For what it's worth, when someone here said, back in 2020, that this was an "intelligence test," I posted that I didn't quite agree, because a lot of intelligent people had gotten it wrong, and I said that I thought that it was instead more of a wisdom test.
Wisdom is different than intelligence, although the definitions can be hard to nail down. Generally speaking, intelligence seems to be more about things like analytic problem solving, logical thinking, the ability to take in and process new information in an efficient manner, etc., while wisdom is often thought to be more experience-based and to have a more "practical application" component.
I think what we're trying to parse out here is, was there some sort of "pattern-recognition across different contexts" skill that resisters tended to share - something that enabled us to say "no, it's not different this time, this is just the same old abuse/authoritarianism/lying/manipulation that I've seen (or studied) before, and/or this is just the same old flu-like respiratory virus behavior that we've seen before, I looked at the actual data, and it really isn't all that different this time," and to be able to stick to that perspective despite propaganda telling us we were wrong and crazy.
Maybe the ability to stick to your guns and believe your own perceptions when everyone around you is saying something else is also a key factor? Maybe that's part of wisdom? Because ultimately it doesn't matter WHY you thought the covid response was a scam - it could have been any one of the factors I listed, grounded in any combination of intellectual knowledge, instinct, prior personal experience, or faith - but the important thing was that once you perceived it, you stuck to and trusted your own perception, and were able to keep stubbornly sticking to your own perspective in the face of a huge society-wide effort to tell you that you were wrong, and punish you for dissenting? Something about having a stronger internal locus of knowledge/belief rather than a more socially-constructed one?
I don't know. I'm just throwing things out there. We've talked about what made resistors able to resist before, and it's an interesting question.
(FYI, I posted the pattern recognition comment above, as well as the original list of 10 factors that seemed to contribute to resistance to the narrative. I should probably make a habit of signing things...)
Re: The Epiphany (A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Wisdom is different than intelligence, although the definitions can be hard to nail down. Generally speaking, intelligence seems to be more about things like analytic problem solving, logical thinking, the ability to take in and process new information in an efficient manner, etc., while wisdom is often thought to be more experience-based and to have a more "practical application" component.
I think what we're trying to parse out here is, was there some sort of "pattern-recognition across different contexts" skill that resisters tended to share - something that enabled us to say "no, it's not different this time, this is just the same old abuse/authoritarianism/lying/manipulation that I've seen (or studied) before, and/or this is just the same old flu-like respiratory virus behavior that we've seen before, I looked at the actual data, and it really isn't all that different this time," and to be able to stick to that perspective despite propaganda telling us we were wrong and crazy.
Maybe the ability to stick to your guns and believe your own perceptions when everyone around you is saying something else is also a key factor? Maybe that's part of wisdom? Because ultimately it doesn't matter WHY you thought the covid response was a scam - it could have been any one of the factors I listed, grounded in any combination of intellectual knowledge, instinct, prior personal experience, or faith - but the important thing was that once you perceived it, you stuck to and trusted your own perception, and were able to keep stubbornly sticking to your own perspective in the face of a huge society-wide effort to tell you that you were wrong, and punish you for dissenting? Something about having a stronger internal locus of knowledge/belief rather than a more socially-constructed one?
I don't know. I'm just throwing things out there. We've talked about what made resistors able to resist before, and it's an interesting question.
(FYI, I posted the pattern recognition comment above, as well as the original list of 10 factors that seemed to contribute to resistance to the narrative. I should probably make a habit of signing things...)
Mauve Erudite Stoat