I found this thread on the Steele dossier to be useful:
The TL;DR: this was raw intelligence, which included stuff that is unlikely to be true for many reasons, and extracting information from it requires competent analysis, and by “competent” I mean “skilled in this type of intelligence”. Being smart and having “common sense” is insufficient.
OF COURSE, the author was attacked to supporting Trump, not going by Rachel Maddow’s “connect the dots” analysis because she is a woman, etc.
Now, this is technical, but RadiofreeTom was attempting to explain the situation to non-experts. Good luck with that.
Other stuff:
It is common to try for success in your dream field/profession and to come up shorter than you had hoped you would. That leaves this interesting question:
Yes, aptitude matters. I’ve seen people fail out of stem programs because they lacked the sufficient aptitude to attain the level of success that they wanted. You might even said that was true of me; after all, I am not full professor at MIT (and shouldn’t be). And I certainly failed spectacularly at sports.
Now, of course, one can get into this whole aptitude thing: are we talking about genetic aptitude (yes, it exists), or aptitude due to environmental factors (e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome people, or some sort of physically or mentally debilitating injury, or lack of development due to illness, poor early nutrition, or perhaps retarded development due to early environmental factors…) Yes, it is very complicated.
Still…interesting issue, and no, I have zero desire to discuss this with a woke.
Football
The Big Ten and SEC teams are starting play and let the excuses and rationalizations begin:
Life of an old goat 