I'm pretty certain I modestly proposed roving machinegun-toting death squads who shoot coughers on sight as a solution to coronavirus a year or so ago. ...wonder if the death toll would have been higher, or lower? Anyway... Tweet— Twitter API (@user) date
Would have been easier on the NHS, just scoop up the bodies and take them to the local Soylent plant.
This "against our values" shite drives me wild. It's illegal to use "language likely to insult, alarm or distress". We're legally coerced into providing lengthy documentation on our financial situations and earnings. We get angry extrajudicial pricks forcing our front doors open over TV licenses. You need three separate pieces of documentation to be legally able to drive, and another to buy fake plastic toy guns. Where's this mythical bastion of libertarian wilderness the Facebook idiots call Britain, exactly? We're an authoritarian nanny state, always have been, always will be. A diehard antivaxxer, antimasker conspiracy theorist customer of mine got really angry over the masks, brandishing one and expleting at me, "this is a violation of our civil liberties!" I don't have anything witty to say about that moment, it just stuck in my mind because I wanted to laugh and despair at the same time at what a total ****ing LARPy delusional moron he was.
I've yet to have someone quite that loopy, but I've had the 'you are free to cancel your appointment,' conversation with a bunch of patients in the last year. What's surprised me is how many are from the well spoken middle class.
Well...at the risk of drawing a circle so wide it encompasses me, my friends, my family and half this forum, I'd say the worst people for a good bit of irrational and fallacious thinking are the ones who know they're not stupid, know they're educated, correctly identify that a lot of ordinary people are less clever and less educated than them, and then get carried away and mistakenly jump to thinking 1) that they're therefore in some rarified percentile of formidable minds, that 2) this makes them much less error prone and 3) that it grants them some Sherlock power to see things that "most" people don't. I've caught myself thinking like this many times and have to check against it now.
Well... yes and no. First, as a general rule, people are dumb. There is usually a sharp intake of breath amongst my psychology colleagues when I say this --except the neuropsychologists who kind of nod: What measures as an average IQ of 100 is not much in real-life practical terms. We do not really start to think of people as "bright" until they hit 120. People who become the doctors, engineers and scientists that we consider really bright are in the 130 and up range. That is only 2% of the population (one of my former psychology colleagues actually has a certified IQ of 153; she is a rarity). The big caveat, of course, is that intelligence manifests in many different ways not necessarily captured by any test, so we need to be wary of our stereotypical prejudices and ideas of what "bright" looks like. Plenty of people who do not conform to stereotype and are considered "dumb" exhibit the kind of curiosity, creativity, intuition, reasoning and insight that definitely is "bright". You can tell from an early age. Often brightness is beaten out of kids as much as it is nurtured (and indeed, often in the process of attempting to nurture it). Following from this, the interesting bit is that most people tend to assume that other people are roughly as bright as they are. This is because for dumb people it's really hard to imagine what it's like to be bright, and for bright people it's really hard to imagine what it's like to be dumb. So dumb people tend to assume that other people are more or less like them, and therefore overestimate their own intelligence viz a viz other people. Bright people tend to assume that other people are more or less like them, and therefore underestimate their own intelligence viz a viz other people. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (reinforced by the fact that people of similar ability tend to be surrounded in the workplace by other people of similar ability). So the really bright people who are, in fact, a rarified percentile of formidable minds, don't tend to think that they are. In fact they often have huge imposter syndrome. Anyone who thinks that they're being smart usually isn't being smart.
Very well put. I do wish you'd commit to walls of text more often. Your walls of text used to be the main reason I visited Serious, but lately you just write gloomy dejected one-liners. It began around the time of Brexit, I assume that's not a coincidence. Don't let the bastards get you down, Nexxo.
Very kind of you. Yeah, I had to (as we say in the trade) process Brexit a bit... But also work got insanely busy when around the same time my boss unexpectedly died and I had to step in (managing a team of psychologists is like managing a herd of cats. I used to be one of those cats, so I suspect that Karma is having a laugh with me here). 10-hour work days became 12-hour work days during COVID. This has left me with little spare time, and generally very tired and grumpy. But I'm feeling much better lately, as my retirement towards end this year is in sight. After which I plan to move to a nice house in rural France with a bit of land for beekeeping and growing and a big-ass barn for a workshop.
I don't know how anyone can argue that, generally, humanity isn't dumb. If humanity wasn't dumb, we'd have learned from the last global pandemic. We'd have taken the lessons learned from the last major SARS outbreaks to heart and had a robust approach to controlling the severity of another coronavirus outbreak. Buuut, here we are.
And he was never heard from again... Seriously tho let us know how it goes, we'll all be in for it sooner or later so it's good to have anecdotal data.
Seems a bit pointless. 15 minutes is not nearly enough for you to mutate and start manifesting your superpowers.
