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RAW quote: intelligence blocking

Mark Frauenfelder at 11:23 pm Mon, Jan 16, 2012

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"Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies, etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission."

-- Robert Anton Wilson

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Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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The Snowden Principle

  • Cowicide

    amen.

  • Comedian

    “Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us.”

  • atimoshenko

    Never blocking anything produces a cacophony. Intelligence is the ability to figure out which patterns – produced by (temporary) selective blocking of most of the rest of reality – are useful under which circumstances. Dogma is trying to use one pattern for everything. Ignorance is the inability to discern the existence of a possible pattern. Disinterest/dullness is a fear or a laziness that leads to an unwillingness to go against/beyond previously identified patterns (and censorship a promotion thereof). And fantasist irrationality is the tendency to invent patterns by working backwards from desired conclusions.

    • Walt Guyll

      Indeed. Science, as ” a systematic body of concepts” qualifies as ideology.

    • AnthonyC

      Nevertheless, if you had sufficient intelligence to do so, you could do even better by processing more of the data. In other words, our sensory input exceeds our ability to process it, but it is in principle possible to do better than any human ever could.

  • Jacob Ewing

    I’ll go out on a limb here and ask someone to explain to me what a “robotic reality-tunnel” is supposed to be.

    • benettfreeman

      One in which information becomes dismissed because it does not conform to the prior programming of the robotic mind. For example, if someone says to you “If we want a world with less violence, we should eradicate all governments”, you might think “But who will build the roads?”, since your prior programming MIGHT have included the tenet ‘Only governments can provide public services’. This tenet of course becomes instantly rebutted by the argument (made by Hans-Hermann Hoppe) that ‘Just because monkeys can ride bikes, doesn’t mean that ONLY monkeys can ride bikes.’
      Hope you find this useful. If you like my explanation, please visit my website at: consentient DOT wordpress DOT com.

  • loroferoz

    Ergo censorship can make a society stupid.

  • http://www.batshite.com/royalflush Scott Bartlett

    I guess, then, that maintaining intelligence involves somehow staving off declining brain plasticity.