Saeko wrote:Except the kind that actually matters.
You're being needlessly vague here.
But if you're suggesting that socially-constructed smartness isn't important, I'm going to have to seriously disagree with you. A huge part of scientific discovery and philosophy... is discovered while conversing with someone with fresh ideas. (fresh for you) The book
The Republic (a formative work for Western civilization) is based on the social contact of Socrates with the foreign sailors he conversed with. Platonic knowledge was formulated this way. The Greeks learned about life by conversing with foreign sailors and foreign slaves.
This means that limiting social contact
the way that suburbia and mass media addiction to... makes us all dumber in very critical ways. And limiting the mass media to 'corporate parrots only' is fatal.
By the way, the word 'nice' comes from the Latin word 'niscere' which means
ignorant. And the DOJ is trying to make our media
nice. As in : 'if you don't have anything nice to say about America, don't say anything at all.'