. But just like with car repair, he didn’t know this subject. It has been a field of study for a while, and researchers have worked directly on this core problem defining general intelligence distinct from specific knowledge.
This Veritassium video is a balanced overview of the topic: https://youtu.be/FkKPsLxgpuY?si=iY7QBEQK1DkzNhxI
Needless to say, no, the IQ test is not a conspiracy by people who are good at number sequence problems to keep themselves in charge of the world.
IQ of someone is not stable: it changes depending on how much you train to do it or the mental/psychological state you are in when you pass it. Thus it is not a sound scale to measure anything.
The fact that it is merely a ranking of people further push it in the realm of straight bullshit.
In Summer the Eiffel tower is higher than in Winter. Does that mean meters are not a sound scale to measure length?
Do you happen to know where Asimov published this opinion and what its title was?
Found it!
The essay is “Thinking About Thinking,” ©1989, collected in the book Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection.
And that’s why Thanos should have made everybody half as large as they once were.
Holy cow. However intelligence is defined, you’re smarter than I am. That would have been a really short film.
…and I’m just realizing that universe would look pretty much exactly like those little kid Marvel Adventures shows…
sorry to stop the circlejerk, but this is dumb. an intelligent person could learn to repair the car more easily and have more insight than a moron. intelligence exists and we all experience it everyday. the wais-r is a relatively good test, but no there is never going to be a perfect way to measure intelligence. you can say intelligence is just what the test measures which is really pretty non biased, but that’s reducing things too much. y’all know morons and people that are crazy fucking smart. experience in different subjects is distributed, but the ability to gain experience quickly is the biggest difference.
Yeah, because it’s so morally defensible to eliminate all of the developmentally disabled and republicans.
Considering that most are over 60 and believe in magical ecosystems that would suddenly stop burning with ever-increasing frequency and severity each summer overnight if West coast states where that happens most often elect more Republican leadership- and will now literally try to deny that it’s not raining outside- I highly doubt they’re that clever at all, let alone more so than one congresswoman who lives in their heads rent-free
Hang on, do you mean “with the least capacity to be smart,” or is he killing all the babies and children?
I mean, the average newborn is smarter than the average politician, so maybe it’s not as bad as we think.
Bruh babies cant even talk or have object permanence, don’t try to spin that as being smart.
They’d still be appalled and try to stop him given their strong moral code. And given that they’d be at full strength they’d probably find a way to stop him and reverse things faster than they did in OTL
I’m frankly astonished anyone could genuinely think the Avengers would ever somehow be more ok with letting Thanos kill “only the stupid people”. Like…that’s a very strange read on these characters to think they’d ever react any differently in this scenario.
But even if they were so morally and ethically bankrupt to think it may not be such a bad idea, the truth is killing “the dumber 50%” is still causing catastrophic secondary effects. People would lose loved ones. That’s enough of a reason to go Avenging.
Hell, how are we defining “dumb”? Because you may have just murdered every child under a certain age.
And given that they’d be at full strength they’d probably find a way to stop him and reverse things faster than they did in OTL
Good point. But I dunno. Thor is a big power loss, and unless Captain America gets a free pass for emotional intelligence counting, they’re short in leadership, too.
Would they have all still fought against him?
I know this is No Stupid Questions but…come on.
Why on Earth would the Avengers react any differently? Is the assumption that they’re morally bankrupt enough to actually reconsider in this scenario? That somehow letting “stupid” people be murdered is ever, in any way, acceptable?
