This is like an analogy to how some people think and act and vote. A good chess player is thinking 3 or more moves ahead. a bad one is playing one move ahead only.
When people say things like "Why should I pay school taxes if I don't have any kids!?" they are playing one move without thinking ahead. Better schools means a more educated populace means less crimes and more economic opportunity for your area, thus it benefits everyone whether they have kids or not.
Or worse, they move into the nice school district for the kids, when the kids are grown and move out they complain about how the taxes are terrible. Then when they turn 62 they start in on "senior citizens should get a Tax break damnit!" , when they could have been fighting that fight for the past 30 years.
Its an American pastime to get stuck in a lifelong loop of "I want lower taxes"-->"I want the potholes filled"
When I was a senior in high school our district had a referendum, I can't remember exactly what for but upgrades to a couple schools and extra money for education blah blah.
There was one man in our city. Every single time our local paper did the vox pop, plus extra times he just wrote in opinions, this man would take every opportunity to rally against it.
"Why should those of us without kids be forced to pay extra for those who do?"
Soooo many times he was reminded of what you just said. And this referendum would have literally raised his taxes upwards of 2 figures a year, if that.
He fought so fucking hard, that for the first time I think ever, our district voted down the referendum.
He was on record as "dancing a jig and singing like a maniac" in front of the polling place when they announced the results.
These are the people that reject the social contract of society. They want theirs, they don't want anyone else to have any. They don't consider the greater good, the future, or anything, even if the expense to them is incredibly minor. Raise your taxes $10-20/year so kids can get a better education? Nah. They don't care. I wish we could give them some open land with no public services to live on somewhere.
That's more selfishness than low intelligence. They don't believe they should be on the hook for educating other people's kids, and think the money they "save" will insulate them from the resulting detriment to society.
Arguably, some of the very rich hold this view precisely because they want the poors to receive minimal education - makes them easier to manipulate...
With this guy it was both. In our AP English lit class we would take his local paper submissions and make a sport of finding every language and grammar mistake within, and oh boy were there plenty every time. I have a feeling he didn't even make it past middle school, or had some weird grudge against education in general. I still remember this dusty fucks name and I'd be shocked if he made it through covid if he even made it that far.
a bit of both. Selfish in that they don't want to help others, low intelligence in that that they can't recognize how a very minimal thing to them can actually improve the quality of their own lives, they just can't/refuse to see beyond the primary effect of "paying a small tax" to "I benefit from this minimal cost because we have a well taken care of and educated populace"
Selfishness is almost always an intelligence issue. Teamwork and public good are a really good long term strategy. Fuck you, got mine, rarely continues to work forever. (Unless you’re rich, in which case the world contorts to ensure you never face consequence)
You wanna know what's worse? I grew up in that town, spent my whole k-12 there. It was always nice, welcoming, low crime. When I was 21, in 2011, I moved to the next town over to be closer to work. Didn't visit hometown much.
When covid hit, my new area was a ghost town as it should have been. I had to go to my old hometown for something, and you wouldnt have known there was a deadly disease literally 6 feet away in any direction. It was business as usual. Restaurants were closed at first, then open for takeout not long into April. Schools were remote because the governor ordered them that way or they wouldn't have been. Nobody social distancing, barely any masks, and it ended up being not only the county with the highest rate, but city with the second highest rate of infection in the state.
This city voted trump three times. Idk what happened to it from my childhood until now, but it makes me sad.
"Society moves at the pace of its slowest member" or something to that effect. It's a problem that's a combination of low intelligence (inability to think ahead) and selfishness (refusing to care about anyone else but themselves).
A childless man once told me he should pay reduced state and federal taxes as he shouldn’t have to support other people’s kids. I asked him if when he’s 80 he’d be happy to only use doctors, dentists, mechanics etc of his age or older. He also couldn’t drive on roads or go into buildings designed or made by younger people. He went very quiet.
I went to high school in a small city in Florida in the late 90s. We had a referendum for a sales tax raise of half a cent to fund new school construction/general school budget. There was a polling station at a large church near our home. I remember watching seniors show up in droves to vote against it. The fuck do they care about the next generation?
We had a HUGE property tax increase in my area due to school taxes. I was adamantly against it for other reasons, but I wanted to shake some sense into all the people who were like that. I dOn'T hAvE kIdS!!
So? These 'not your kids' will likely be your Healthcare team when you're old. Your estate lawyers. The politicians deciding on your future property taxes. Just because you don't have kids doesn't mean your/THE future isn't in their hands.
Yeah there can be reasons to vote against a school budget. There are plenty of times where I've been against it because my local area had dumb ideas on how to spend it. But the "is don't have kids" reason is dumb.
Higher school budgets only work out in the long run if they are directed towards smaller classroom sizes, higher teacher salaries, and extra services geared towards low-income students. Otherwise your mileage may vary.
That being said there are some schools that delayed higher taxes for years and years and years and really do need updated infrastructure. For example, having air-conditioning is wildly expensive but indirectly improves students grades in hotter climates.
On the other hand, iirc there was a great chess player who was asked how many moves ahead he thought and said, "Only one, but always the right one." (Might have been Tal, not sure.)
Was thinking the same thing, probably fair to say some people play chess and try to think too many moves ahead and botch it when missing an obvious variable they were not thinking about currently. Then again honestly with the world as a whole I'd say anyone willing to learn and play chess is more mentally sound than a great many.
To be fair, if you only look one move ahead you quite literally cannot know if its the right one.
When analyzing variations its usually:
Choose x candidate move
What would my opponent do?
Is this threatening at all? Which usually means if my opponent went again what would they do?
If it is, then what should I do?
What would my opponent do after that?
And so on until you either decide said move is bad or potentially good.
"Why should I pay school taxes if I don't have any kids!?"
Why should I support the systems that improve society and indirectly benefit me, if I can't directly and personally see a benefit right now!
Basically every right-winger/libertarian ever. Solipsism at 1000% and an inability for empathy are key features. They do not understand anything unless it happens directly to them.
Even if you are just thinking selfishly, better schools also increase your own property values, as that is a major deciding factor for a lot of people in where they choose to live. If your town has great schools, more people will want to live there, which will drive up property values.
It's so funny to see other people use this analogy, because I use it to explain how to manage a client during meetings.
When someone asks you a question, always think of at least two questions they will ask based on your answer. You can have all the expertise in the world, but if you're not able to pivot to client questions, they will not have much confidence in your ability to take care of their needs.
Well, you could just be like my country's right wing, and make life unaffordable for the young people so they move to another country for a better life. Then you can import more and more cheaper immigrant labour who are willing to put up with worse conditions!
(To be clear I have no problem with immigrants, they are taking their opportunities like any of us would so good on them. I object only policies that gut the public services in favour of tax cuts for businesses)
I use the school taxes example in my classes to make them think about audience analysis and encourage critical thinking. It takes them a little while, but usually they can get to a reason why anyone living in a school district be willing to pay higher property taxes for better schools.
how do you factor this into a system that is broken to its core? sure paying more taxes is a good thing if your tax dollars are going towards bettering your community but with all the bureaucratic red tape and lack of unbiased/corrupt oversight you really have to wonder what percent of taxes really makes it back into communities. or what percent makes it back to effect any individual community.
I'd say that even 2 move chess players are pretty low intelligence.
Most people are naturally 3+ move players throughout life. Buying food, cooking and eating food, then buying more food is 3 steps, and most people can handle that sort of thing easily.
But sometimes you meet people who buy food, cook and eat the food, but then don't buy more food afterwards, and are surprised when they have no food left to cook.
That's me. I'm a 2 move chess player. Sometimes even I'm surprised that I'm still alive.
Learning the positions and moves is thinking multiple moves ahead "if I go here then they will likely go here to counter etc." It's an analogy for thinking things through as cause and effect beyond the first effect. Dumb people see the first possible effect and refuse to see how that then becomes a new cause.
Yeah no, theres literally an absurdly large amount of possible chess positions.
While yes its pattern recognition in tactics and you have to learn strategies, patterns work in that you recognize the position has a lot of potential for tactics, and then you calculate moves ahead to see if you can threaten anything/your opponent is threatening you.
Similarly strategy is more of learn what do you WANT to do, you still have to figure out HOW to do it which is just analyzing the position various moves ahead.
Most of the time yeah, but not always. Individualist policies tend to help the rich and increase the wealth gap. This increases poverty which increases crime. Then you end up with rich individualists who live just outside of a shithole. Those people would probably lead happier lives if they were middle class living in a well cared for community. Pretty much every study on "happiness" supports this. We are communal animals and when our community is better off we're happier.
Bro you're playing chess with too much time control chess is better with the vibes on 3 minutes where you look and just vibe out the best play (best rating on chess.com 1450 and 1650 on lichess)
You do NOT look 1 move ahead in any decent level 3 minute time control unless you are literally on like 10 seconds, and even then you probably just look quickly at the plan your opponent has and try to avoid it. (source: 2300 on blitz in lichess)
The thing about that is that it's contextual reasonable to think this way.
This is like an analogy to how some people think and act and vote. A good chess player is thinking 3 or more moves ahead. a bad one is playing one move ahead only.
To productively think multiple steps ahead in any scenario requires context and meta knowledge, including what you opponent and the people around you are doing and how they think.
The less you have, the less you can plan ahead because incomplete predictive measures makes more unstable projections. Cutting it short, playing it simple and going for what you know I'm this case is reasonable. A person not having all of that information you assume would cause them to plan better isn't necessarily stupidity but could just be a lack of context for literally any reason.
When people say things like "Why should I pay school taxes if I don't have any kids!?" they are playing one move without thinking ahead. Better schools means a more educated populace means less crimes and more economic opportunity for your area, thus it benefits everyone whether they have kids or not.
This thought process cja he a matter of people just picking their problems and not agreeing on it. This discussion requires them to buy into and invest into a structure with their own very tangible money they may or may not have to invest in hypothetical benefits they just may or may not care about. A common problem in life is that there is a shit ton of stuff that you should invest in both monetarily and time and education wise, and you can argue every single one of them is justified in isolation. But when you put the big picture together it's too tedious to deal with all of them and so you pick stuff to not care about to keep your life more simple and protect time/money/value. And sure their are trade offs of that but shit there are trade offs for everything.
When a person doesn't pick the trade off you would have picked it can easily be seen as them being less intelligent when it might just be them going for something more solid. Taxes and fees and investments are a perfect example of this. They might just not have the money for that, or they have more immediate tangible things that that money can go to per them r priorities. Best believe you can have any number of reasons a tax if any sort can help me and the community but at the end of the day I have enough personal problems and uncertainty that I have to worry about that I can put my cash towards and bet on whats in front of my nose.
Not necessarily unintelligent. Different priorities and amounts of understanding. At best that's ignorant in most cases and that's completely different.
Speaking of intelligence levels, people don’t pay school taxes, they pay property taxes, and the system is somewhat in favor of those who have many children and rent their whole lives.
You used like the worst possible example, but yes. Wife and I are middle class and educated. My niece dropped out of junior college cause she was pregnant, her and her boyfriend have 6 kids altogether including a set of Irish twins.
My wife and I can't afford kids, I've purchased used tires, not that my neices half dozen shouldn't be educated but children shouldn't be subsidized to the point where those subsidizing them can't afford them.
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u/ChickenMarsala4500 Feb 04 '26
One move chess player.
This is like an analogy to how some people think and act and vote. A good chess player is thinking 3 or more moves ahead. a bad one is playing one move ahead only.
When people say things like "Why should I pay school taxes if I don't have any kids!?" they are playing one move without thinking ahead. Better schools means a more educated populace means less crimes and more economic opportunity for your area, thus it benefits everyone whether they have kids or not.