Who Needs a Brain in the 21st Century? (So What, Who Cares? vol 4, issue 2)
Hello!
Editor's Note: This newsletter was supposed to go out on Friday and it was flagged for offensive content by a robot. A human had to review it and confirm that lo, I'm not out recruiting for the alt-right. Enjoy the delayed newsletter.
Another Friday, another urge to spend the entire weekend making the entire house a mess in the name of "cleaning" and "organizing." I can't decide whether to just lie down until the impulse passes or go with it.
Editor's Note The Second: By Sunday, the impulse was so strong, I went to Ikea. On a Sunday afternoon! I KNOW. Also, I committed to holding a yard sale on August 11. So that's my weekend. How was yours? Ping me via Twitter -- @lschmeiser.
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Before there was Idiocracy, there was C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons," published in Galaxy Science Fiction in April 1951.
"The Marching Morons" outlines what happens when a minority group of smart people asks a revived 20th-century man what they can do with the masses of low-intellect people who have outpopulated them; the 20th-century man's solution is lifted straight from the Nazi playbook. Kornbluth was writing a scant 18 years after Germany began interning people in concentration camps yet his story feels unnervingly relevant in 2018.
"What will we do with people who aren't as smart as we are?" was a question that reverberated down the 20th century. More than a few answers have been profoundly inhumane. (For example, the state of California sterilized 20,000 people they deemed "unfit" to reproduce, and the people in charge of those sterilizations systemically targeted Latinx women.) Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is a great examination of the idea of biological determinism. Among the topics he tackled: the notion that one's genes determine one's intellect and ergo, one's value to society. He examined the biases that undergirded some of the most high-profile research of the early 20th century, then asked the reader to examine their own biases qua intellect and societal value.
Since I cover tech and business, I go to a lot of events where I hear about how artificial intelligence is going to improve how we work. Many companies are carefully positioning AI as the friendly helpmeet working with a white-collar employee, not replacing them through automating pattern-recognition work. So I hear about how intelligent assistants will help us work smarter, not harder. There's a lot of commitment to smart in these events.
That "smart" is a successful corporate sales pitch in an age where one political party says higher education is a net negative for the U.S. is notable. It certainly seems to be confirming the worst fears of this 2016 piece from The Atlantic, "The War on Stupid People." In it, we learn that higher IQs confer unfair advantages in the opening decades of the 21st century:
According to the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a long-running federal study, IQ correlates with chances of landing a financially rewarding job. Other analyses suggest that each IQ point is worth hundreds of dollars in annual income—surely a painful formula for the 80 million Americans with an IQ of 90 or below. […] Studies have furthermore found that, compared with the intelligent, less intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some types of mental illness, become obese, develop heart disease, experience permanent brain damage from a traumatic injury, and end up in prison, where they are more likely than other inmates to be drawn to violence. They’re also likely to die sooner.
The piece also points out that the rise of automation eliminates the kinds of jobs that use to keep people of all cognitive capacities employed. (It does not, however, mention the decline of labor unions, which used to ensure job protections and decent wages for these jobs.)
By the end of the piece, the reader is asked, do you want to live in a society by and for the cognitively gifted?
So what? With the caveat that "smart" and "college educated" are not interchangeable, let's agree that one (the education) is commonly used as a signifier for the other.
We as a country do not agree on the idea that a college education is valuable -- even though getting a college education has demonstrable economic benefit for the recipient, something that lands with some audiences where "but a well-rounded education leads to critical, analytical thinkers" will not.
A college education is even positioned as the engine of ruinous societal disruption: both The Atlantic and Time recently ran pieces positing that the existence of college-educated elites is responsible for the stratification of U.S. society. These pieces are coming out right as two other higher-education stories are taking off in the mainstream: the ruinous effects student loans have had on a generation of American adults, and the likelihood of a great crash in the American higher-education market.
It's not hard to see that the idea of "the merits of a college education" is now up for debate. It will be interesting to see if "smart" is still a selling point afterward.
Who cares? People who earn a living in higher education. While we'd all like to believe that everyone goes to college because the primary purpose of an education is learning for the sake of knowledge, the reality is more nuanced. A college education is a filter for job opportunities. It's a way to reinforce socioeconomic status or try to improve it. And it's a place to learn.
If a college education loses some of that cultural currency, it's harder to make the argument to sign on for six figures in student loan debt if the end result doesn't pay off in either financial or social currency. There may soon come a time when bypassing a college education is the smart play in the U.S.
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Your pop culture recommendation for the weekend: I am really into unchallenging television right now. There is a time and a place for prestige TV drama and that time is NOT NOW and that place is NOT IN MY LIVING ROOM.
My favorite exuberantly silly show this year was the already-been-canceled LA to Vegas, which followed the adventures of a flight crew and a few regulars on a Southwest Airlines knockoff air carrier, and oh my goodness, I had no idea Dylan McDermott was so damned funny until I saw him play Captain Dave.
This show scratched the Happy Ending and Weird Loners itches: Twenty-two minutes of unabashed, sweet-natured weirdos and the mayhem they attract.
I am very happy to report that LA to Vegas is streaming on Hulu, so if you don't already have an account, beg someone for their log-in and watch this glorious, canceled-too-soon gem.
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