Comment by bemtevi
5 days ago
"There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Although perhaps the terminology is a bit dichotomous - smart vs. stupid, which could be misleading also. I mean it's a bit ridiculous to condense ability and wisdom along many dimensions into this single dimension. And it further seems that in common parlance, stupid can mean a variety of things based on context...
Although I get the spirit of the article, I think it's just too much of a simplification to be useful.
I feel like the ability of making connections is relative to the domain, and more learned by exposure rather than innate.
For example, someone doing system engineering will be able to understand how the networking of a system works, while someone being a movie critics will find the hidden meanings and connections in the movies they watch. Similar for a musician.
Probably indeed the semantic is important. Someone can say something stupid in a specific occasion or all the time in a specific domain, but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
> ...but almost every time there are areas of life where they will be considered "smart".
This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
I do think there's a distinction to be made between "stupid" and "uneducated" but in terms of how you experience interactions, it's a distinction without a difference.
I actually was thinking on the following example, from my personal life: I have two masters, however I was doing summer jobs in my local town, as handyman, and was humbled very quickly.
The others colleagues all stopped school very early, got the same irrational political views that the ones you mentioned, etc.
However, they were beating us totally, students coming from fancy universities, for everything else related to machinery, gardening, repair, etc... Even on new problems, they were able to quickly make these logical connections, that we would miss.
>if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated.
poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.
these attributes are not the divider between smart and stupid.
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>This is a reasonable assumption if you've spent your life in places where the average person is well-educated, but, if we're being honest, it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated. Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's just your political biases expressed as classism bigotry.
I really doubt there's any correlation between left Vs right voting tendencies and intelligence.
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> it falls apart when you go to places where the average person is poor and/or uneducated
But being poor or uneducated is not an innate property of a person. Everyone can become poor or rich, educated or uneducated at any time.
> Think: places where people express eagerness to elect a certain person to a third term.
That's exactly something where I think "Smart people don't think others are stupid" applies. Just because people don't vote in ways that would follow your logic means they are dumb. They maybe have different priorities, incentives or moral than you.
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> "There are no smart people or stupid people, just people being smart or being stupid."
> I don't know if I really agree with that. I mean, there's definitely some behaviour stuff that can be changed, and some things someone can do to make themselves think more logically and clearly. But what about innate ability? It seems to me that some people just find it easier to make connections and certain kinds of logical thinking comes easier to them than to others with very little effort.
Even if it's not technically true, IMHO it's better to strike "stupid" from your conceptual vocabulary, because not thinking that way just gets you into a better mindset to live with others.
That's especially true for software engineers and other people who've often built an identity around being "smart." That mindset usually leads to arrogance and "smart people being stupid." It's also help to default to being very respectful of experience and expertise outside of your field (and even within it).
I think it is very difficult to discern innate ability because it can be so easily masked by effort. Lack of effort registers as lack of ability. Sometimes it's hard to keep making an effort when you lack ability. So are you slacking because you are lazy, or are you slacking because it's exhausting?
Sometimes you can help somebody find their smart by sparking their interest. Their smart was there all along. They just needed the right motivation to find it. They can learn all sorts of smart things as long as you relate it to kites, or Napolean, or horses, or whatever they find interesting.
If you feel the need to quote that, just remember that it was from something written back in 2012. That was a time so beautiful, even the light reflected from a raw sewerage tank could create a full spectrum rainbow with twinkling stars if you capture and bring it to today's world.
Now days, the world has grown much bigger, and people are accustomed to unfamiliarity (the world of strangers), with no need to understand and love, with no need to bring people together. So the check is much straight forward and quick: if someone thinks stupid, acts stupid, then maybe they are stupid. Brutal and useful, high utilitarian efficiency.
Sure, there are some people with specific intellectual disabilities, brain injuries and the like.
But beyond that it gets woolly - how do you separate aptitude, interest, effort, and opportunity? And even if it were possible, would the work needed to identify a (presumably small) set of 'truly stupid' people really be worth the effort?
>But what about innate ability?
With some life experience one finds that innate incredibly high IQ doesn't stop people from doing extremely stupid things - both generally in life and also in their own field/profession.
True. I wasn't referring to high IQ. But innate ability to have some wisdom or learn easily from life's mistakes, which IMO is much different than high IQ.
Yeah, but if we change it to "wisdom/learning from mistakes" the claim becomes tautological: "people who are wise act wise".
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The fact that some people are smart and some people are stupid is obvious to everyone. Every single human quality (strength, hair color, endurance, patience, height, immunity to diseases, penis size, etc.) follows some form of smooth distribution and we all agree on that. The claim that intelligence somehow doesn't because reasons is so blatantly false I don't understand why would we be discussing it in the first place. If you're a woman you ain't going to compete with men in MMA no matter how hard you train. It's extremely evident with children who innately display different skills. Also mentally disabled people exist and they prove that "everyone is equally innately smart" is false as fuck unless you don't consider mentally disabled people to be people - controversial position, but not exactly useless.
The issue here is that the society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
And what exactly is intelligence. Because there are many aspects to usual understanding of it and ability in each of them can vary quite a bit, even though there is some transfer (and it even has a name).
And then the issue of innateness, there is so much interplay with education both formal and informal, socioeconomic status, diet, emotional state, and myriad other things that it turns out pretty quickly that it's hard to say how kuch each part contributes.
It gets pretty murky fast once you start being careful when reasoning about this.
What’s very funny about this is that most people who aren’t very smart know they aren’t. They’re not too smart to think that there’s no difference between smart people and not smart people.
> society simply isn't ready for the logical implications of the fact that different people have different innate intelligence.
What are the logical implications?
Are there clusters of people with high/low intelligence, just like there are clusters of people with other traits? Like, Asians tend to be short, Africans are mostly black, men are usually stronger than women, Irish are redheads, etc. If we identify groups of people that are indeed stupid, what do we do about them as a society? We've tried mass murder and it backfired, we've tried other eugenics programs and it backfired too.
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Well there’s a spectrum with literally everything, including benchmarks. The perception of who is intelligent changes over time.