C. Thi Nguyen

So I'm not, I mean, I think it's, okay, I think the thing you said is the, maybe I'm just being like a fussy economic philosopher here.

Yeah, I mean, let me go back and first, like, push up what you said.

So I think one of the most important things I learned from a lot of the historians I'm reading here in this field called science and technology studies is this idea that a lot of the times there are things that people make, that are decisions that people make, right?

that go into information infrastructure.

And when they enter information infrastructure, we forget they're there and we forget that there were decisions people made.

And then we just think that's the way the world is, right?

So one of my favorite examples, this is new, it's not in the book because I just ended up talking about it in class because of a reading.

A philosopher named Felipe was in a discussion of like,

Values and Measurement, about how measurements themselves can be value-laden and political, talks about the idea that intelligence is a measurable quality.

And I think when people talk about IQ tests, they already know something like, oh, IQ tests are biased, they're biased on racial grounds, they're biased on gender grounds.

But there's another even deeper underlying thought that he's pushing, which is the very idea that there's one thing, one quality that's intelligence,

that's measurable, and that we can point to and say that's the general quality that cross-cuts everything and lasts over your life, that's a very specific way of thinking about the world.

There's very different ways of thinking about the world.

You could think about the world as one in which there's hundreds of different capacities, which are important in different contexts, and which were measurable independently, right?

But instead, we've done this thing where we've squashed them into one thing, and we've made decisions about how they're ranked.

So I think...

It took me a while to realize this, but our intelligence testing and measurement system tends to highly weight logic and mathematical ability and tends to weight barely, if at all, emotional sensitivity, right?

That's built into the scheme.

But if that enters your background infrastructure, you just might walk around and think like, oh, that's just what intelligence is.

There weren't any decisions that were made in that.