So a persistent thought of mine, when I look at the world and all it's problems, is that we're not smart enough to solve them. And that as such, we should invest our efforts in being smarter, both individually and collectively. :/
@Angle I definitely think we're generally not educated enough, as a whole? Like the knowledge is out there but few know abt it. There are many fields that could be helpful to everyone, for basic understanding of the world and society, but it's generally just not taught and/or not accessible without college level education. Idk...
@Arr0w_root Mmm, no that's exactly it. There's also the fact that our general ways of talking and making decisions aren't very good. That is to say, they don't make very good use of even what individual intelligence we've got, resulting in a system that ends up /less/ than the sum of its parts. That's the whole reasoning behind my Agora forum: Make a better way to communicate, and thereby improve our collective intelligence. :/
@Angle ah I see! Well I think ways of communicating as a (more or less big) group has been explored or at least imagined but I don't know much about that... It's a shame, since with the internet we have so many possibilities now.
And I like the way you made your forum btw, it's a very interesting project
@Arr0w_root Thank you! Honestly I'm just getting started. Once I've got it federating there's all sorts of stuff I want to try. Allowing people to add new links between existing posts, for example, and thereby link multiple instances of the same argument into a single whole, or various tricks for making the thing more navigable. And of course various methods of moderation and the like. XD
@Angle your explanation of your project makes me go OwO
@Arr0w_root Haha yeah well to be fair I haven't been achieving much with it lately, so. XD
@Angle we are smart enough to solve our technical problems. we are not emotionally smart enough to solve our cultural problems.
additionally I think we actually have the emotional toolbox to solve the cultural problems, and the problem is one of adoption.
so maybe the root cause is one of rhetorical intelligence?
@joXn You mean that we're not very good at discussing our emotional tools so as to promote appropriate adoption? :/
@Angle that, and the emotional tools are threatening to the dominant ideologies, so they are actively propagandized against
@Angle I think that a lack of collective effort is the main issue
There are plenty of "smart," "talented" people who are extremely self-centered and see everyone else as stepping stones on their way to greatness, and the encouragement of that mentality is a lot of the problem
@Angle YES. I have ideas. No time to even attempt a summary right now, tho. (Sitting at Jiffy Lube waiting for my car to be done.)
I'm not super confident in this, of course. It does occur to me that it might not be very possible, or practical, to do such, and so we'd be better just sticking it out and trying to tackle the problems themselves. But I do think it's worth taking a look at. :/