Sometimes we don’t value stable career or steady income as highly as other pursuits.
I wouldn’t say it’s not intelligent. Just different priorities.
I admire anyone brave and idealistic enough to commit to academia or culture or any similarly less lucrative and extremely uncertain path. Takes some resilience and big balls. You are almost guaranteed to lose a lot of the comforts available to others with that. And yet, they still do it. And we are all better for it. The world is better for it.
And here I am thinking everyone can do this, it’s so weird that a thing like this just never came up with anyone
This is so interesting, since I simply can not tell a difference between the aspartame/acesulfane and actual sugar in fizzy drinks. I guess I have it easy because of that, but I have a somewhat keen sense of taste otherwise, I cook a lot and can detect what the taste is missing or has too much of pretty consistently, and know the “opposite” tastes/ingredients to apply. And wines and such, it’s sort of a synesthesia thing too, since I kind of feel them as something close to colors. But sweet things I have trouble with. I thought, not sure why, this was a human thing, but it’s interesting to hear someone can detect the sweet things granularly! Cool!
While I don’t agree, I’ll concede I might be in the minority with this stand. But I don’t really believe in a universal intelligence in the first place. There are several, and not all of them are self-serving or marked by the traditionally associated emotionless calculations. There’s emotional intelligence. Social intelligence. And so on.
I don’t pretend to be a philosopher or a psychologist to say what they all are, what they even are if you get down to it, but I do know there’s intelligence in caring for others. There’s intelligence in many kinds of sacrifice too. They just aren’t the classical kind of universal intelligence, because that is defined by self-serving “cold facts” and a fragile attempt at realizing an objective world and objective stance on it, which one can never truly reach or possess. If something like that even is possible.
I stand by my original comment, and I’ll be a bit sad to learn if I’m the odd one out with that take, but I also think these are the kind of things philosophers ought to talk about and not me. What do I know? Maybe my view is distorted by idealism and good expectations, faith in people and the world, that may well be unsubstantiated and entirely delusional.