If one has been labeled 'smart' at one point or another (maybe when very young), one may also begin to identify with that label. The label becomes the identity. And, at that point, it becomes quite difficult to accept 'being wrong' because it's an attack on one's identity and reputation.
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?
Additionally, once branded "smart," people (young especially) want to avoid looking "stupid" so much that they shy away from learning new things in order to not look incompetant/inexperienced.
So much this. I recently posted a question on reddit about a technology stack I've been using for the last 10+ years I think (a long while) because there were specific aspects of the stack I had always avoided due to the way it forces you to work (and later versions of the tooling on top of the stack moved away from the approach, meaning my interpretation of it wasn't completely without merit).
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:
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.
In reply to your edit:
I think ap22213 is referring to applying the Socratic method[1], although it might be a more obscure reference that goes over my head, as I am not well-read on Socrates.
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.
I assume you're being ironic. It's clear to me that Socrates did not for a moment think that all those other people around him were smart--more precisely, he didn't think they were as smart as they thought they were.
The Socratic method means something more specific than that. Socrates' basic MO was as follows:
(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.
labelling it as smarter is a bit of a misnomer, they may very well be more knowledgeable and experienced than you in the field you're asking questions about.
You can question someone's assumptions without being 'smarter' than them.
they may very well be more knowledgeable and experienced than you in the field you're asking questions about.
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.
well obviously you're right because you hold the opinion. If someone else held that opinion than it would obviously be wrong because then you would no longer hold that opinion, thereby nullifying the validity of said opinion.
People who are never wrong are not smart, they are "smartass". Same goes for people who "know it all".
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.
Smart people actively seek evidence that they are wrong - finding evidence that you're right doesn't prove anything. A single piece of evidence that you're wrong shows everything.
That's sort of a no true scotsman argument. People can have astonishing amounts of brainpower and still do very little critical thinking on their own beliefs or others' arguments they disagree with.
The point isn't about what all smart people do or don't do. It's the power of counterevidence.
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.
While I agree that trying to actively break one's theories is a thing that should be done by smart people, I think that in the general sense of smart meaning "possessing raw intelligence", it is not something that I can say that smart people do in general, nor is it something you have to be that smart to do.
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.
>Smart people actively seek evidence that they are wrong - finding evidence that you're right doesn't prove anything. A single piece of evidence that you're wrong shows everything.
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).
Seeking for evidence that you are wrong is the same as seeking evidence that you are right. If nothing comes up to prove that you are wrong then that's stronger evidence that you are right.
But neither this, nor what the author is talking about is "the curse of smart people".
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.
The curse, specifically, is that the smart people make their mistaken theories sound good, build them up to the point that it's hard to break them without being equally smart AND also primed to look for subtle glitches in reasoning or technique.
To me, intelligence is like a fast truck with a lot of cargo space: you can use it to help other people move into a nicer home, you can use it to make great trips, you can run it into a wall and kill yourself much better than you could with a slower truck, and you can load it up with children and drive off a bridge. Intelligence is to stupidity what a power tool is to a screwdriver, you can do more powerful good and bad things with it, but the fact that it's more powerful says nothing about how it will be used. Sadly.
As someone who secretly fears they suffer from exactly what the blog author stated, I can tell you unequivocally that your interpretation is not what I fear.
Plus, I've noticed that with some people, their great knowledge and/or intelligence concerning a particular issue, combined with confidence (and maybe a dash of social 'deafness'), can come across as arrogance. Sometimes it took a while to figure out that they were open to correction, and hella smart.
I would've missed out on their insight had I applied a heuristic as simple as "arrogant people aren't smart".
You need a certain level of arrogance to think that you are right despite everybody thinking you are wrong. If you are threading new ground, you need it to succeed. For example, all those startup creators are arrogant. They think their ideas will succeed despite knowing that they have 99% chance of not succeeding.
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.
Always allow the possibility that you could be wrong.