Ask Lemmy

For me the most important marks of an intelligent person are, similar to other responses in this thread, the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it, and the willingness to update your beliefs when confronted with convincing evidence.

All too often on Lemmy we see people immediately jumping to one side of an issue or the other as a knee-jerk reaction, uncritically parroting their side's talking points and lambasting anyone with the audacity to disagree without even listening to what they have to say. The comments that get my strongest upvotes are the ones that go against the grain of a thread while also bringing up additional relevant information or perspectives. Not because they're necessarily right, but because they're positively contributing to a thread in a way that circlejerking doesn't.

And no, this doesn't mean that the enlightened centrist take is necessarily the correct one, but it does mean that you should at least consider counterarguments to your position.

And while yes, sealioning exists, I see Lemmings talking past each other far more often than I see them constructively engaging with each other when they disagree.

And "updating your beliefs" doesn't need to mean "completely changing your mind about something" (though that should always be a possibility). It can mean adding nuance to your position, or replacing one peripheral idea with another.

As a random example, acknowledging that AI does have a few genuinely useful use cases doesn't mean that its current implementation isn't also mostly a dystopian and environmental disaster. This nuance helps ensure that we take the right action in addressing the problem, instead of a knee-jerk blanket response that, while popular, might end up being just as harmful as the status quo.

While I think Lemmings in general are a good deal smarter (or at least more educated) than the average person, I honestly don't think they're all that much more intelligent.