The impotence of being clever
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
This torments me too. Growing up I was top of my class/district (same as my parents and theirs, which really suggests a genetic component), but then when I started working with other smart people I realized that only gets you so far.
To make wise decisions, you need to have the proper mindstate to make genuine "human" decisions, rather than using just your intelligence. In fact, if you're smart enough, you can "logically" prove wrong things to yourself like "this is impossible". Wisdom is knowing that whenever you say that, you have made a mistake in your logic at some point.
It's very hard to teach people to start thinking like this. The junior engineers who can think on their feet are usually mentored better since that's the part you can't teach..
The tormenting part is this: the same can be said of most other areas of life. I've seen so many genuinely smart people completely mess up personal areas of their life by refusing to think, or do things differently. Despite having a strong apparatus for thinking, they don't "wake up" and use it, they just form all kinds of delusions that they can prove to themselves using their strong proving abilities. Despite being wise in some areas, this wisdom doesn't extend to the others.
I think this is why depression rates are higher in more intelligent people. There's a better ability to comprehend and change your life, but that usually doesn't translate to the willpower and wisdom needed to do so. Those are separate things one has to have/train. An inbalance in the two causes great upset/lost potential.
Does it? Could be as much a product of a privileged upbringing and generational welth reproducing themselves. Do you have an adopted sibling you grew up with, that had the same environments and opportunities, but turned out to be a moron? As a control group, you know.
I find odd how people are so quick to jump to genetics to explain a thing so complex as a human being inside a society. There's SO many forces acting on it at all times, picking genes over all the others feels like an oversimplification.
> privileged upbringing and generational welth reproducing themselves
I come from an ex Soviet satellite state, I don't think your assumptions of what my parents/grandparents' life was like is accurate. I had a more privileged upbringing, but that doesn't explain 2 generations away.
I am not at all put off by genetic explanations (go genes!), but it does equally suggest environment and upbringing as a common element, it's a series of poster children for it.
As a personal story that I will share since it also has value as an experiment: I did not see my father between the ages of 0-3 and 7-19. That means he was not there for a large part of my developmental phase, in which I formed a lot of my viewpoints on the world (at the time, obviously).
What astounded me was that when I met him, he shared a lot of those viewpoints. A lot of my behaviour that I thought was specific to me, was not. Even small things like preference for walking etc. I will not list everything obviously but it really ingrained in me that a lot of what I considered "my identity" was not chosen in any way by me. We grew up in rather different environments/countries too.
I think most humans would rather not face the fact that their identity is scarcely chosen. But learning to accept that means you can experience a lot more, since your ego doesn't mind losing parts that aren't "really part of it" anyway. Or at least it's less scary.
Maybe genetics plays a much larger role in intelligence than we currently think, it's just so complicated that (unlike eye color) we can't identify those genes yet.
(It isn't.)
> Maybe genetics plays a much larger role in intelligence than we currently think, it's just so complicated that (unlike eye color) we can't identify those genes yet.
People telling you "genetics causes x" are committing abuses of notation if they don't include the counterfactual i.e. they are lying to you.
Everything about you is 100% caused by genetics - because otherwise you'd be a gorilla.
Everything about you is also 100% caused by the environment - because if a rock fell on your head you wouldn't have any "intelligence" after that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44083-9
Obviously, there is also a strong environmental factor. But lacking either, will probably result in no pickup truck.
As for our kids though, both drive Caminos.
This really reminds me of some guy I used to work with. He would spew random madness like people don't really need to eat because alive is an arbitrary state. I really have no idea how he functioned outside of his CS job.
He was also annoying at work because I would say things like the customer needs this then he would retort with some more madness like "well if you think about it blah blah the customer doesn't really matter." An I would just have to be like "ok thats great just get your feature assignments done on time". through gritted teeth. He did always get his work done.
You'll never get anywhere pedantically deconstructing things with no bounds.
He currently works at Northrop Grumman so not looking good for us.
>I think this is why depression rates are higher in more intelligent people. There's a better ability to comprehend and change your life, but that usually doesn't translate to the willpower and wisdom needed to do so.
Other possibilities:
- intelligent people have a history of being bullied and develop anxiety/depression from that
- they struggle with impossibly high expectations placed on them
- genes associated with intelligence increase risk of mental illness
- they rely too much on their intellect at an early age and fail to develop other important skills
- intelligent people may be more arrogant and have difficulty maintaining friendships
- a higher correlation of neurodivergence and the difficulties of living in a world not designed for them
Yes, exactly! I'm aware of it and can't stop doing it. You do it too I bet. It's a very annoying flaw in the human psyche.
edit: to be clear, you can stop. It requires some energy to open up your mind though, so you can't do it forever or you'll burn out, at least in my experience.
Intelligent people are more likely to realize they're depressed, go online, talk about depression, and meet other intelligent people who are also depressed?
No it doesn't. It implicates an inheritable component, just not necessarily a genetic one. Education, wealth, culture, prosperity, etc.
Wow, would you think it’s possible that there is a correlation between intelligent people and groups which create education, wealth, culture, prosperity, etc.?
[0] for instance, I was top of my class not by choice but merely because I enjoyed reading all the things all the time because it was so natural, so pleasurable. That pleasure is far away most of the time now.
The emotional / personal aspect of abuse of "thinking" is also interesting.
There's also something about how college material is presented maybe, it's a bit obfuscated behind notations. Or maybe that's just me not being in sync with high level thinking anymore. As a kid I loved all weird notations without feeling lost.
I recognize this as empathy. It is something of a superpower when used to its full potential.
So undervalued by many.
It's not. Intelligence is negatively correlated to both anxiety and depression.
>Although intelligence conferred no consistent independent effects on depression, it did increase the risk for depression across samples once neuroticism was adjusted for.[1]
>Those with high IQ had higher risk for psychological disorders (RR 1.20 - 223.08). High IQ was associated with higher risk for physiological diseases (RR 1.84 - 4.33).[2]
[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01031-2
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486156/
[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...!
[3]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-...
Perhaps this is another manifestation of the fear of failure that prevents some smart people from taking chances. E.g., admitting they were wrong and the normies were right would mean they aren’t smart after all, so they entrench and apply every brain cell to convincing themselves they are right, to the point of delusion.
Were you raised by your parents?
In more detail, here's a paragraph-by-paragraph "map" of the essay:
• [1–2] Three quotes that speak of cleverness negatively. So is there something wrong with being clever?
• [3-4] Connecting cleverness to being an "outsider". [IMO the main theme pervading the whole essay: alienation/dissociation.] The four character types [mentioned above].
• [5–9] The detective as outsider. [Raymond Chandler, Chinatown.]
• [10–13] The comedian as outsider. [Woody Allen, Seinfeld]
• [14–16] The flâneur (with link to detective).
• [17–19] Online cleverness (with links to the observations made about the earlier types).
• [20–22] Three paragraphs of conclusion: Kierkegaard and a way out.
In light of this, this essay is far more methodically structured than most I've read! From your comment it sounds like you're most interested in the "comedian" bits (paras 10–13 and 19), but the rest of the essay is quite connected too. And the journal is subtitled "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture", so it makes sense that there are references to contemporary culture.
The OP gestures towards a thesis ('here's why society's championing of cleverness is bad') and then spends paragraphs meandering around it.
If the author stuck to just dissecting only Twitter or Seinfeld or Kierkegaard or Einstein using some supporting of details derived from just one of of those references, or even tied in one extra reference for robustness, that’d be great in my opinion. But this essay reads like it was constructed from a bunch of transcluded notes from an Obsidian vault or a zettelkasten (where reference upon reference can be taking due to bi-directional links between notes).
I can go as far as to say that this is less classic prose, than it is prose in the manner of a Family Guy episode.
No, although that's an excellent book. I'm referring to the essay-writing tradition that started with Michel de Montaigne (who first used the word 'essay' in that sense). He was a skeptic and thought of essays as wandering and exploratory, not probative.
I think the piece does resound a bit if you can clean off the gunky verbal tripe and look at what they’re trying to say. There’s a definite problem regarding people trying to be clever. I’m just not convinced that’s the source of the problem. Just a symptom.
The point of citing Kierkegaard is to make use of the insights of others to try to explain something and to shed light on it. What the author is examining starts as a vague, confused, and murky impression that requires refinement, analysis, and effort to get to the essence of the thing. Clarity is not a given. Do you presume to know all there can be said about a thing? If not, then looking at what others have said is an opportunity to grow in wisdom and break out of the provincialism of one's own limited perspective, if only by the very act of wrestling with their material. I thank the wise who came before me for showing me the way and enriching my understanding of reality.
Is talking about "culture" a way of lumping fiction and reality together? Fictional always-right, wisecracking detectives aren't real, but there are real detectives, and presumably some clever ones whose actual cleverness is of real practical use. Fictional scientists who are more passionate than logical aren't real, but there are real scientists, whose cleverness is presumably valuable. Realistic work of professionals doesn't make for good reading. Fiction is entertainment in the first place.
Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.
Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?
But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I also think that, like consuming only social media probably atrophies your attention span, reading only "direct" prose atrophies your ability to experience the ride of other styles and receive what they have to give.
And again I don't really intend this as a value judgement. Both styles have their place and there is no moral imperative to enjoy all approaches to writing. But having a limited palate accidentally, being blind to that, and thinking the fault is entirely in anything that lies outside of it is in a very literal sense pathetic. And here I often sense that it is perceived as virtuous distance from foolishness instead.
I think that reaction's a combination of that sort of writing sometimes being amateurish wankery poorly-imitating better writers with better ideas, and an awful lot of tech- and science-nerd sorts having decided around 5th grade that they were already expert readers and literature and language classes were just a bunch of time-wasting made-up bullshit that couldn't possibly teach them to be better readers or writers. "It's this entire field that's wrong, not me!"
Poor literacy is almost as prevalent as poor math skills, folks are just less comfortable owning up to it. Plus a lot more people overestimate how good they are at it, I think, than do with math skills.
If an article is nonfiction, then get to the point and stay there, dammit.
There's meandering with multiple sometimes subtle qualities along the way and there's ... meandering.
I think part of the issue is that these kinds of essays serve both as an argument and jumping off point for discussion, but also as a form of entertainment. If you enjoy the entertainment, you might enjoy the argument being padded and meandering. But if you're mostly interested in hearing the argument and responding, this type of writing can fell like it's intentionally wasting your time.
I actually agree with you that more reflection in general is a good idea (though I don't necessarily agree that these kinds of essays engender that kind of reflection, but that's a separate topic). However, the online communities that exist now are designed to dissuade people from doing anything (reflection, research, editing, etc.) that take more time.
It's also the case that time is limited, and there are some topics we don't want to spend much time on. It's common to see people argue that if you don't spend as much time on the topic as them, then your opinions on it aren't as worthy, but I can't really agree with that. It's very often used as a way to defend poor beliefs against obvious criticisms. You see it a lot with conspiracy theories. "You can't dismiss this unless you've read all of the writings on it!" But only true believers are going to subject themselves to dozens of books on a crank theory.
In today's writing, perhaps because we demand so great a volume of it, purposeful prose financially rewards the author's extra effort less than ever before, and is less appreciated by readers because they're less willing to pause their pace of consumption to reflect on subtleties and unobvious insights. The online written word has evolved into a 24x7-driven ehpemeral commodity, where cleverness alone is the desiderata that makes or breaks the work and its auteur.
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all?
This sounds like the proletariat mimicking their leadership, in that the above is a description of how politics seems to work. We need a better class of example-setters before we're going to see better behaved societies.
The topic of discussion is quickly lost, and any hope of progress towards a resolution along with it, amongst a competition of witticisms.
I'm quite happy with this cleverness of mine:
"I'd rather be right than popular, and I often am."
But this could just be an intellectual hedging of my bets against whatever the real-life-vulnerability equivalent of down votes is; Stern, disapproving glares.
Cleverness is often seen as a positive quality, but it is also associated with being an outsider. In modernity, this has led to the proliferation of cleverness in public life, often in the form of contrived knowingness and irony. This has led to cleverness becoming a currency online, with people competing for likes and subscribers with clever jokes and analyses. There is an affinity between cleverness and alienation, as exemplified by the detective archetype, who is a detached and calculating outsider. This kind of cleverness often takes the form of seeing through illusions and can be found in popular media, online commenting, and in fiction. The proliferation of cleverness in public life has led to it becoming a nuisance and being criticized by figures such as Oscar Wilde and Søren Kierkegaard. It is important to distinguish between genuine wisdom and cleverness, and not to value the latter over the former.
I see a few (e.g. linking 'Kierkegaard' and 'proliferation'), but it would be probably more interesting to do the same on an article presenting some solid argument.
> Pretty good job
Do you think the summary is really structured? Does it present an argument? Does it identify its nodes?
Or is it more like Woody Allen having made that speed-reading course and concluding that War and Peace is about Russia?
However, if your goal was to just know what to expect from the article and then read it, it made a 'Pretty good job'.
The author focuses a lot on the trappings of cleverness - the witticisms and the "outsider" nature of the clever individual. This is the wrong thing to focus on. People with conventional ideas today exploit these trappings (with the help of professional marketing and PR teams) to give themselves an air of importance and brilliance. It's no surprise that when you focus there, you will find cleverness to be "impotent."
Instead, cleverness defined as a cross-disciplinary ("outsider") perspective is incredibly valuable in the modern world. A lot of cleverness comes from people who otherwise seem very boring - they are clever in their specialty and in their own way, but not the supposed "renaissance men" that media personalities seem to be attracted to.
And so what the layperson sees, because it's what's chosen by the engagement maximising algorithm, is only ever type 1 cleverness. Hence it's the topic.
Which is ironic in itself, a well written article about the focus being wrong because the focus is wrong.
(My pithy summation is also such an example, it's clever but adds or solves fucking nothing, welcome to my career).
I believe the word you're looking for is "dilettante".
In the context of programming, the best person on my team was wise, but he sometimes could not resist being clever to the detriment of the readability of the code. To me, clever code is the stuff you might find (admittedly these are extreme) on the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. "Wise" code is code that does what it needs to do but is clear. The weakest person on a team should be able to read and understand (and maybe fix bugs in) this code.
We had one example where the person in question had just read about multiple inheritance in C++ and just could not resist the urge to use it in some key code that none of the rest of us understood at all! I made him rewrite it without multiple inheritance.
Being clever rather than wise will push you to find those simple/elegant solutions that are not easy to understand or maintain. In reverse being wise rather than merely clever you will go with the boring or seemingly complex solution if it is easier for the team to understand and maintain.
Sometimes being clever is about the ability of self-delusion as long as it serves one's goal, as described in On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality — https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/selfdelusion.html
Advice: question /why/. The rest should follow.
Make it apparent. Oh, but in a way the author did.
Bad signals: «Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes»; «associations»; «positive»; «is seen»; «many will identify»; «we tend to use»; ... «redeem ... by making a clever joke ... that shows»; «to appear»; «the game» ...
The accusation of levity is circular, acted from a perspective firmly installed in levity.
Very little appears of any constructive consideration of the Point: we have to manage a World, we need well processed information, we had been since the dawn of time, playing is for spare time - and Stern is mostly playing.
--
> the medium’s stupidity
In spite of a number of faults, let us hold HN dear for the goods it offers.
Lewis Hyde "Alcohol & Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking"
However, the other form of being clever, the Fight Club "How's the working out for you? -- Being clever?" is shallow and often contagious, in the sense that a clever turn of phrase or a meme might replace rational thought. I'll give an example: whenever someone might suggest that someone else who is mentally ill might be violent, the stock response (I'll give you a bit to think of it) is some variant "Mentally ill people are in more danger of having violence inflicted on them than average people."
It's interesting as a response, it might even be true, but it in no way answers the actual question: is there a statistically larger incidence of violence from the mentally ill as compared to the norm? And then if you press further, you can get something like "The vast majority of people with mental health problems are no more likely to be violent than anyone else," which is yet another clever evasion and still doesn't answer the question.
This is just one example, but a lot of "memetic politics" contain such obscuring cleverness. It's a magic trick, at best, and should be stamped out wherever it appears, as a terrible shim jammed in, separating us just a little bit more from the real world.
It definitely feels like much of always-online culture is a defense mechanism against feeling scared and powerless, even as it presents itself as anything but.
One of the TIL moments for me in the film is learning why the conservative intellectuals of the day were dead against "new planets" discovered by telescopes. It turns out, since all their natural sciences were governed by Zodiac hand-me-downs from Babylon via Aristotle and Avicenna -- ~"all natural phenomena are caused by the movements of heavenly bodies" -- having their magic number Seven (7) be supplanted was a complete intellectual crisis.
It was "cleverness", being "aloof" and "an outsider" that marks the man, Descartes (at least as depicted here). He repeatedly makes the point in the film as to why he chose to live among Dutch merchants and sailors instead of fellow geeks in Paris! ("I want to be left alone to think and reflect").
I think pre-Enlightenment the conservative ethos was held to be 'godly' and 'true'. Then a sequence of brilliant clever men such as Descartes heedlessly began to question practically every received wisdom. And then by the time our witty man of letters comes around, it had become fashionable and no longer the unique instrument of true wits and true minds.
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A reviewer: "At first glance this is the most tedious of Rossellini's portraits, double the length, with even more repetitive talk about a more abstract subject: the correct use of mind."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0161382
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:26FF01235DA0205BFA466939EED0EA5100CBB3BE
The above is also an example.
edit: not the op.
One is humility. Cleverness often leads to various forms of hubris. The most dangerous of which is to overvalue one’s deductions/decisions (as opposed to others’) because too often one’s previous deductions/decisions were “more right” than those of the others. “Right too often trap”.
The other one is experience. Experience teaches us that the problems/dilemmas often have more dimensions than one initially sees. Often times the non obvious dimensions are the key ones, rather than the ones we see originally. “Wrong dimensions trap”.
genius -> brilliance -> intelligence -> cleverness -> cunning
I think Dungeons & Dragons character sheets were insightful in prodiving separate values for 'intelligence' vs. 'wisdom' (with the former being more valuable for wizards, and the latter for clerics).
What exactly differentiates these categories is a matter of dispute, although many examples come to mind - such as, building FTX/Alameda took a lot of cleverness, though not much wisdom. Generally, wisdom implies the possession of an internal moral compass or at least incorporation of risk assessment into one's decision-making process.
Coming up with well-regarded tests for both intelligence and wisdom in individual people, however, seems to be an unsolved problem. One issue in assigning such quantitative values to people is that, as with strength and dexterity, human beings can improve these characteristics to some extent. Some will claim that the limits of character value development are genetically determined, but the reality is that most people don't spend the time and energy training themselves up to any such limit.
Too Clever by Half
Whatever the reasons/excuses - genetics, upbringing, current social trends towards individualism, whatever - I can find no solution though. Whenever I force myself to get involved I end up disilusioned and eventually angry. Impotence describes it perfectly.
So in the end one must asume that whatever is lacking, be it wisdom or faith, or humblesness, it really is lacking and preventing me from making any significant impact. And being only clever is similar to being a clown.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, especially seeing the same individuals bring an insane amount of attention to whatever they want. Most of it looks controversial to the general public, but is not so much based in their realities.
I think most clever people are simply beyond the good and evil we define as a society and make up their own values & ethics (A very Nietzsche way to look at it). The Seinfeld example is great in this article because that's exactly what I think about when I think of Larry David. He's a very clever person given the best comedy is relatable, even if it is morally wrong as defined by society.
That those people are clearly not clever at all and most can’t think for themselves so they just parrot whatever they heard from others? Trying to feign cleverness and actually being clever are not the same thing.
That’s from The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
There are at least a couple of other examples of this line of thought in the books : https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2011/03/skull-was-of-enormou...
Page 4
I appreciate cleverness in others when it helps me avoid my own suffering. Unfortunately I still suffer most of the time.
What a breathe Omm
Our love of our own cleverness is the ego's attempt to assert its relevance. "I am smart. I can figure out the world on my own. I am right in what I think and believe" whereas religion puts us in our place, as mortal and limited beings in an infinite and eternal universe, whose knowledge and even theoretical ability to grasp the ultimate truth is limited.
> Think of the way adolescents try a knowing remark to project worldliness when their egos are threatened.
What does this mean?
Writing about impotent pretensions to cleverness on on the Internet on a site on the Internet hardly anyone will read, quoting Seinfeld, Raymond Chandler, a vintage movie script, and Kierkegaard, and name-checking Oscar Wilde and Einstein, all under the modest tag "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture" is... quite a look.
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption.
The flow of the writing reminded me a lot of Paul Graham's essays.
Very hopefully not. A game of associations ("first", "test", "try", "feel", "skin"...) is already «t[ying] together a number of disparate elements». But randomly, in idleness, possibly decadent.
Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
Which by the way seems to have been an intended target of TFA. Compromising a lot with its enemy, though.
I remember reading something similar from an old Ernest Hemingway interview.
Does anyone who knows what I'm talking about have a link?
If Hemingway said something similar, I'd say it is not specifically because great minds think alike - also that -, but because we described the same thing. There is an infinite number of ways to describe, say, a glass through «relatively fixed perspective form[s]», but a pretty limited number of «ideal structure[s]» pertaining.
Sorry, I shouldn't have written similar. It's literally word for word equivalent.
Have you ever considered rewriting the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, but for different reasons?
Incidentally: I checked earlier, because I was intrigued - though probably "«for different reasons»", i.e. to compare the views - and I could not find it. I saw that there exists an "Hemingway on Writing", 2019. But I do not know. I admit I never read Hemingway (owing to queues). Though I can guess we have pretty different styles: syntactic vs paratactic.
Edit: but if that "magic" happened - /if/ -, I know the trick, and I can already tell you (rephrasing what written before): if, e.g., "a circumference is the set of points equidistant from a centre", the ways in which you can say that idea will collapse into that.
Further edit: although, if the equivalence were there word by word for that deontic definition of writing, I'd turn to the supernatural.
That confers legitimacy in a way that a frozen block of quotes does not.
Same thing with Paul Graham. He actually did things, and wove those experiences into his writing. The exact same thoughts coming from nobody mean a hell of a lot less.
> Same thing with Paul Graham. He [is part of the financial elite]. The exact same thoughts coming from [some pleb] mean a hell of a lot less.
So... actual elitism. This isn't a very charitable way of engaging with literature, and it's your own loss.
Plenty of "nobodies" had thoughts that became legitimate well after their own lifetimes.
Still, anything is better than hiding behind a solid wall of references. Let a little light in! Reassure me that the author's not dead!
And, if you still think that it's trying to be clever, and you think that invalidates its point, doesn't that argue for its thesis?
IHMO, cleverness always lacks substance; it's superficial, droll, better-than-banal — but never synonymous with brilliant or everlasting. Pretension is cleverness that serves only the author. Both apply here, I fear.
That's probably one definition of clever, but not the only one. Describing those different meanings is the first thing the article does, and it sounds like you actually agree with where he ended up.
I think what you're describing as pretentious is really just the tone of the article, which is a function of the publication it's writing, for and what that audience expects. To me, it would be pretentious if he'd used examples that he wasn't actually familiar with, in order to seem more knowledgeable than he was. But the ones he chose seem fine to me: I would expect his audience to be familiar enough with them, and they helped make his point. People sometimes use pretentious to mean "high brow", but I don't think they mean the same thing.
And my comment is the quintessential backlash to the snarky quintessential comment.
Oh god. Are we becoming too self-aware. Someone shut us off.
It's like if you wrote an essay on the limitations of language, and then someone went "But you're using language to write it". Well that part is inescapable, isn't it? Just like you can't really scrutinize cleverness (in the sense the author intended), without being clever, without being above it all, at least for the duration of the article. You need that vantage point for any sweeping reflections on current culture.
Funny enough, I didn't consider quoting Seinfeld or Oscar Wilde as symptoms of the particular strain of cleverness the author is referring to.
what does that have to do with the lack of self-awareness?
> … in a text where the actual argument was a pelvic taunting.
I don't understand what this means, but I suspect that better understanding it would not make my life any better.
I interpret it that while afraid, you do not mind me explaining, also/at least for others that may not have understood.
Argument: "We adopt this stance, because it allows X and doing differently would cause Y and Z".
The Spectator, a few months ago: "It is like in that Seinfeld episode where she expressed her concerns and he replied that all [slur] are [slur]. Yeah, take that, [slur], because this [vulgarity] has met your [relative]".
Edit: and when I read that, I thought that the current decadence, each day more evident, is abusing boundaries.
Edit: ...although, I suspect that this type of articles that The Spectator has so horribly decided are acceptable, could actually be tolerated, under the circumstance that they are read and acted by Mike Meyers in a costume.
Correction: "to defend an anti-abortionist stance".
Sorry, this writer is having attention faults.
The humor of Kierkegaard: an anthology (edited by Thomas C. Oden)
Things I'm reasonably good at are self-awareness and being aware my own limitations (if it were ever claimed that I wasn't much good at anything then no one could justifiably claim those). Being aware of them has often kept me out of trouble.
The sort of cleverness that the essay is complaining about seems to me to be summed up in the phrase: "you’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself".