I thought we were talking about gender quotas?
I thought that this thread needed a good derail since there was nothing more to say about the original subject.
The truthfulness of statement s3 is questionable/dubious, and is where the false equivalency lies.
(Your reasoning is correct, but bear with me for a moment because
I'm playing the Devil's advocate here. ;P )
It is indeed the case that "intelligence" can be conceived of as
real property that exists regardless of what
we think –
but, is it possible to
objectively measure such a property? To start with the easier end of things, measuring "non-human intelligence
for humans" is, as you pointed out, often a trivial matter: we can instantly
tell that crows are more "intelligent" than nematodes, and humans are more "intelligent" than crows (whatever that means) – these answers can be easily extrapolated by comparing the animals' behavioural and neuronal complexity with each other, simple as that. However, we start getting into trouble when we try to compare the behavioural patterns of species that closely resemble each other in terms of behavioral/neuronal complexity: Are horses smarter than donkeys? Are goats smarter than antelopes? Are flatworms smarter than nematodes? The official scientific answer at this point is "who the fuck knows?"
Things get even more desperately difficult when we try to measure differences in intelligence between
members of a single species. The fact of the matter is that we currently have
absolutely no way of objectively measuring "intelligence as such" in humans, since human intelligence tests like WAIS are obviously designed to quantify a very specific subset of possible human behavioural patterns – a very specific
kind of "human intelligence
for humans." If you want to know how accurate our intelligence tests are, well,
the Flynn effect is quite illustrative of the present state of the art, as is
the membership of Mensa (including such luminaries as Scott Adams, Jimmy Savile, Julie Peterson, and Katariina Souri).
Because we have
no objective measure of being "intelligent," the colloquial measure of "smartness" is – in a capitalist society – quite simply the abilty to
make money, period.
If John makes a buck,
then John has to be "smart" in some unspecified way (M ––> S).
If John is "smart" in whatever way,
then John sure as fuck
does make a buck (S ––> M). Therefore, to be "smart" is to "make money" and vice versa (S <==> M), as I argued above.
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Topic: Gender quotas (Read 37745 times)