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anxious Consider a group of 100 people with a Gaussian IQ distribution. Further assume that 50% of population has IQ 120 and higher and 5% have IQ 150 and higher. Let us say two exciting but useless art-forms/ qualities/ properties A and B are such that only people with IQ greater than 150 appreciate A more than B, people between IQ 120 and 150 appreciate B more than A and people having IQ less than 120 are unwilling/unable to form an opinion.
A particular form of media X(internet/ TV/newspaper) gives a lot of coverage to A and Y to B. Clearly Y will be more popular than X. The opinions of Y soon become popular opinion, and are accepted by the category of people with IQ below 120 just because they are "popular". Y dominates the market share and soon starts outnumbering X to the extent that it gets annihilated.
Further Y starts giving opinions about more important topics which cannot be verified or validated by anybody because Y itself is the source of evidence. Y is in the business of conforming to popular opinion rather than scientific opinion - distorting them - making euphemisms to keep everyone happy, covering the disease, hiding the flaws and worst of all- arguing that what it claims is right because it is popular.
Generalize this to multi-player game with grayness instead of black and white and soon you are looking at your own society.
This is dangerous.
February 16 2007, 06:41:29 UTC 5 years ago
Dost, by IQ I guess you mean intelliegnce. You are saying that elite, more intelligent prespectives will get drowned in a sea of 'lesser thought'. Because the lesser thought cannot understand the higher thought.
Read about rationalist and super-rationalist players in Game Theory. (wrt Prisoner's Dilemma)
You are right. This is dangerous, and counter-productive. Quite depressive even.
February 16 2007, 18:56:24 UTC 5 years ago
I was just trying to quantify intelligence.
In a book called Plato's children, the author argues that if Socrates lived in today's society he would still be murdered (atleast ideologically if not physically) for going against democratic opinion.