|
Aswad -> RE: Why Are Americans Anti-Intellectual? (10/4/2012 4:26:36 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: fucktoyprincess
It is one of the few places in the world where I have lived and worked where being smart means you are looked down on, bullied, etc.
Please do not come to Norway. We will reset and recalibrate your scale.
quote:
Smart people are generally viewed with suspicion and hatred, rather than admired.
Isn't that normal everywhere?
Admiration is reserved for beauty (women), strength (men) and status (both).
Mobbing, incidentally, has one consistent predictor: being objectively superior in some regard to the mob.
quote:
It has led to a society that elevates the average, and wants their leadership to resemble them.
Looking at the US from up here, it seems to be a society that worships the cream of the crop and wants leadership that has every quality in the book in abundance, while sneering at the merely good, pissing on the average and curb stomping everything below the average. It may be that this is not the impression from where you lived before going to the US, in which case I think it might be good for me to move to wherever you were before.
quote:
And why, as Americans, so we feel talent is completely divorced from being smart?
Where I'm from, talent is considered a matter of the luck of the draw, and skill is seen much the same. It comes from above by some mystic process, rather than by practice, discipline, attention to quality and intelligent refinement of methodology. And you better not get it in your head that putting in a hundred thousand hours of practice means you actually know something, let alone that the result could be implied to be anything other than your good fortune to be gifted with such an outcome.
I guess it comes down to the unfairness of it. By applying my mind, I have been able to learn more fields than anyone I know that is less intelligent. I can figure out what I need to do to get better at something, even if that something has nothing to do with my mind. If I care to become a football player, I can apply my mind to improving my body, my coordination, my reflexes and so forth, and I can bring that mind with me onto the playing field to handle strategy at a level the coach (is that the word?) may well be unable to follow, while tracking the locations of every member of both teams, their capabilities and their behavior patterns.
«A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.»
- Robert A. Heinlein
One of the things Heinlein is implying, which I don't agree with, is that intelligence is the measurable quantity that we may call humanity or human potential. Another thing he's implying, which I do agree with, is that intelligence allows you to take on more tasks than a less intelligent being can.
It's polite to subscribe to the idea that there's different kinds of intelligence. I think that's a partial truth only. There's different skillsets, and people have a different degree of talent for each skillset, but intelligence allows you to acquire and improve any skillset that's not outside your reach by virtue of actual brain damage, congenital or not. That is, someone with high intellectual capacity and a lower social or emotional capacity can decide to attain a higher social or emotional capacity and succeed at it, regardless of whether they started low or high to begin with. Because at a certain level of intelligence, you start to become able to grasp what your mind is doing, and able to grasp what we know about the human mind, and able to synthesize from this a method that will take you from what you are to what you want to be.
Character, of course, will determine what use you actually choose to put such intellect to. And opportunity determines what choices are readily available without first choosing to change the available options. You can't just think your way out of anything, or into anything (though I've noticed I can probably think my way into some women's pants, lol), but intellect is the great multiplier. In life, you add up everything you have (including circumstance), and then you multiply it by intelligence. Doubling anything else adds just a little bit. Doubling intelligence will double the total.
That's not fair in the sense of being linearly additive or equally available to anyone or any other popular definition of fairness.
And, of course, if you can't see what's going on, it'll seem like luck or whatever, not intellect or effort.
People tend to admire only what they can understand, which is often very little.
quote:
And given the complexity of the global economy and the global geo-political situation, why is it that we think politicians don't need to be smart to be effective in their roles?
For programming savvy people and polymaths, I will point out that Paul Graham has a great quote on this using programming languages to illustrate.
For the rest:
People can't distinguish between the quality of candidates that are of higher merit than themselves, because they aren't aware of those complexities at all. This is one of many significant drawbacks with the democratic model, because it is the fat tail of the bell curve which can do great things, and it is the center of the bell curve that will decide which things are done and who gets to do them, or- accurately- decide who decides those things.
As a rule, the people near the center of the bell curve have zero- I repeat, zero- ability to determine if someone is near the extreme far end of the fat tail, or just slightly off-center. I readily recognize that there are people who are whole orders of magnitude smarter than me. But I've rarely encountered people that are substantially less smart than me and still able to distinguish between my intellect and the intellect of those I consider my superiors in that department. And according to every bit of psychometry I've been through, even in my current state- which is such that I keep thinking "this is what dementia must be like"- I significantly exceed the average, so anyone average will probably be unable to make the distinction I mention.
Most of the time, average people up here fall into two groups when it comes to how they see my intellect: they either worship me as an unknowable, bright star they cannot touch, or revile me as an intolerable, pompous ass that thinks he's better than them (although that, ironically enough, is usually a projection of their own thoughts, and not something I actually think, although I'll admit this particular post has been pointed and rather pompous). I see no reason to expect this to be any different anywhere along the spectrum.
For everyone here that can see that I'm merely above average smart, it should be clear that no democratic process will ever lead to the best leaders being chosen, except by chance. Its role is to damp out impulses, to deaden and control, so that one can accomplish a degree of stability that is conducive to being a happy cog in the machine without the burden of chaos and surprise. To make the average, rather than beating it at the risk of falling short. And, of course, a direct implication is that only improving the population as a whole will substantially change the world for the better without violating every basic value, ideal and idea underlying democracy as a concept.
I'm not a genious. Someone out there is, though. And you can bet s/he won't be your head of state. Ever.
quote:
In many ways the American public gets the government it deserves. And it is sad.
The average gets what the average deserves. That's not sad.
What's sad is the rest of us get stuck with it, too.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
P.S.: The upshot is the rest of us get to reap the fruits of the labors of the numerous averages, cumulative over human history.
P.P.S.: Please ignore the "before you came to the US" part, as I misunderstood, thinking you went there, rather than working abroad.
|
|
|
|
