> i'd be interested to know how the list feels about this. do you feel that
> people in general are smarter than they are given credit for?..does it only
> seem as if the general level of knowledge, understanding, and intelligence is
> slipping?..or is this a legitimate concern?
Maybe intelligence should be viewed at several levels. There's the
personal intelligence, at which level a LOT of people seems stupid and
ignorant. :-)
Then theres the public, common, shared democratic intelligence where
some kind of subconcoius consensus decides what is right or wrong. Where
the local stupidity in an individual is leveled out by means of
statistics. Like the invisible hand in the marketplace, and the
selection of government in a democracy.
The thing is that it is impossible to be very smart in the many areas
that this world offers. How many people are really experts in things
like society, technology, art, bussines, sociology, politics etc. If
there's an infinite way to view things, and things to know, and we can
only learn a small subset of them really well. Then we are in fact all
pretty stupid aren't we? But somehow society seems to be humping along
pretty ok.
Probably Because we all decide from that little subset of things that we
know. All those subsets probably makes for smart decisions if theres
enough of them overlapping in a big population.
MAX M
New Media Director & Multimedia Artist
Private biz: mailto:maxm@maxmcorp.dk
http://www.maxmcorp.dk
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http://www.maxmcorp.dk/graphicnovel/index.htm
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