The fact that you're asking these questions is probably indicative that you're not a midwit. To me, what characterizes the midwit is the lack of self-reflection. They float through life doing what they're told by whatever authority figure is presented to them at a given time.
In a way, this can be advantageous to us, because when and if we regain society's institutions, the midwits will fall in line then just as easily as they do now.
I'm by no means an authority on the subject, but speaking from experience, I definitely used to be a midwit. I was one of those "NPR sweater liberals" (love that term) who just repeats whatever talking points the media presents and thinks himself informed for it.
This was my life from about 18-23. I think normal maturation is all that I needed to bring me out of it. If someone manages to cling to midwittery after 30 though, I don't have much hope for them.
The classic midwit approach to problems is to conflate a symptom with the disease, offer an inefficient or ineffective cure for the symptom as the solution to the problem, and then wonder why it isn't working.
For example:
A midwit notices tremendous human suffering among the institutionalized mentally ill.
The midwit declares institutions the problem.
The midwit campaigns to have institutions shut down.
The midwit congratulates himself on a job well done.
...
A midwit notices tremendous human suffering among the homeless mentally ill.
The midwit declares homelessness the problem.
The midwit campaigns to spend ever-increasing sums of money 'fighting homelessness'.
Homelessness continues to grow unchecked.
A dullard would have given up and declared the problem unsolvable, while an intelligent person would be investigating why the rates of mental illness are steadily rising and would attempt to combat the problem at its source. The midwit, meanwhile, is the governor of California.
As others have said, if you're concerned that you may not be thinking things through thoroughly enough, you're capable of introspection and growth and unlikely to be a midwit. In any case, a bit of humility is generally enough to stave off the worst excesses of midwitism, which is why today's midwits are generally 'atheist'.
It was even around before Marx. Puritan Thomas Watson wrote one of the uses of the 8th commandment was to "confute the doctrine of community", which is that all property should be held in common.
A midwit notices tremendous human suffering among the institutionalized mentally ill.
The midwit declares institutions the problem.
A corollary to this is that midwits are lazy cowards, so they'll always pick the safest and easiest route. Fighting mental illness is difficult. It requires deep knowledge of many things, and it may not even be possible. Fighting institutions is easy. They're physical things that can be destroyed. You can't wave signs around in front of mental illness, but you can in front of an institution.
Same thing with homelessness. It's an easy fight. Someone doesn't have a house? Give them a house! There, problem fixed. They aren't homeless any more.
If someone thinks that every problem has a quick, easy, and most importantly very safe solution, they are a midwit.
There are so many people on the right who think that at a certain point, people will HAVE to see how bad things are getting and take our side. That isn’t how the world works.
In reality, the people in the middle are people who tend to have some buy-in in society, but not enough to be wealthy and able to afford for the whole system to collapse. Because of this, they will always support the status quo, no matter how evil it is. The way you change their minds is to take over the institutions that control society (which is not a democratic process), and then you can tell them what they are allowed to believe.
The midwit problem is that bell curve for moral courage is inverse to that of intelligence.
The dimwits are animals, they act without thinking because they can't. The (very few) truely smart people are willing to stand out and make sacrifices because they imagine out to the infinite future and realize their personal hardships are insignificant over this timeframe, AND have rationalized that living in fear is worse than anything that they are afraid of.
The midwits know just enough to be scared but not enough to make it over that hump to be willing to make the required sacrifices of themselves. <-- unfortunately I'm still here but my bag of fucks is quite rapidly emptying
Not being a genius generally isn't a problem. By definition the majority aren't, and taking a position that an effectively immutable trait of the majority of the population is an immediate problem is one that leads to the weird comic book evil caricature version of eugenics.
But midwit =/= passivity and compliance, it's blind passivity and compliance that lead to letting governments and social pressures take control and gaslight them into tacitly supporting their own destruction/servitude.
And the good thing with passivity and compliance is whilst there is some element of inherent inclination, fully formed adults can still shift their behaviours wildly with context and conditioning. E.i. you can't significantly smarten a midwit up, but remove the dronelike brainwashing and expose them to the goods of freedom and individuality and you can still make a community minded supporter of those values.
Looking at the rest of the thread it seems a lot of people are conflating other traits for middling intelligence, say, being in the 35th to 65th percentile intelligence range. Which is a somewhat literal interpretation but roughly what I would personally consider a qualifies as a "midwit".
If that's what specifically you're asking about, it's a little fuzzy depending on how much weight you want to lend the concept of a general intelligence quotient (G factor), but roughly speaking if you're over 25-30 years old then at best you probably won't be able to train yourself any more than 10 percentile points consistently higher on a good state of the art suite of tests meant to measure g. But that's all arbitrary and whilst I believe the underlying kernel of a concept holds true, that there is are factor(s) that affect all forms of cognitive activity which just so happen to be highly heritable, the weightings and task choices are entirely arbitrary so cannot be claimed as a truly unified and objective measure of intelligence. So yeah, if you're a midwit as I define it, that's unlikely to significantly change at this point, at least using the imperfect tests we have currently to measure it.
But that isn't necessarily a problem, as I said it looks like many people here are not purely speaking of middling intelligence when they say "midwit", but middling intelligence coupled with numerous other negative traits, like a lack of self-awareness of emotional instability. Truly just having an average intelligence is not a problem, and honestly even the majority of people that folks here might consider based and righteous are themselves probably not exceptionally intelligent.
So I say don't fret too hard about the strict intelligence portion which is relatively fixed but in real world settings can be mitigated, practice good mental hygiene in other respects such as focus and proactive self-reflection and you can still see strong positive changes in a few chosen areas. You can also just get and stay physically healthier, that is as much a factor in mental acuity as any form of direct cognitive training.
The fact that you're asking these questions is probably indicative that you're not a midwit. To me, what characterizes the midwit is the lack of self-reflection. They float through life doing what they're told by whatever authority figure is presented to them at a given time.
In a way, this can be advantageous to us, because when and if we regain society's institutions, the midwits will fall in line then just as easily as they do now.
I'm by no means an authority on the subject, but speaking from experience, I definitely used to be a midwit. I was one of those "NPR sweater liberals" (love that term) who just repeats whatever talking points the media presents and thinks himself informed for it.
This was my life from about 18-23. I think normal maturation is all that I needed to bring me out of it. If someone manages to cling to midwittery after 30 though, I don't have much hope for them.
The old adage: "I think, therefore, I am."
The classic midwit approach to problems is to conflate a symptom with the disease, offer an inefficient or ineffective cure for the symptom as the solution to the problem, and then wonder why it isn't working.
For example:
A dullard would have given up and declared the problem unsolvable, while an intelligent person would be investigating why the rates of mental illness are steadily rising and would attempt to combat the problem at its source. The midwit, meanwhile, is the governor of California.
As others have said, if you're concerned that you may not be thinking things through thoroughly enough, you're capable of introspection and growth and unlikely to be a midwit. In any case, a bit of humility is generally enough to stave off the worst excesses of midwitism, which is why today's midwits are generally 'atheist'.
Communism never disappears because it is a political manifestation of evil, and evil is a reliable byproduct of free will.
It was even around before Marx. Puritan Thomas Watson wrote one of the uses of the 8th commandment was to "confute the doctrine of community", which is that all property should be held in common.
A corollary to this is that midwits are lazy cowards, so they'll always pick the safest and easiest route. Fighting mental illness is difficult. It requires deep knowledge of many things, and it may not even be possible. Fighting institutions is easy. They're physical things that can be destroyed. You can't wave signs around in front of mental illness, but you can in front of an institution.
Same thing with homelessness. It's an easy fight. Someone doesn't have a house? Give them a house! There, problem fixed. They aren't homeless any more.
If someone thinks that every problem has a quick, easy, and most importantly very safe solution, they are a midwit.
There are so many people on the right who think that at a certain point, people will HAVE to see how bad things are getting and take our side. That isn’t how the world works.
In reality, the people in the middle are people who tend to have some buy-in in society, but not enough to be wealthy and able to afford for the whole system to collapse. Because of this, they will always support the status quo, no matter how evil it is. The way you change their minds is to take over the institutions that control society (which is not a democratic process), and then you can tell them what they are allowed to believe.
The midwit problem is that bell curve for moral courage is inverse to that of intelligence.
The dimwits are animals, they act without thinking because they can't. The (very few) truely smart people are willing to stand out and make sacrifices because they imagine out to the infinite future and realize their personal hardships are insignificant over this timeframe, AND have rationalized that living in fear is worse than anything that they are afraid of.
The midwits know just enough to be scared but not enough to make it over that hump to be willing to make the required sacrifices of themselves. <-- unfortunately I'm still here but my bag of fucks is quite rapidly emptying
Not being a genius generally isn't a problem. By definition the majority aren't, and taking a position that an effectively immutable trait of the majority of the population is an immediate problem is one that leads to the weird comic book evil caricature version of eugenics.
But midwit =/= passivity and compliance, it's blind passivity and compliance that lead to letting governments and social pressures take control and gaslight them into tacitly supporting their own destruction/servitude.
And the good thing with passivity and compliance is whilst there is some element of inherent inclination, fully formed adults can still shift their behaviours wildly with context and conditioning. E.i. you can't significantly smarten a midwit up, but remove the dronelike brainwashing and expose them to the goods of freedom and individuality and you can still make a community minded supporter of those values.
Looking at the rest of the thread it seems a lot of people are conflating other traits for middling intelligence, say, being in the 35th to 65th percentile intelligence range. Which is a somewhat literal interpretation but roughly what I would personally consider a qualifies as a "midwit".
If that's what specifically you're asking about, it's a little fuzzy depending on how much weight you want to lend the concept of a general intelligence quotient (G factor), but roughly speaking if you're over 25-30 years old then at best you probably won't be able to train yourself any more than 10 percentile points consistently higher on a good state of the art suite of tests meant to measure g. But that's all arbitrary and whilst I believe the underlying kernel of a concept holds true, that there is are factor(s) that affect all forms of cognitive activity which just so happen to be highly heritable, the weightings and task choices are entirely arbitrary so cannot be claimed as a truly unified and objective measure of intelligence. So yeah, if you're a midwit as I define it, that's unlikely to significantly change at this point, at least using the imperfect tests we have currently to measure it.
But that isn't necessarily a problem, as I said it looks like many people here are not purely speaking of middling intelligence when they say "midwit", but middling intelligence coupled with numerous other negative traits, like a lack of self-awareness of emotional instability. Truly just having an average intelligence is not a problem, and honestly even the majority of people that folks here might consider based and righteous are themselves probably not exceptionally intelligent.
So I say don't fret too hard about the strict intelligence portion which is relatively fixed but in real world settings can be mitigated, practice good mental hygiene in other respects such as focus and proactive self-reflection and you can still see strong positive changes in a few chosen areas. You can also just get and stay physically healthier, that is as much a factor in mental acuity as any form of direct cognitive training.
Take an IQ test, dipshit.
IQ tests are known to be unreliable sources of true intelligence measurement
I've heard that's what they tell you when your score is low.