You give priority to theories (such as the predictive power of IQ for large groups) and thinkers that replicate (that different groups have different gifts consistently replicates) and have predictive and explanatory power.
You shouldn’t fear a challenge. You should be able to engage with differing points of view. Your epistemic network should encourage you to develop the best possible relations with everyone. As your epistemics improve, your life should improve. Your network should score low on the Gurometer. You favorite thinkers should withstand a good decoding.
You don’t want to be your worldview on hot takes that get your juices flowing.
You should understand that ties bind and blind. It’s great to belong to a community, but if you want to think clearly, you have step outside of your ties and look at things objectively.
Everyone has a hero story. Understand the incentives that people work under. For example, if the people pushing climate change legislation would have the same left-wing agenda even if there were no climate change, be appropriately suspicious of their claims.
If someone can’t acknowledge that different peoples have different gifts, they’re not much use for understanding reality. Nothing in the social science reproduces like the studies of large-group IQ differences. If your fear of getting canceled forces you to deny the blindingly obvious, you’re not much of a source for truth.
When 12-year old boys can easily beat the greatest female athletes, don’t tell me how amazing women’s sports are and that they deserve identical pay to higher performing men. If you can’t acknowledge significant differences between men and women, you’re no use for understanding life.
I don’t believe in turning over our lives and governments to experts. Expertise has become so specialized that only experts, it seems can evaluate the claims of other experts. On the other hand, I’m not a populist who believes that wisdom resides in the people. Sometimes, it seems to me, the experts are right and sometimes the people are right.
Just because someone has expertise in one area, such as making a nuclear bomb, does not bestow them with wisdom in other areas, such as whether or not to use the nuclear bomb on an enemy such as WWII Japan.
