Coach Chass: More is coming...but it's going to be S*L*O*W given the workload I have here... I'll work on this non-linearly a section at a time...
>>I'll end with a true story about logic vs. values. Maybe it's related, maybe it's not.
My first year teaching, I was in a 1-A school in the little town where I grew up. Overall, it's a pretty low-income area, and one of the classes I was teaching had a majority of the lower-economic-status students even among that group.
A friend of mine had paid me back a loan at school that day and I had stuck the $100 bill he gave me in my pocket. Apparently I accidentally pulled it out in class while fishing for a pen, and it fell on the floor without me noticing. First I knew of it, I was writing on the board, and a girl who sits in the front row tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You dropped this."
She could have kept it, and I would never have known. Half the people in the class yelled at her and called her stupid for giving it back. I knew her family; they didn't have much. She often wore the same clothes to school several days a week. That $100 could have bought a lot of groceries for her family; her little brothers would have eaten better; she could have gotten some new shoes. Giving it back, all she got was a sincere thank-you from her teacher (she wouldn't take any money) and the ability to hold her head up and feel like she'd done the right thing. She gave up something that could have benefited her family because it was more important to her to stick to her values; she was going to go hungry that night no matter how eloquently someone might have praised her. From a logical perspective, that was pretty dumb.
We could use some more dumb people in this world. <<
It's a nice story -- but you're apparently confusing moral and ethical behavior with the intelligence of that behavior. It's not hard to posit that we need more honest people in the world. It's difficult to posit that honesty and stupidity are the same. And it's almost impossible to posit that we need more stupidity in this world.
There's actually a lot of game theory out there that show that optimizing for short-term benefit by bypassing moral and ethical behavior has tremendous advantages over time. Thus, this child was acting much more "smart" than "dumb" -- and I'm sure that's because her parents helped her understand that.
I hope that you don't really believe we could use more dumb people in this world. I'm a pretty big proponent of education so that we can have fewer...I'm pretty sure you are too.
