Erik Naggum's Ideas and Principles

The Foolish and the Unintelligent

Many net.users have noticed that I suffer fools hardly at all. It is necessary to point out that I make a sharp distinction between behavior and inherent or innate characteristics. First, people should not be criticized only for what they cannot change. Second, people should be criticized for what they should not do.

Intelligence is probably a genetically determined characteristic. The benefit of intelligence is that the range of one's thinking is longer than is necessary for day-to-day living, and thus that one may see further into the future based on one's perception of relationships between issues and things that are not easy to discover. The unintelligent will have to spend more time getting to the conclusions because they will have to trace each step more carefully. The highly intelligent will, on the other hand, have to be careful that they don't skip necessary steps. The fools, in contrast, are those who skip necessary steps on purpose, or just plain don't care whether they do or not. This is intolerable. No genetically determined characteristic should allow people to make destructive mistakes that should be avoided at all cost.