My objection btw isn't about false positive or false negative errors, it's about the very idea of exceptionally privileging exceptionality at the expense of the ability of the ordinary to pursue completely ordinary lives
Conversation
Replying to
Mediocrity will do as it does without help. Hoping for the exceptional is raging against the dying of the light. The former is important to come to terms with, but holding it up as an ideal is perverse.
1
Replying to
Nope it will not. Without help, "exceptional" nearly always ends up seriously oppressing "ordinary"
2
Replying to
What do you do with someone who is exceptional at creating the systems you'd like to see?
1
Replying to
historically they haven't been created by exceptional people but by ordinary people under weird conditions
you're begging the question of the supposed value of exceptional people and assuming ordinary people are worthless drags on the special
1
1
If you take it as axiomatic that "great" people exist and that all value comes from them, you will land on exactly the sort of apparently self-evident conclusions and contempt for the ordinary you seem to
1
Replying to
You're reading a lot into my questioning but at least that answers some other Qs I had.. But you're mistaken, I think you're correct on the broader point but there's a fine line I'm trying to clarify for myself between recognition of the thing and creation of mythology around it.
1
Replying to
I'm not. I've watched the general tendency and pattern of your comments/replies over several years, as well as your own posts on FB etc. It's clear that you start from very different assumptions than I do on most of these questions.
1
I think your revealed axioms (and I'm confident I'm reading them correctly, I know you well enough) are basically wrong, but that's fine. Just futile to argue across such a big divide in axioms.
1
Replying to
FWIW I do think great people exist in the Carlyle sense, I just think their role and relationship to everyone else is broadly misunderstood and over-simplified. At the end of the day we're just talking about hierarchy and reversion to the mean. The rest is value judgments.
1
Replying to
Yep, it's clear you think this, along with a rapidly growing number of people over the last decade
I don't argue, but as you no doubt realize I don't agree either
Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content
Show

