I got distracted by lions

Poll, that I didn't even write down in a notes file but am just typing directly here:

"Should people be concerned or upset if a situation seems to harm stupid people, like if they can't get jobs?"

Yes

I'm not sure

No

This is, basically, an indirect test for awareness of the hidden problem.

I would say the answer is yes, and yet I may have acted like other people would not answer yes.

It is not really fair to just state that "stupid people create problems". If you believe in evolution, two million years ago we were all only as smart as other monkeys. Everyone was stupid, and we became better; societies became more successful than other societies, and stupid people also played a big role in that success.

But because of the hidden problem, people gain more awareness of the potential for stupid people to cause outcomes that other people may regard as very harmful, even if they may not be willing to admit it; and so people can come to view stupid people as their enemies, which is not at all helped by stupid people using bad words and acting like other people are their enemies. But it's hard to blame them, because if it's a war, who can ever say who started the war?

(When I talked about Jewish people a few posts back, it made me think afterwards about apples and my animal name given to me by my oldest sister, which I'm not sure if I've mentioned on this site. I still think that it's about awareness of the hidden problem; not that "knowledge" is "knowledge of the hidden problem", but that degraded and unreliable signal accuracy can only affect cultures that have come to believe in knowledge, as useful information that can be communicated to others. A war can only exist if people know it exists, and this is early evidence.)

Anyway: it's better to avoid fighting. People don't like to admit to being stupid, and it's often considered an insult, but people who are stupid would prefer if other people saw them in a friendly way, rather than as an enemy. A lot of people don't want help or even sympathy, because people can use helping someone at one moment in time as an excuse not to help them in the future, but giving someone a job where they provide the same value as other workers is not providing them with special privileges. (Noting that people with physical disabilities like blindness also often want to find paid work. In my second job, as a dishwasher, there was a cook who sometimes had seizures that interrupted his work; he did not want to lose the job, but he did.)

To be honest I may have forgotten why I made this post, and before I try to remember, Knowledge: role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons often have two statistics related to thought. In D&D, they are Wisdom (sought by clerics, who gain their power from deities, and apparently also by psionicists) and Intelligence (sought by wizards, who gain their power from raw magical potential in the world). In World of Warcraft, they are Spirit and Intellect, which were apparently intended to have a similar RPG flavor, with the first sought by healers and the second sought by mages.

There was an explanation that I remember, of the difference: "Intelligence is knowing that it will rain. Wisdom is knowing you should get out of the rain." I don't know if that's a good or accurate explanation. I think that maybe wisdom could be better contrasted with knowledge, which is not the same as intelligence: the idea here being that signal accuracy becomes more important, and its effects including decreased fitness for intelligent individuals are more prominent, in larger communities, where everyone does not already know everyone else.

Wisdom is a word that is (at least in the culture that I know, having been born at a certain time, and not necessarily familiar with how the word was used 200 years ago) associated with old people. Old people being more wise does not necessarily mean they are more knowledgeable than someone who is 20~30 years old and like been picking herbs for 20 of those years. This is the knowledge distinction: knowledge is useful information that can be communicated, or maybe replicated. Wisdom, then, is maybe decisions that are reached, possibly from information that would not be seem 'useful' enough to be classified as knowledge: the memory that someone had a certain facial expression before or after certain events, from which could be inferred their emotional state and values, even if neither the exact expression nor the inferred information can be communicated to other people or written in a book as reliable information.

So in a sense, wisdom would have predated knowledge. A lion might be wise, or maybe people are just impressed by lions sleeping all day and conserving their movement. It would be much easier to conclude from a lion's behavior that he is wise, than that he has any knowledge beyond awareness of the things that an observer could also see (or hear, or smell).

Almost been an hour since I started writing this, so if I have forgotten its purpose, not entirely surprising. Now it has been an hour.

If you read this post, please tell me if this seems like a useful poll. Of course I don't expect anyone to respond, and if they did it would be a trap since they would be acknowledging awareness of this idea and creating a moral dilemma for themselves.