Using Nuance to Combat Indoctrination

From what I've observed, Intelligent people seem to value nuance. Smarter people are more likely to use big words. But the goal of using big words should be to establish nuance, and not to invoke artistry. Artistic language is like mental masturbation. People like Jordan Peterson and many modern day philosophers have made a living off of sounding smart to dumb people, but not actually offering much else to further societal progress. Just because you can use a bunch of ambiguous language, does not make you smart.

Ambiguity is easy. You can just say a bunch of words like beauty, love, virtue, etc. and people will pretty much always find a way to agree with you because they are free to insert their own meaning into the loose framework of words you've created for them. If you want to communicate more effectively, use words that can easily be traced back to simple referents in the real world. If you speak technically to untechnical people, they will be confused, but the burden should fall on them, and not your communication. When intelligent people speak to each other, they are able to speak directly with one another and not fear that they will evoke an unintended emotional response. Stupid people have the tendency to let their emotions and instincts guide their reaction, but the smarter you get, you tend to empathize with people because you realize no one really says exactly what they mean.

We have a thought, we try to find words to convey that, but there are always lapses in communication. Intelligent people fill these lapses with empathy, and unintelligent people fill them with emotion, or poor judgement. By using the word stupid so many times above, I may be unintentionally invoking a sense of status superiority over those who don't understand things. Many stupid people will get angry with me (emotion), instead of understanding context and realizing that communication is imperfect (empathy). You could argue that another word fits the context better, and closes these emotional gaps, and I would probably agree, but for the sake of ease I just decided to use "stupid". If your initial response was to label me with a single word, you should now be able to understand the point I was trying to make about the use of language.

This is also why it's much easier to indoctrinate stupid people. If you use a bunch of emotion invoking words like horrifying, bigoted, racist, communist, etc. You can easily make a stupid person feel angry, or fearful, until they conform to your set of beliefs. Religious texts and political news stations are riddled with words meant to invoke an emotional response, and less intelligent people eat that shit up. To avoid being labeled as an iconoclast, or plainly: asshole, people tend to just let ambiguous language slide. I mean just think about the use of the word "faith" for a moment. People rarely approach this language with reason. This is not necessarily implying that those examples have no reasonable aspects, but they are not fundamentally grounded in reason. We should normalize asking clarifying questions.

We leverage emotions because it's faster. I can quickly convince a stupid person that communism is bad by using colorful language. A smarter person, however, might want to see data, evaluate cases, or analyze different factors. They would hopefully both arrive at "communism = bad" in their brains, but the latter process takes much longer.

When it comes to opinions, laziness is the elephant in the room.

Lazy people form opinions based on the trust that other people did the work. This saves them time and effort, which they like. Obviously time is of the essence, and you can't just discount everything because you haven't empirically reviewed it, but smart people are less willing to hand out trust, and more willing to put in the work. And that's what allows them to accumulate real knowledge.

Typically what happens in an objective process is that you don't arrive at a binary "communism = good, communism = bad" opinion. In your head, you may weigh a list of pros and cons and then outwardly communicate your conclusion in a simple way. But unidirectional communication doesn't provide a basis for understanding, and is only effective in convincing stupid people, or people who already trust your judgement.

This is why I believe cancel culture to be so pervasive. People are lazy and incapable of evaluating nuance. I agree that some things should always be out-of-bounds, but ignoring context and neatly packaging someone with a single word is a result of faulty reason. In reality, the world and everything in it is complex. If you want to understand something you have to put in the work. Subjectivity leads to emotion, and if you want clear judgement you should try to avoid it.

Well what's the point of having clear judgement? Ideally, your judgement must be grounded in results. If you think you're so smart, but this leads you to alcoholism or laziness, just how smart are you really? There are many people that devote their whole lives to understanding, and feel good about themselves because they tell themselves everyone else is dumber than them. A common trait that accompanies this archetype is masked envy. A lot of times these "smart" people see the "stupid" people leading much better lives than them, and so they blame the system, adopt a victim mindset, or become jealous. You're not smart if you can identify complex problems, you're smart if you can identify simple solutions.

Being smart means nothing unless you use it to achieve the results you desire. Intelligence is an ambiguous word that really doesn't mean anything. I think the word efficacy is more along the lines of what I mean here. If you aren't where you want to be, take responsibility, and improve. I know that the odds might be stacked against you, and logic might tell you to stay where you are, but is that something you want to be right about?

"People romanticize their plans but dread the execution. The magic you’re looking for lies in the work you’re avoiding"

"laziness is the elephant in the room"

"Intelligent people don’t identify complex problems they identify simple solutions"