#midwit

[chornykot]

[vath-and-such-vinluv-s-stuff]

Made a new painting for my Art Hisyory class I have to take because my university requires I take creative writing to graduate. It is called "The Lone Artist" and it's based off of the Renaissance "Corporate" Workshops that erased the individual creative for the "Brand" of the Renaissance Man.

[sykesplaining]

The ironic thing about the midwit meme is twofold:

1. that it's basically become the conservative "chud" that is

2. used almost exclusively by conservative midwits.

The problem is, while chud[*] is a typical postmodern Leftist Dadaism nonce (in English: nonsense word), midwit itself has a valid definition. Mid means middle or median, average. Wit means intellect or intelligence.

(* chud was coined as a politically correct slur that was not an existing slur against existing groups, to become an existing slur against groups... Yeah, Orwell would laugh.)

The way rightoids use it, you'd think mid suddenly means "above average". Like the Mid in Midwest is barely accurate, but with the dyscalculic idiocy that comes from the fact that midwit is commonly defined as being in the 110-120, even 115-130 range.

The funny thing about this is that they, those who abuse midwit like leftists abuse incel, need not elevate Democrats' average IQ that far high. In fact, most of the jobs that come under rightwing fire -- social workers, teachers, education, administration -- bottom out on average IQ per college degree in this chart:

While I can't speak for the source, it passes my sniff test, generally speaking; most charts resemble this one.

So why say a midwit IQ is 110 to 125? (The numbers always differ, hence the inconstancy is reflected here.) I suppose it is to include Critical Theory, PolSci and Social Science; how many cons know such charts exist, would they even care about the facts, as they claim? The thing is, if you're including the high end of the bell curve you need also include the lower end down to 90. Unless this is some type of upper middle class, lower middle class hair-splitting?

I'd ask if these people are stupid, even anti-science, but they're just regurgitating what they've heard inside their bubble uncritically. In other words, midwittery*. When you're a stereotypical conservative, abusing midwit too loosely looks like what is expected of you: anti-intellectual ignorance.

(*These people mainly belong in 'the woke right'. All partisan politics/rhetoric is just projection.)

Are midwits the upper-middle class of IQ? As a metaphor I'd say that tracks: socially and in terms of hierarchy, they behave and exist at about the same areas. But upper-middle class people say they're "just middle class"; in this case midwits are damned for the same above-average distinction. But there's another 17% of the gen pop accounted for in that 'lower-midwit' class, educated but less so. Where would they majorly lean politically and socially?

With all that said:

To give a basic definition: a midwit is someone who scores from roughly 90 to 115 in most IQ tests which is 70% of the population; who follows convention; who, stereotypically, is good at swallowing slogans and spewing them back out a la Fun Facts, without capacity for original research, much less original conclusions, unless these can fit into a premolded worldview, ideology, religion, whatever I repeat myself.

A midwit asks "s-source?" or "v-verse?"; the orthodox types cite scientific studies or patristic screeds uncritically, ignorant to methodology or historiography. Speaking of past writers:

I can guarantee that most thinkers, writers etc. you follow religiously were midwits in their own time. The practices and motives of medieval scholars and modern scholars are almost indistinguishable from one another. You can't spell theology without "READ THEORY!!!"

In summary:

Are midwits just the upper-middle class of IQ? The way the term gets tossed about by rightoid midwits... perhaps. There should be a distinction made between upper and lower midwits; the former lead the latter, the mid leading the mid. But, I suppose, upper-midwit is not as punchy.

P.S.

"S-source?" My source is I thought it the fuck up. When's the last time you had an original thought in your life?

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

What I hate about twitter debatebros is that it's all sophistry. There is no intelligence or merit in their arguments. They get by on linguistic trickery and manipulate people into thinking they are smart when they are not.

[clownsmile1488]

[sprachspiele]

One of the ideas floated in discussions of artificial intelligence is this idea of “qualitative” (as opposed to quantitative) intelligence. Humans are more intelligent than dogs, however you define that word, because, for example, humans understand general relativity and dogs don’t. This is a qualitative difference because it’s not as if dogs can do calculations in general relativity just really slowly -- it is not a matter of speed, rather the nature of the tasks performed are different. This has led AI theorists to speculate in what ways an artificial “superintelligence” may be qualitatively more intelligent than human beings.

I bring this up not because I know much about AI but because it reminds me a lot of the “midwit” phenomenon. Peter Hitchens once described Stephen Fry as “a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person is like.” As you climb the intellectual scale it’s not that you simply get better at the same set of tasks but your conception of what “intelligence” is changes. One difference, for example, is that to stupid people intelligence means knowing lots of trivia. This is why Stephen Fry is perceived as intelligent. Whereas, to me at least, intelligence means being perceptive, it means “seeing” things in situations that no one else sees even when everything is open to view.

What explains this difference? I think part of it is that you need a certain degree of perceptiveness to even recognise it in others. Someone makes a perceptive remark. Is it totally obvious on its face that that remark was perceptive? Do you not need to have some grasp of the situation to see what what they said perceptive? This makes me think of art or music, where not everyone can “just recognise” the quality of a piece of art or music on seeing or hearing it. To be honest this is how I feel about poetry. With a few exceptions I am ear blind to poetry -- I can’t “just recognise” what is and isn’t good poetry in the same way that I can for music. And even then I have friends who are musicians who clearly “hear” things in music that I don’t, musical techniques that they can appreciate. This is contrasted with, say, trivia, where it takes very little to “recognise” whether someone knows a lot about Ancient Greece.

This gets me on to the midwit phenomenon. What grates so much about Bluecheck Twitter Midwits is not so much their bad opinions or lack of original thought but their lack of an intuitive recognition of insight. That is, they seem basically unable to tell the difference between genuinely profound observations and its absence. This is why they read so much Pop Science or Pop History -- because they have a kind of blindness to genius, just as some people have an aesthetic blindness to good and bad art. They are unable to see the shallowness of the water they swim in because they can’t see the bottom and fail to recognise when someone else is swimming in much deeper water. They lack an intuitive grasp of the difference in quality between the great writers and philosophers of the 19th century and what is produced today, and this undoubtably contributes to their view that “no decline in quality has occurred.”

[nowicantlose]

[unbearablekoality]