I think one could be more direct about it: the curse of smart people is arrogance.
Always allow the possibility that you could be wrong.
Always allow the possibility that you could be wrong.
This seems to have become worse in the Internet-age, where a lot of 'smart' people have had their reputations branded into the permanent record. So much arrogance, rudeness, vitriol, etc. in order to 'win' at being 'smart'.
Ironically, I have recently discovered that it's often easier to channel Socrates and just act stupid. It's way too hard to be smart, these days. And, given that there's so much new shit to learn, who really wants to be?
Edit: What does the term "channel Socrates" mean?
(1) Find a thesis that the person you're talking to appears to believe, and get him to commit to it.
(2) Get the person to accept a few apparently innocuous assumptions.
(3) Get the person to realize, by repeated questions and answers, that the apparently innocuous assumptions lead to conclusions that contradict the thesis the person originally committed to.
This could be construed as "acting stupid" to start with, but if you're successful with the method, it will be obvious by the end that you are smarter than the person you're talking to. Which can be frustrating for that person, and since Socrates apparently did it to a lot of people, they eventually got fed up, as ap22213 says.
You can question someone's assumptions without being 'smarter' than them.
But if they are, then the method will break down at either steps 2 or 3, because either the person will see that the assumptions you're trying to get them to accept would contradict their thesis, or they will be able to use their superior knowledge to convince you that the assumptions don't actually contradict their thesis after all.
You can question someone's assumptions without being 'smarter' than them.
Yes, but the method I described is more specific than just "questioning assumptions". It's a specific tactic with a specific objective: to force the person you're talking to to admit that a thesis they had believed up to that point is false, by making them prove it false for themselves. But to use this method successfully, you have to pick your targets: you don't use it unless you already know, in advance, that step 3 can be reached, which means you already know, in advance, that the person will not be able to head you off during the process. That knowledge is what makes you smarter than the other person.
It's worth noting, btw, that most of what we know about Socrates, and practically all of what we know about how he used this method, comes from Plato's dialogues, which portray Socrates as having a very high success rate with his method. We don't know how accurately Plato represented that aspect of things; the real Socrates might not have been as consistently successful at using the method as the character Socrates in the dialogues. My comments are really about the character Socrates; they are only about the real Socrates to the extent that the character accurately represents what he did and how well he did it.
But, Socrates is a guy from Plato's books who's is frustrated by all the smart people around him. They all seem really smart to Socrates, and Socrates wants to be smart, like them. So, he goes around asking all of these smart people lots of stupid questions. But, it turns out that they can't answer a lot of his stupid questions.
It may not be a good strategy though, because eventually they kill him, because he's an annoyance.
So I have a client of a client ask me to help out with a problem they're having, the problem is, the tech usage falls right smack dab into the hole in my experience because of my earlier decision not to use the tech stack in this way.
So I ask a fairly specific question about it on reddit. The top voted comment was a snarky reply in which the respondent implied I was the one who created the initial problem and because I don't have the experience necessary, I should hire a freelancer with more experience in the tech stack.
The issue is that person in question was so far off base about what the problem could potentially be, I ended up solving it using exactly the methods they stated were bad assumptions on my part. This poster colored the entire question such that I got pretty much no good input out of it, and instead simply had to rely on what I did know about this aspect of the tech stack to piece together a solution.
It's a bit long winded, but I guess the point is that people are amazingly short sighted with respect to asking questions. The poster in question took my willingness to ask a question as an indication that I had no idea what I was doing.
And it's this propensity that causes everyone to put forth such a persona of arrogance. If my reputation is linked in any way to my financial success, I cannot be seen asking such questions publicly. That's just reality.
Colloquially, "channeling" X means behaving like X, or in a manner inspired by X, in this case, where X == Socrates.
This meaning is a natural outgrowth of the term's original meaning, a purported means of communicating with the dead: a psychic medium is supposedly possessed by a spirit -- i.e. the medium becomes the channel for it -- allowing it to speak through his/her body:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediumship#Channeling
The other incarnation of non-physical mediumship is a form of channeling in which the channeler goes into a trance, or "leaves their body". He or she allows the spirit-person to borrow his/her body, who then talks through them.[22] When in a trance the medium seems to come under the control of another personality, purportedly the spirit of a departed soul, and a genuine medium undoubtedly believes the 'control' to be a spirit entity.
Being successfully smart means you recognize you don't know everything, but you also recognize you know quite a lot. And for things that you do know you are always looking for why these might be debunked. And for things you do not know, you know you can learn and become pretty confident you know them very quickly, to grasp concepts somewhat faster than other people.
There was a great Veritasium video on this while back. The schtick was that Derek Muller was posing a puzzle to people as a series of numbers. They had to figure out the rule governing the series by proposing their own series.
The point was that finding other sequences with matched the rule didn't do much. Finding a sequence which failed the rule, that is, one that disproved what they thought the rule was, was much more informative.
If you've got lots of brainpower but never push the envelope of your beliefs, that brainpower's not going to be of much use actually expanding your understanding.
Which is why really smart people try to break things: software, hardware, systems of understanding. By pushing them beyond what they feel their limits are and seeing what happens.
Intelligence and education have the effect of greatly increasing the number and variety of "things you can think", exponentially so. Unfortunately the exponentially-vast-bulk of such new thoughts are also wrong. Many of them grossly and obviously so (the vast bulk are new ideas that are syntactically-correct gibbering nonsense), but there's a much more dangerous and still very large fringe of wrong ideas that require one to dig into reality to determine are wrong. And what I often find myself calling something like the Prime Danger of Intellectualism is that our education system is happy to introduce you into that vast space of new ideas, but while flirting for a while with ways of determining their truth, a lot of intellectual tradition in the last 50 years or so has given up on it (in many cases wearing this surrender as a badge of pride!), leaving many modern intellectuals adrift in a massive sea of ideas with no compass, no sextant, and no map. It's a sad and frankly dangerous state of affairs, and it is the default in the intellectual world right now, unfortunately. I know that's a bold statement but once you learn what to look for you, alas, see it everywhere.
I'll condition my definition as "those exhibiting smartness", not merely those possessed of an innate mental capacity and facility.
Knowledge is a container. You can be knowledgeable (full of information) and either smart or not, though I'd consider someone filled with facts and the lack of capacity to connect and relate them sensibly not particularly knowledgeable.
Intelligence is somewhere between a talent and a skill. It's trainable, but requires an innate foundation. #INCLUDE GLADWELL_10000_HOURS
Wise is a mix of both. You need the information (much of it acquired through experience, or at least direct observation), and the capability to use it. And it's the wise who will almost always exhibit the trait of questioning their most closely held facts, beliefs, understandings, and mechanisms.
I've been reading up on Hyman G. Rickover, father of the US nuclear navy. His approach to technology, organizations, training, and more, are very much what I consider to be the workings of an absolutely first-rate mind. I'd like to find a good biography of him.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28uxu6/more_hym...
And: accepting ideas without testing them is a rapid path to failure. It's anti-evolutionary (variance without selection).
You get to define what you mean by "smart", but others get to reject it.
This only holds if you define "smart people" to be this way. Which is kind of a tautology.
I you use the common meaning of the word, or even just check what people other people consider "smart", you'll find out that they don't always fit your description.
I think to be practical it's best to see who people label as smart, and then note what attributes they have. Instead of starting from the attributes that you think a smart person should have (because then you just made your own definition, and it doesn't describe what most people see).
Conspiracy theorists, evolution deniers, religious fundamentalists, alien abductees and so on are examples of people getting together, and successfully rationalizing their belief in some quite twisted ideas. We don't call such groups "smart people", typically. They're not necessarily stupid either. They're just people.
So it's just the "curse" of being a human, I guess.
Whether we use our mind superpowers for good, or in order to fool ourselves and the people around us is completely independent of one's smartness, and has more to do with wisdom.
Many people believe that if you can wrap a convincing narrative around a set of selected facts, the narrative must be truth itself. Stories posing as insight are all around you.
Experience leads to wisdom, and wisdom teaches us to be more open-minded and less sure in the stories we hear or tell ourselves.
Ignorance is not opposed to intelligence. Arrogance is a flaw that can reduce the benefits of being smart, but it doesn't make someone not-smart.
(Unless you're using 'smart' differently to the conventional meaning, which is an unhelpful thing to do.)
I would've missed out on their insight had I applied a heuristic as simple as "arrogant people aren't smart".
Your reaction is an irritating trait of our western societies. Almost all our hero figures, all our geniuses, are arrogant assholes. Almost everything on TV is about a guy winning against all odds, our business geniuses had all crazy business plan, ... Yet, we despise the same people if their plan does not succeed.
Take a guy like Zuckerberg. Drop out of school to build your startup with borderline illegal business tactic, that's genius. Do the same and fail and you are an obvious loser that deserved what he got and should be happy not to be in jail. This mixed signal the society is sending is annoying.