"But I DID have breakfast this morning"

The difference between human, subhuman, and ultrahuman

There is a very popular 4chan meme that goes -

Wait. Before we get started, I need to issue a disclaimer here. The following article touches on a topic that is not politically correct at all, namely the true - but unpopular - idea that not all people are equal. In this degenerate time of social media lynch mobs and cancel culture, I’m confident that some people looking for outrage bait will immediately label this a “racist dogwhistle.” So before I continue, I want to make it clear that nothing in this article is related to race at all. If you decide to view this post through a race-based filter, that’s entirely your fault. It’s sad that something like this even needs to be said, but apparently this is where we are in Current Year. Anyway, with that disclaimer in mind, let’s get back to my story.

There is a very popular 4chan meme called “But I DID have breakfast this morning,” which discusses the way people of different intelligence experience empathy differently. The original post that inspired the meme is too long to recreate here, but essentially it repeats the anecdote of a grad student doing IQ research on convicts in San Quentin, who discovered that many convicts shared many similar traits, notably the fact that they had an exceptionally low intelligence which made them unable to understand conditional hypotheticals. The grad student goes on to hypothesize that perhaps this is why they are criminals in the first place: because they lack the capacity to build a mental model of somebody else’s mind, which makes them unable to empathize with other people. He goes on to quote a typical interview with a convict:

“How do you think that man felt when you beat him?”

“Dunno.”

“How do you think that boy’s mom felt when she heard that her son was dead?”

“Dunno.”

This inability to mentally model how other people would feel is very similar to their inability to understand other mental models, such as how they would feel if they hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning:

“How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch?”

“What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch.”

“Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?”

“Why are you saying that you didn’t eat breakfast? I just told you that I did.”

“Imagine that you hadn’t eaten it, though. How would you have felt?”

“I don’t understand the question.”