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Monday, September 10, 2007

Book smart and no people skills.

Known plenty like that, myself included.

Fred On Everything:
"Generally intelligence has no effect on conclusions, which are glandularly determined. It just rationalizes hormonal inevitabilities.

...Brains just allow you to be more elaborately and ornately disastrously wrong.


However, smart people are at least interesting, like rare tumors, so early on I started having a lot of smart friends. I noticed that most of them were crazy. The right-wingers were hostile paranoids with the empathy of a torque wrench who wanted to nuke somebody. I don’t think they really cared who. The left-wingers were angry totalitarians-in-waiting with minds closed tighter than Fort Knox. For this they needed IQs of 160? You could do as well with derelicts in the Port Authority Bus Station at three a.m.

See, what happens is, as kids the bright don’t fit in. They don’t have much in common with anybody. They dress funny and get made fun of. They can’t dance. They don’t get laid much, or at all. This warps their heads. They retreat into isolation with others like them, become contemptuous of everyone else to get even, and deal in abstractions because it’s all they know. (I claim that if Marx had been able to jitterbug, the Soviet Union would never have existed.)

In short, a large IQ is an infallible predictor of emotional inadequacy.

...Many were professors at places like Stanford and MIT—scientists and anthropologists not of the first rank, nor of the second—too rigid, I thought, for originality—but nonetheless highly intelligent...

Here I figured was a window into academe, full of towering minds like Plato. These were not squirrels I bumped into in the back alleys of life. They were the real article. I eagerly awaited clarity, dispassion, and the self-abnegation of earnest bloodhounds in disinterested pursuit of Truth. Ha.

No. They too started with their premises, which they didn’t seem to realize were premises, and reasoned doggedly to…their premises...

An example: One of them used Google to search for rescue operations in the US, Mexico, and China. He found countless rescue stories for America—trapped miners, children in wells, cats in trees, what have you—and only one or two for China and Mexico. From this he did not conclude that the English press just doesn’t cover Mexico and China well—I searched in Spanish and found lots. No. He decided that Mexicans and Chinese do not regard individual life as important. They just don’t bother to rescue people, see.

...Here you have it: large IQ, zero grasp of humanity, all is abstractions.

...We ought to put something in the water to keep IQs down. There would be so much less noise."

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