The Noblest Predator

When we think of the kinds of predators that inspire respect and admiration, the creatures we put on coins and flags and coats of arms, it's often animals like lions, bears and eagles we choose. I'd like to suggest that these aren't necessarily the models of courage and nobility we should be inspired by, and nominate instead an unjustly maligned predator as a moral exemplar.

The lion, for instance, while certainly a majestic looking beast, is a cruel and murderous patriarch. When a dominant male (or usually a gang of two or three) takes over a pride (by the violent overthrow of the previous regime), the first order of business is to kill any nursing cubs, so as to free up the mothers to start a new litter with the invaders. Can we think of this as anything but reprehensible?

Such behaviour isn't limited to lions. Mother bears are well-known among mammals for their fierce defence of their young, but part of the reason the cubs need such defence is that other bears will think nothing of eating someone else's cubs.

But quite apart from the intraspecies conduct of these predators, there are moral issues with their predatory styles, as well. For one thing, most predators are cowardly, when you think about it: they attack the sickly and frail, the most vulnerable prey they can find, as if their sharp teeth and claws weren't enough of an advantage. And many predators go after prey very much smaller than themselves, so much so that we don't even really think of them as predators; consider the baleen whales, who lazily scoop up vast numbers of invertebrates, small fish and anything else unfortunate enough to be in the wrong  volume of seawater, swallowing their prey whole to be digested alive en masse. I sometimes suspect that the majority of individual animals in the world spend their last living moments in the stomachs of such predator like whales and anteaters, who simply gulp down tiny victims without even doing them the courtesy of a merciful euthanizing chewing.

It is, after all, generally only the predators with enough courage to take on prey closer to their own size who bother to kill before eating. Not out of any compassion for their victims, mind you; it's just easier to eat a zebra when it's no longer trying to kick your teeth out. And the methods used are far from humane, anyway; teeth and claws, drowning, suffocation, venom, even electric shock in the case of certain sea creatures. There are even predators, like the ichneumon wasp, who go out of their way to keep their prey alive as long as possible so as to keep it fresh for when the eggs laid inside the hapless victim hatch.

Even on those rare occasions when we humans, the most terrifyingly effective killer of other creatures on the planet, bother to concern ourselves with minimizing the suffering of our prey, the fact remains that we kill what we eat, and there really is no such thing as a nice way to kill someone.

So allow me to recommend as the most noble, heroic and courageous predator this: the lowly mosquito.

The mosquito lives most of its life as a vegetarian, after all. Loath to harm another sentient creature, it takes most of its sustenance from plant juices. It is only when a female finds herself with developing eggs that she is compelled to take a meal of animal blood, and not even for her own sake, but solely for the benefit of her children.

Yet what does the mother-to-be mosquito do when she needs protein for her babies? Unlike more cowardly predators, she does not seek out smaller, more vulnerable creatures to kill. No, she doesn't pick on someone her own size; she goes after prey that dwarfs her by many orders of magnitude. Indeed, she often goes after that very deadliest of animals, Homo sapiens. And not to kill, but to humanely harvest a tiny quantity of blood, ideally without causing the slightest discomfort whatsoever. (A mosquito does not want to be noticed, after all.) Less than a drop of blood is all she seeks, never to be missed by the donor, and that only to feed her babies. And to get it, she faces the grave risk of being smashed into paste by her gigantic prey.

Now, it's true, of course, that mosquitoes are blamed for many human deaths annually, as diseases like malaria are spread by insect bites. But it's not fair to hold the mosquito responsible for what is really done by the malaria parasite; the mosquito is if anything another victim of the parasite's exploitation. Indeed, just counting sheer numbers, the number of mosquitoes slain by pesticides and other measures aimed at controlling the spread of insect-borne diseases is astronomically larger than the number of humans who will ever have lived, let alone be affected by all of those diseases combined. I expect that if the malaria parasite were to go extinct tomorrow, few creatures would have more cause to celebrate than the mosquito.

So let us admire the courage and compassion of the noble mosquito, even if we don't stop swatting them.  And best of all, these valourous little bloodsuckers don't sparkle!

Obsolete Ruminations on Obsolete Hominids

     I've always been intrigued by the fact that Neanderthals actually had brains that were, on average, bigger than ours, despite our habit of dismissing them as crude brutes who never had a chance against us refined and sophisticated Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens types. While it's a mistake to assume that intelligence is always directly correlated with brain size, it isn't completely ridiculous to wonder if maybe H. neanderthalensis was actually smarter in some ways than we are.
     I once read somewhere that there was some question as to whether or not our Neanderthal cousins had the capacity for language, based on an examination of their bones that seemed to suggest they didn't have the same vocalization abilities that we do. This got me to thinking about the role of language in our own species' success, how it could have helped us out-compete the Neanderthals, and its implications for our culture generally. Individually, they might well have been smarter. But without language, each individual Neanderthal would have had to figure out new innovations largely on her own, perhaps with some hands-on demonstration by others, but essentially by discovery anew each time. In contrast, the somewhat dimmer  H. sapiens might take longer to come up with a concept, but as soon as any member of a sapiens clan worked something out, everyone else would know it pretty quickly.
    As an example of this process, I think of my own experience in studying math in school. Although the rote memorization of the times table in elementary school bored me to tears, I eventually discovered the beauty of mathematics, and took great pleasure in exploring mathematical ideas. For most of junior high school and the first two years of high school, I did very well, ignoring the teachers for the most part and coming up with my own way of solving problems on the spot. Many of my classmates, however, struggled with trying to memorize and follow the teachers' instructions (and not "getting it" as intuitively and naturally as I did).
     This worked just fine for me, up until Grade 12, when the math suddenly seemed to get more complicated. It wasn't that I couldn't do it; I could still look at a problem, take it apart and derive a solution. But the complexity of the problems in calculus and polynomials was such that it would take me more than the available time to finish the exam. My grades plummeted, and while I did pass (barely), my classmates (who actually listened to the instructions) did much better, even if they didn't always have as deep a feel for the math as I did.
     So I wondered, then, if the Neanderthal predicament was like mine had been in math. On her own, she would have been more than a match for any individual modern human: stronger and smarter. But modern humans aren't on our own; we inherit, through language, a vast amount of knowledge that we don't have to rediscover for ourselves. We don't need to be so smart as individuals, because we share our smarts better.

     These speculations are, at least in the case of Neanderthals, obsolete. It turns out that they probably did have language, based in part on genetic evidence that they had a gene known as FOXP2, which is associated with language. Yet even if my speculations don't actually solve the mystery of how our ancestors survived and the Neanderthals didn't, they have at least given me an interesting insight into the role of authority in human culture. It's always puzzled and even alarmed me the extent to which people are willing to defer to an authority, whether it be an charismatic leader, a peer group or a text. If it's written down, or if it's the wisdom of our ancestors handed down from times past, we're inclined to accept it without question, and I suspect this isn't just something we're taught to do; it seems to come naturally. (It's also taught, of course; I certainly remember the emphasis on citing authority in law school).
     It's tempting to lament this as a curse, the stifling of individuality and slavish unthinking obedience to tradition, but it's not altogether a bad thing, and neither is it all there is to human nature. After all, we also need to have a certain amount of individual creativity to provide the ideas that are then transmitted and received this way. And I have to admit, I found that, when I took linear algebra in university, studying hard and following instructions really did help me to do better within the time constraints, even if it wasn't in my nature.
     But I do think it's important for us to be at least aware of our innate tendency to defer to authority, and maintain a sensible balance. Tradition is useful, and ideas that have been around for a long time can generally be assumed to have passed some kind of test, so we should be inclined to take them seriously, but we should never be afraid to examine them critically as well. A bit of the Neanderthal nature is healthy.

Some Observations on Neuropathy

     I've recently finished with chemotherapy for colon cancer, which has afforded me the opportunity to experience some things that, while not necessarily pleasant, have been kind of interesting. In particular, right now I'm thinking about the composite nature of tactile senses in a way it never occurred to me to consider before.

     We all know that the colours we see are really just distinct blends of only three basic colours: red, blue and green. That's because our retinas contain photoreceptor cells that are particularly sensitive to one of these three ranges of frequencies. Primates have better colour vision than most other mammals, which only have two different colour receptors. Most birds have four, giving them a greater sensitivity to distinct colours.
     Likewise, the many flavours we can distinguish are generally made up of composite signals from just five types of receptors on our tastebuds: bitter, salty, sour, sweet and umami. Our brains recognize one particular proportion of these signals as garlic, another pattern as lemon, and so on.
     Indeed, hearing is also a composite sense; tiny hairs are located at a different resonant lengths within the cochlea, and thus are sensitive to different frequency inputs. What we distinguish as a single sound (a violin, a trumpet, a human voice) is a complex blend of the inputs of hundreds of different audio frequencies.

     Now, one of the side effects of oxaliplatin (one of the chemotherapy drugs I was on) is what they call peripheral neuropathy, or damage to the nerves leading to the remote (peripheral) parts of the body: fingers and toes. In short, my fingers and toes are uncomfortably numb. However, it seems that this neuropathy doesn't affect all receptors equally. While I've lost most of the pressure sensors in my fingertips, I can still receive signals from the pain and temperature receptors, which has had some interesting (if annoying) effects.
     First, the pressure receptors have by far the finest resolution, as Braille readers demonstrate. The pain and temperature receptors don't need to be as precise about location; it's enough that the brain knows a particular fingertip is risking damage without worrying about what square millimeter is at risk. This means I can't sense things as precisely with my fingertips as I could before the treatment. I have trouble buttoning my shirt, and I can't play the guitar without visually confirming I'm putting my fingers on the right strings and frets. It also means my fingers constantly feel kind of greasy to me, as if a fine layer of oil is preventing me from detecting the tiny variations in altitude of a surface that would normally show up as small local variations in signals from pressure sensors.
     But I can still sense textures to some extent, and I think this is due in part to the role of what we call the pain sensors. The pain sensors are triggered by extremes, stresses of pressure or temperature that threaten to damage tissues, but they seem to have a wide range of sensitivity, and I think that normally they must play a role in sensing things that are not strictly speaking "painful". For example, when feeling the edge of a knife, one doesn't apply enough pressure to actually suffer any damage, but the relatively extreme stresses on the tissues do trigger a mild pain signal which, combined with the pressure and temperature signals, forms a composite tactile image of a sharp edge. The composite signal doesn't register as painful at all, but the presence of a certain amount of the pain signal is part of what gives the feeling of sharpness.
     I am finding I sense the sharpness of surfaces, like the edge of a fingernail, as sharper than normal. I believe this is due to the "pain" signal making up a bigger portion of the composite input, since the pressure sensors are providing very little signal. It doesn't hurt, exactly; it just feels like edges I touch are sharper than they were before the treatment.
     In a way, it's sort of like the reaction to cold I had at the very first cycle. Touching cold things was startling; it's not that they felt colder than usual, but just more vividly cold. It was sort of like having just cleaned my glasses and then seeing the world much more clearly all of a sudden. (Subsequent rounds of chemo made the effect worse; instead of just feeling vividly cold, handling something right out of the fridge was like grabbing a live wire, a very nasty shock.) I am not sure how to interpret this experience, because the attenuated pressure sensitivity hadn't kicked in yet.

     Anyway, it's been fascinating to be able to take advantage of this experiment, much as I'd prefer to have learned this stuff second-hand.

Theory and Fact

     "My son is taking piano lessons, and I'm pleased with that. I just wish they wouldn't teach music theory as if it were fact."

     There's a widespread misconception about what academics and scientists mean by the word "theory". In common usage, we often speak of "theory" as if it were a guess, a tentative fact-in-waiting yet to be confirmed, and so we'll often hear a complaint like the above with respect to evolution: people object to it being taught as if it's fact when it's "only a theory".

     Of course, that's not what "theory" means at all, and thinking about music theory is a good way to understand that. As you probably know, music theory includes all those complicated symbols composers and arrangers use to write down musical scores, which was the only way to preserve a record of compositions back in the days before audio recording. But there is more to musical theory than simply notes, rests, time and key signatures. Musical theory is a systematic way of describing music, relying on a set of defined terms and symbols and rules relating those terms to one another in various ways. With musical theory one can not only write down a melody so someone else can play it, but analyze and manipulate musical propositions, and even make predictions such as which notes will make for pleasant harmonies with which others.
     In short, musical theory is a cognitive framework for understanding music. The key word here is "understanding", not "knowing". Musical theory is not something you can know in the sense of justified true belief; it simply isn't a matter of being true or false. Rather, it's a matter of being more or less helpful in making sense of music.
     So it is with other theories: game theory, number theory, relativity theory and yes, evolutionary theory. A good theory enhances our ability to make meaningful and accurate inferences or predictions about the subject matter. These inferences or predictions themselves are factual claims, and a theory lives or dies on the accuracy of these predictions; if a theory leads to inferences that turn out to be false, well, the usefulness of the theory is reduced. Useless theories aren't false; they're just not used.
     Mind you, a theory that always makes true predictions isn't necessarily useful; it may just be ridiculously vague. Creationism (which explains all observed phenomena with "Because God made it that way") always gives a "true" prediction to the question "What will happen if we do this experiment?"  But "Whatever God makes happen" is a very uninformative answer, even if it is true (which, if an omnipotent God exists, it must be by definition). This is why scientists talk about good theories making falsifiable predictions.

     So to complain that evolution is "just a theory" and therefore shouldn't be taught as "fact" is simply to misunderstand what a theory is. Of course, that doesn't really answer the objection; the creationist who uses the word "theory" correctly will complain instead that the predictions of evolutionary theory, which often are presented as facts (and justifiably so), are false. And that's fine, because then we can have an intelligent conversation about what the facts are, with reference to evidence and principles of reasoning and so forth, and such a conversation does properly answer the objection.

A Tip on Parking in Snow

     We've had a sudden dumping of snow on our streets this past weekend, and while it isn't really a stupendous amount in historical terms, it is enough to get stuck in if you don't know how to drive in it. Sadly, I find a lot of people don't, which includes many SUV owners who claim to have bought their vehicles specifically to deal with Alberta winters. It's as if they think an SUV is magically immune to weather, without considering what exactly it is that makes an SUV better able to handle certain kinds of driving conditions. And so, one winter a couple of years ago when I had an hour long highway commute, I once counted 38 vehicles in the ditch, the disproportionate majority of which were SUVs, an alarming number of which had rolled over after leaving the road (owing in part to their high center of gravity).

     I'm not a fan of SUVs generally, at least not as private vehicles for ordinary use. It's not that I don't see their utility in certain contexts, but the same can be said of SCUBA gear. If you want to wear an air tank around town as a Cousteau-chic fashion statement, fine. You'll look silly. But if you wear it on a crowded elevator, you can expect to annoy people. Likewise oversize vehicles that take up more parking space than is warranted, with high suspensions that make even your low-beam headlights shine down directly into the eyes of drives of smaller vehicles. (This latter problem is made worse by following too close.) But I'll grant that it's true that the higher wheel base does make it possible in principle to go through deeper snow than I can safely manage in my sanely sized car.

     Last winter, an SUV got stuck in the lane behind our house, and when we went out to help dig it free, it became clear how the driver's confused thinking about snow caused the problem in the first place: he seemed to think that more power was the solution. To be fair, it's not necessarily a completely stupid idea; if you think of snow as creating more resistance to the movement of the vehicle, then greater force to overcome that resistance is a natural inference.

     Of course, snow doesn't just create more resistance; it also decreases traction, and this is usually the bigger problem. Indeed, ordinary small cars like mine have more than enough power to get through even fairly deep snow, provided the tires can firmly grip a solid surface underneath. So one of the tricks to driving in snow is to manage the surface under the tires. Be aware of the effect your wheels are having on the snow, and use it to your advantage.

     An example: Last night, I had to drive to pick up my son at the home of a classmate, which was in a residential neighbourhood where the snow had piled up, especially along the curb where I would normally have parked. I parked in the snowdrift anyway, and had no trouble extricating myself. Here's how I did it.

    First, I approached with just enough power to keep me moving forward into the snow drift, relying primarily on my vehicle's momentum to get me to the parking spot. I was careful to keep the wheels rolling through the snow, not spinning free but maintaining firm contact with the snow underneath. Like a rolling pin going over pie dough, the wheels compressed the snow into a firm track under the tires. I let the snow itself bring me to a halt, not using the brake at all, so that the tires never scraped the snow beneath. Spinning or sliding tires will polish the snow underneath them into slippery ice, so avoid that at all costs.

    Then, when it was time to leave, I knew that there was lots of deep snow ahead of me, and the front of my tires were right up against it. To try to drive straight out, as I would in summer, would require enough traction not just to accelerate the mass of the car but also to overcome the resistance of that snow. However, the way I rolled gently to a stop in the snowdrift meant that there was a flat track of compressed (but not polished slippery!) snow under and behind my wheels. So, I very gently backed up in that track until I had enough room to build up the momentum to roll through the deeper snow and out into the main thoroughfare. And that was that.

     So, to put it another way, the lesson is this: Do not treat the snow as an enemy to be overcome with force. Treat it gently with your tires, so that it becomes your ally. 

Faith, Pretence and the Tragedy of Abortion

     In my first posting to this blog, I spoke about the difference between faith and belief, and argued that faith is a matter of acting as if some proposition is true, regardless of whether or not one actually believes it to be so. It's a matter of acting in good faith, even if one suspects that one's counterparts may not live up to their own obligations. In such cases, it's a matter of suspending one's personal judgments (such as if a defence lawyer happens to believe her client is guilty despite his claiming otherwise) and acting in accordance with the "belief" that duty requires (the assumption the client is not guilty, and that the court will reach the correct conclusion in light of all the evidence).
     However, the line blurs sometimes, especially when some people have trouble with that level of abstraction. It's not easy for everyone to believe one thing and act as if they don't; indeed, it may seem dishonest to them to do so. ("What kind of lawyer could, in good conscience, defend a client he believes is guilty?" is a question I'm often asked, and my answer is always that a good lawyer suspends judgment, and recognizes that her own gut feelings about something might well be wrong.) Perhaps it's simpler for such people simply to believe the article of faith, and not worry about such distinctions.

     This ties into abortion with respect to people's beliefs about the personhood of the fetus. If one believes that personhood begins at conception, then it follows one would believe that abortion is murder; if one believes personhood begins at birth, then abortion is not murder.
     Now, I think we ought to err on the side of caution, especially when what's at stake is something as serious as killing a person, but the experience of watching my own son's personhood emerge has shifted the boundaries of the debate somewhat. While I used to accept unreflectively that obviously a newborn baby had to be considered a person, and so the question for me was at what point during pregnancy does it become a person, it now seems to me that the morally relevant characteristics of personhood aren't really all there at birth. Conscious thought? Moral accountability? No, probably not. Or at least, for the first several months, the personhood claims of a human baby don't appear to be significantly weightier than the personhood claims of any other mammal, some of which we happily kill and eat. Just about any objective trait we might point at and say "A human baby is a person because it can do X," would also commit us to recognizing as persons some animals we might not want to grant legal personhood. So, my own powerful emotional entanglements aside (I adore babies), I have had to conclude that objectively, these little bundles of joy probably aren't actually persons yet.
     But at the same time, it's extremely useful to their development into persons that we treat them as such from day one. It's true, of course, that trying to engage a baby in meaningful conversation is futile; the baby won't understand a word you say, and won't be able to respond with anything intelligible. Yet we have to treat babies as persons, and talk to them and pay attention to them and all that entails, in order for them to learn and develop healthily. We owe it to the persons they will become to treat them as persons now, even if they aren't actually persons yet.
     Indeed, it's almost certainly a good thing that we develop these habits of treating them with love and affection even before they are born. I confess that we put earphones over my wife's belly when she was pregnant with our son, though not out of any belief in the "Mozart effect"; it was just one of many acts of belly-interaction (patting, talking, feeling for little baby-kicks) that formed the foundation of growing relationship with what we would eventually come to know as our son. And when he was born, of course, we adoringly held him and cuddled him and talked to him and treasured every little hint of a response, conscious or not.
     To be sure, we didn't act this way out of a conscious choice to act "in good faith"that he was a person, despite objective evidence to the contrary. We instinctively identified him as our son, a distinct individuated person, and bonded with him on that basis, regardless of whether or not it was objectively accurate.

     So I am torn about the whole abortion debate. On the one hand, I think it is objectively incorrect to characterize the unborn fetus as a person in the moral sense, and I now strongly suspect that actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness capital-P Personhood doesn't really emerge until a baby is several months or even a year old. It follows from that that strictly speaking, I cannot call infanticide murder. But I still want to err on the side of caution, and so it seems to me eminently reasonable and practical to establish the moment of birth as the onset of legal personhood.
     On the other hand, the emotional and developmental benefits of starting early on bonding with and establishing a personal relationship with a pre-person are so great that I do not wish to upset the belief by many that a fetus is a person. It's a good belief for parents to act upon, even if it's not objectively true. It would be nice if we could encourage the behaviour without the belief, but I'm not sure that's possible for everyone. Our natural and healthy parental instincts will make it impossible for some people to acknowledge, even intellectually, that a fetus could be anything other than a person. Abortion is legal, as it should be (and like root canal, no one should ever want to need one), but I don't think we'll ever truly be at peace over that. And in a strange way, I'm sort of glad about that, because I want everyone who will become a parent to love their future children from even before the moment of conception.

Stupid Stigmas

     For some time I've been puzzled by the way we seem to think of intelligence or the lack thereof as a morally relevant trait. That is, we seem to think that stupidity is a moral failing, rather than simply a lowered intellectual capacity. For example, most of us think nothing of saying "Anyone that stupid deserves to get ripped off!" Yet we'd not talk that way about other weaknesses: "Anyone that short deserves not to be able to reach things on the top shelf!" or "Anyone that slow deserves to be caught and eaten by a pack of wolves!" Why is this?

     One reason might be that genuine stupidity is so difficult to confirm, in contrast to many other handicaps. Most of us will quite cheerfully hold a door open for someone in a wheelchair, or fetch things from the top shelf for someone who can't reach as high as we can, because it's visually obvious: she's in a wheelchair, and he's shorter than I am. If we were to discover that the person in the wheelchair could, like Guy Caballero, stand and walk and dance just fine, but just liked having other people do things for her, we'd resent it.

     So people who make stupid decisions might be suffering from genuine cognitive handicaps, but they might also just be too lazy to think things through for themselves. What's more, for some of us, thinking is something that just comes naturally, and doesn't seem to take a lot of effort, so it's not always easy to identify with someone for whom it's difficult. Certainly it's frustrating to try to deal with someone who can't (or won't) understand and apply what appears to be a rather simple concept, but why should this be different from getting something down from the top shelf for someone? It's not THAT high, why can't you get it yourself? Are you REALLY that short?

     I suspect that's a big part of why we tend to judge stupidity in moral terms, while we are more forgiving of other defects. Another part of it may be rehabilitative; most of us learn by making mistakes, and when a mistake is embarrassing, the lesson is that much more effective. In other words, in the normal course of events, ridiculing or chastising someone for doing something stupid is a natural part of helping to make them smarter. But in any case, our tendency to stigmatize stupidity in moral terms actually has some rather nasty side effects.

     First, however therapeutic it might be to the not-yet-smart, it's terribly unfair to those who really do suffer from cognitive defects. There are genuinely stupid people out there, who would really love to be smarter than they are, but something about the way their brains are wired or their neurotransmitters are secreted just won't let them. The genuinely stupid are handicapped in one of the worst possible ways, and suffer tremendous disadvantages as a result; they deserve our help and our sympathy, not our moral contempt. (Of course, one of the disadvantages of stupidity is that you don't necessarily know you're stupid, and you may not be able to recognize or appreciate when someone is being helpful. This makes it especially frustrating to try to help the genuinely stupid; they often reject what they need most.)

     Second, though, is a backlash against smart people, or perhaps more precisely against people who give the impression that they think of themselves as smart. If we attach a moral stigma to being stupid, it follows that we imply a moral superiority to being smart. Yet this goes against deeply held egalitarian values; no one is just better than anyone else. And so there is in some circles a powerful resentment against intellectuals, nerds, brains, or other elitist scum who think they're better than the rest of us. This is also unfair; many smart people do not think of themselves as being above anyone else. Indeed, a good many smart people steadfastly refuse to think of themselves as smarter than average, much as Socrates stood in disbelief of the Oracle's claim that none was wiser than he.

     The backlash against smarts isn't just unfair, though, and even the unfairness is more than balanced by the natural advantages of being smart. The real problem, I think, manifests in the choices we make as a society. When we vote for a candidate because he or she is just a regular guy, someone we might have a beer with, rather than a highly educated and intelligent solver-of-big-problems, we hurt ourselves. And when we treat it as a social faux pas to win an argument with facts and reason, and take it as a personal offence to be shown wrong (rather than a valuable opportunity to improve our own understanding), we discourage meaningful and constructive discourse, and the means by which we all become smarter.

     So I'd like us to de-stigmatize stupid. Being stupid isn't a good thing by any means, anymore than any other handicap is something we should willingly choose. All other things being equal, it's better to be smarter. We should all be ready to admit that we're not as smart as we'd like to be, and strive always to become smarter, without vilifying those who aren't as smart as we are, or who have hit the wall in the quest to become smarter. And, equally, we should not resent those who seem to be (or think they are) smarter than we are, but encourage them to demonstrate their intelligence if they've got it (and be willing to constructively, respectfully and critically assess their claims). We're all morally significant, and we all have things to learn from each other, even if some have more to offer than others. Let's all try to get smarter together.