Difficulty of Talking About Ideas

You either have to be autistic or have an IQ of 145 or maybe 160.

Humans can't talk about ideas because their input channel is overwhelmed by the status implications. You could say they get distracted, but they literally only care about status, so how is it a distraction?. You need to be a genius or supergenius to suppress and/or overwhelm this instinct. Alternatively, have a mutation that kills the relevant subsystem.

Problem: turns out being scientific is so much more powerful than being human it makes the human look like a rabbit. Something you idly hunt for sport. As a hobby, not for profit. 

Further, talking about status is super boring. As per Paul Fussell, all the status jockeying doesn't work. If you manage to dunk your friend, it's not like you get to choose the restaurant for the evening instead of him. He just gets mad at you. Great work, genius.

By contrast if status is different enough to make a difference, there's no hiding it. Like trying to pretend to be over a foot shorter than you are, it's just dumb. You don't have to jockey for position; indeed that's worse than acting cool. (Shocking news, I know.) 

Humans can only talk about basic ideas. "The shovel is over there." "I would like to buy this now, not that." Communication is, essentially, impossible. Which means, in turn, teaching is impossible below the 0.3 percentile. All you can do is expose them to events so they see it themselves, or re-arrange concepts they already have. "The deer is to the left, not to the right."

Caveat: you can "teach" a human exactly the way you teach a dog. Make them try everything and whip them if they try something wrong. Pavlovian conditioning. "Rational animal" lol. I mean, Socrates was at least 180, so sure it was true for him, but for the bulk of the species you're way off base. 

P.S. Humans are rational given the ideas that are already in their head. They respond very logically to what they know and what they care about. It's just that they care about stupid things and are comically ignorant. 

P.P.S. I suppose that's why rhetoric is so effective. You can't use logic on 99.7% of humans, because they can't hear it. All they hear is dominance or submission. By process of elimination, rhetoric is about using the display of dominance or submission that makes them do what you want. Fun fact: there is essentially always such a display regardless of what you want to accomplish. What weaklings.

P.P.P.S. In an 'everything human is philosophy' moment, I realized this by thinking about an interaction with a grocery store clerk. Not talking about politics. Talking about bagging groceries. It still had to be about status. I made the error of mentioning why I forwent a bag, but that's an idea, so the clerk heard nothing of the sort and responded in a way that was very puzzling to me at first.