[ExI] trump still

Giovanni Santostasi gsantostasi at gmail.com
Sun Nov 13 22:03:55 UTC 2016


Let's start from a very general point of view: saying that 47 % or even 50
% of the population in a country is below average intelligence is not an
insult but actually a mathematical fact given how intelligence is measured
(based on an assumed Gaussian distribution of IQ).

Are all the Trump voters on the left of the bell curve? I think a lot of
them are.

Now Trump was also helped by a lot of intelligent people in particular
millennials that voted thirds parties but I would not be surprised if many
of them actually voted Trump  as a protest vote.

But intelligence is one thing, ignorance is another.

Yes anger is ignorance but a lot of the Trump vote was based on anger and
therefore ignorance.

We may be angry at them as people but the Trump supporters were ignorant
about facts and complex relationship that they fail to understand.

Others here mentioned automation of work and that is one of the most
relevant issues for this group.

People are angry at side effects of a phenomenon that could be actually the
best thing that could happen for all humankind, being freed from
meaningless jobs but for this phenomenon to be a positive thing we need
strong social structures that can redistribute the benefits of automation,
that right now are benefiting mostly the 1 %, to the entire population.

There is no other way to do it really.
We need a basic income and Trump would not help with that.
The right would not help with that.
Libertarian would not help with that.

Only a strong social democratic system, in particular a system that is
knowledgeable and aware of exponential technology trends could implement
policies that would have most of the population support.

But in the US social democracy has been a bad word until recently.
But even social democracy is not good enough as a solution unless it has a
vision about our accelerating technology future.

We need new ideas injected in the political discourse.
This could be an opportunity for democratic Transhumanism to bring these
ideas to the people in particular when Trump craziness and deep ignorance
of both the past and the future would show the failure of conservatism as a
last resort effort in bringing the old good days back (that will not come
back and they were not good at all in the first place) as a way to stop the
unavoidable process of exponential acceleration of technology that can
bring utopia or dystopia according to which social policies we adopt.







On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 2:41 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Here is what I have not seen out of this group, including me:
>
> "Buddhism teachers that anger is a form of ignorance; namely of other
> people's point of view."  (NYT article by Lisa Barrett today)
> Somewhere around 47% of the voters went for Trump.  Now they can't all be
> bone-headed morons.  They can't all be for a silly wall or forced
> emigration or some of the other ridiculous things being proposed.  They
> can't all think that all the industry jobs will be coming back.  Most of
> them are not white supremacists.
>
> So why did any woman vote for a crotch-grabber?  Well, find out.
> What do they think?  What do they want?  Are there ways to give it to
> them, or are they just out of touch?  Ditto every Trump voter.
>
> If we don't understand these Trump voters, if we just write them off as
> imbeciles, there is no way we can attract them to us in the future,
> starting with the elections in 2018.
>
> It's time to stop bitching and blaming and do our research.
>
> bill w
>
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