Too Smart To Be So Dumb

Weekly Standard ^ | 05/27/2003 | Joel Engel

[dighton]

The purported listing of the IQ's of the presidents is fake. Yes, made-up, phoney, false.

Correct, as the author plainly states:

Just one problem. There is no Lovenstein Institute, no Dr. Lovenstein, no Professor Dilliams. That the Internet ruse spread so quickly, without anyone bothering to immediately verify the results (it was "a fact too good to check," as they say at the New York Times), frankly explains more about our culture than it does about our president.

[Dick Bachert]

Was Clinton's 182 for the BIG head -- or the tiny one between his legs.

My guess is the tiny one must have come in around 200 something as it was constantly outsmarting the big one.

[biblewonk]

I'm surrounded by "smart" engineers, a large number of whom live from paycheck to paycheck. They may have passed a few dozen classes in Athens/a University but they don't know how to manage their money.

[dark_lord]

Try attending a Mensa meeting some time. A bigger bunch of neurotic individuals you will never meet. Being able to take tests well is only one facet of "intelligence".

[Billthedrill]

The "article of faith" that GWB is stupid goes considerably deeper than that - most university liberals truly believe a priori that to be conservative is to be stupid, and evidence to the contrary before their eyes results in such vapidities as "you don't seem the type" when one of their number turns out to be an NRA member or a registered Republican.

But it is, after all, a bit difficult to make substantive statements about the distribution of intelligence when no one seems to agree on its constituent elements or the criteria for measuring them. From this we get the recent and risible "emotional intelligence" continuum, proposed principally IMHO by those who don't show a great deal of any other kind. It is no accident that university majors in the areas proposing to measure this elusive quality, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, are populated by the ones who couldn't handle engineering calculus or classical languages. They can, however, sling some serious jargon and do seem to do well on talk shows...

[Consort]

The kid was intelligent but he didn't act very wise, assuming that wisdom is the correct use of knowledge. Should the degree of our comprehension, e.g., intelligence, be used as a criteria in determining the degree of our responsibility for our actions by those who judge us?

[Consort]

...or is it "criterion"?

[BlazingArizona]

ry attending a Mensa meeting some time. A bigger bunch of neurotic individuals you will never meet. Being able to take tests well is only one facet of "intelligence".

But if you dig a little deeper, you will find a total refutation of the idea, commonly held by academics, that IQ causes people to converge on a specific set of sociopolitical values - which always match those of the academic. I've seen innumerable liberals find this out, then angrily leave the organization.

[Publius6961]

Like millions of intellectual elites and wannabes, this woman presumes an inherent connection between intelligence and goodness, and between intelligence and wisdom, as though there exists some objective domain of ethicality to which Mensa members are automatically admitted.

How about intelligence and common sense?
My experience universally has been that there is an inverse relationship in that case.

I think of Bobby Fisher, a functional moron (literally) in the real world, as one textbook example.

[Shooter 2.5]

“Nothing you will learn in your studies here will be the slightest possible use to you in afterlife, save only this; that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a person is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.
Professor John Alexander Smith
Oxford 1914



It's ironic that this is from Oxford and didn't the bent one get kicked out of there?

I commend the Freepers for using their intelligence to see through the lies of the left. It's the ones who see the world with rose colored glasses that fall for the lies and distortions of the dem party.

[7thson]

My favorite quote from Will Rogers is "there is nothing more stupid than an educated man if you get him off what he was educated in."

[Just another Joe]

We live in an age when pure intelligence is valued and honored beyond all bounds of reason. There's almost a cult of worship around it, particularly among intellectual elites on the left--those who set the agenda for schools and media.

Then why am I not a god by now.
These people need to worship.............ME!

[gcruse]

He had an advanced degree and spent years studying the subject.
How dare I think that my opinion was as valid as his.

If he spent years studying the subject and you have not,
then most people would give his opinion more weight than yours, at
least until they could study the matter and form their own
opinion which they would, naturally, esteem above all others.

[itsahoot]

I met a very intelligent woman once at a bar. A few hours later she made a remark that I find funny to this very day.

I met a really ugly woman in a bar once and after a few hours she was beautiful.

Sunrise cured this delusion.

[knuthom]

That said, if you were arguing with the professor about technicalities of his field, maybe he was right.

No, I was not arguing "technicalities". I was arguing about opinion.

There are some areas of academia which involve facts and some that don't. I studied science and would never presume to think I know as much as someone with more experience in specific areas of science.

But there are other fields, such as art, literature,and especially social "sciences" where things are far more subjective. Think about what passes for art, poetry or social research in universities today.

I graduated from college years ago, but went back recently to take a course for my own enrichment. There is a lot of pressure on the students to go along with the prevailing popular opinion among the faculty, even when it directly contradicts their own experience. It is treated like dogma. The professors give lip-service to the idea of intellectual inquiry, but don't actually value or reward it. Students that can parrot back whatever the professor believes are most highly rewarded.

I regularly challenged the professor, not caring what effect it had on my grade, since that was no longer important to me. Most of the other students were afraid to do that, though they would agree with me in private conversations. I think the professor was threatened by me, because he had no power over me.

Because I engaged him in conversations and challenged him to defend his ideas, I found that sometimes even his experience contradicted what he had been taught in grad school. But rather than question his teachers, he had so completely internalized the lessons that he denied the obvious, rather than than question the dogma in view of apparent reality. It was kind of sad. And now he is teaching this kind of mental gyration to others.

[Restorer]

I know what you mean. I've dealt with teachers of this type myself and had similar experiences.

However, if you wanted to argue with an airframe engineer as to whether your design would fly or not, I'd lean towards his opinion. :)

[Restorer]

A 16-year-old driving a new Lincoln coupe hit them at 70 mph--twice the speed limit--after careening off a hillside. Later that night the kid's mother told me how shocked she was by the witness reports of his reckless driving. "But he got 1550 on his SAT," she cried.

I'm not particularly proud of it, but in my younger and more foolish days, I sometimes drove like this myself. Luckily never hit anyone, but that's all it was: Luck.

Foolishness is an entirely different concept from intelligence, and often co-exists just fine with it.

[Restorer]

If GWB is dumb, I'm even dumber.

I agree.

Dumb, dumber, and dumberer.

[Conspiracy Guy]

No I insist, I am the dumbest. I can testify to this because GWB in MHO is the greatest President of modern times.

[Yeti]

Intelligence in the service of what?

A good question, loaded with a good point.

And this was a good read.