Some useful thoughts from Frank J.:
How smart do you have to be to tell if someone else is smart? Hopefully not very smart, because a lot of life — and especially politics — involves asking people to separate the bright from the dimwitted. We can’t figure out or do everything ourselves, so we need to know who the smart people are so we know whom to listen to and entrust with important jobs. But if we incorrectly think morons are smart and listen to them and put them in charge, that would be a disaster.
You could also call it election year 2008.
For some reason, many people thought certain other people — who we can now clearly see are idiots — were smart and should be in charge. So how do we prevent such an error from happening again?
Actually, it was clear to some of us at the time.
Smart people, really smart people, understand the limitations of their knowledge. The tragedy of stupid is that it renders one incapable of recognizing how little they know. One of the endearing features of Forrest Gump was that he understood his limitations. One of the most appalling features of Joe Biden is that he really thinks that he’s the smartest guy in the room (as he told one congressional witness) when it is clear that he is an idiot.
You know how I know that someone is a few ears short of a bushel in the smarts department? When they brag about their IQ. And tell us all how smart they are. To paraphrase Forrest, smart is as smart does. And fortunately, a lot of “smart” people are going to have to go out and get a real job in January, if the voters do what the polls say they will.
Kind of tough being out of work in this economy, though. Particularly when you’re not as smart as you thought you were.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, I posted the link and wrote the above before I Read The Whole Thing. So I wasn’t really plagiarizing Frank on the “smart is as smart does” thing (seriously, how dumb would one have to be to plagiarize from a linked article?). It’s just that great (or, errrr…some kind of) minds think alike.
[Late afternoon update]
This discussion (and Ken Anthony’s comment) reminds me of an interesting question that I read once from a conservative (probably over at The Corner). If you had to make a choice (and not to imply that it must be one), which would you rather — that your child be good, or smart? This was a, if not the, major theme of Forrest Gump. It’s also one of the reasons that people who criticized Sarah Palin for not aborting her son are so off base. I have little personal experience, but I’ve heard that sufferers from Down’s Syndrome are generally very nice people. Again, though, not to imply that there is an implicit choice.
Yes, the idea of a representative democracy is that the “smart” people get put in charge to manage various state affairs on a full-time basis, putting in the time and energy that most of the citizenry does not have into studying and researching of the various matters, so as to make informed decisions.
The problem is that when leftists talk about putting smart guys in charge, they envision the “smart guy” being smart so as to pull all the right levers and manage all the details of controlling and regulating free enterprise, as if the economy was a hyper-complex Cray computer that just needed someone smart enough to push all the right buttons and run the thing. Even if this was true, it would certainly disqualify every elected Democrat in the nation, along with even certain Nobel-prize winning leftist economists who ought to have the education to know better.
Of course it is not true. The real smart guys know that economic success comes by government getting out of the way of free enterprise.
Rand, Do you think you are susceptible to confusing intelligence with ideological compatibility? Do you think “Smart Democrat” is an oxymoron?
—
Do you think the author of the piece is susceptible?
Here’s why I think he is: He says he is pretty sure that Obama’s community organizing job is made up, yet 10 seconds of using wikipedia pulled this up:
After four years in New York City, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.[32][34] During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from US$70,000 ($141,564 in 2010) to US$400,000 ($735,648 in 2010). He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[35]
The author of the piece sounds very certain about Obama: “there wasn’t a single useful thing he did”, but why is a job training program and a college prep tutoring program useless? Even if you think college is useless, you might consider college prep to be pretty useful as a supplement to job training.
Bob… once again, there in your left cheek. I think there is a hook there. You might want to pull it out. Don’t be the Red Herring in Rand’s blog barrel. It’s just not healthy for you.
“He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program”
Didn’t we use to call that high school?
“Red herring is an idiomatic expression referring to a rhetorical tactic of diverting attention away from an item of significance.”
I think your mixing of metaphors is cute, but why is “red herring” apt in this case? What is the item of significance, if it isn’t Frank J. Flemming’s sole real world example of what he is talking about in his election-day piece titled “election question”? Did you read the article?
Hal: As you know, not everyone who makes it through high school is ready for college. And kids in high school sometimes need additional assistance. If they want to be taught, seems like it would be useful to teach!
It’s always helpful to distinguish intelligence and wisdom.
Vice President Biden seems to be quite intelligent… and an utter fool.
Anyone who needs “additional assistance” to get into college after going through high school doesn’t belong in college. See, this is one of the things liberals like Bob-1 don’t seem to want to understand: everyone should not go to college. Not everyone has the sort of mind that can get anything useful out of four-plus more years of sitting in a classroom and taking multiple choice tests and doing papers. That doesn’t mean they are stupid — bookish liberals make the mistake of thinking that people who work “with their hands (farmers, plumbers, electricians, etc.) are stupid because they aren’t interested in sitting around talking about the latest literary sensation, or whatever it is bookish liberals talk about. It just means they have different talents, and should not have them wasted by forcing them into the white-collar, cubicle-farm factories that most colleges have become. Stop making people who would be much happier working at a job that was mostly physical labor go to college where they will be forced to learn a lot of useless (to them) facts that they won’t use in the insurance company or bank they’ll end up slaving away in, bored out of their skulls, their muscles all run to flab, but they won’t be able to quit because of the mortgage and the car payments and the student loan they have to pay off.
When is a job training program and a college prep tutoring program useless?
When it takes thirteen people and $735,648 per year to administer it.
Andrea, there are plenty of people who should go to college, whose talents would greatly benefit everyone if they got to work with professor on projects, but who simply weren’t ready after high school. My wife is a high school teacher, and some of her students are dragging themselves through class because they worked till midnight the night before to help support their families. They aren’t getting as much as they should out of high school and when they graduate i(or when they drop out), they’ll work full-time. But eventually, when times are better, some of them will be right for college, and vice versa. Obama was working in an area much more worse off than where my wife and I live.
( I personally found college a waste of time, but graduate school was a dream come true. I only know of one person who managed to drop out of high school and college and go straight to grad school, but it would be nice if this route was available to more people.)
Andrea, it hits earlier than that also. A large number of high schools have dropped the electives for what would be considered the “technical track” jobs. They’re orienting towards “college track” education. Combine this with the strong push for female-oriented math and science curricula. Nothing against it directly – I have two daughters benefiting from it – but (IMNSHO) our brains do indeed work differently, and making them appeal to females is apparently making them less appealing to males. So we’re getting record numbers of qualifying female college applicants (excellent!), but boys are dropping the entire idea of education earlier and earlier.
Al, maybe they should ditch the concept of co-ed college-prep/HS? (Yeah, cue Simberg’s “liberal head exploding” sound.) Just a thought.
Obama is Simple Jack, and the Dems have gone full retard.
I’ll try to make a point here.
Obama’s people are intelligent. They can also be quite narrow. That is a problem today in too many areas. People who know one thing really well and have little knowledge about another too often start saying things about that area assuming that it is really simple. That’s the way to look rather stupid to people in that other area.
The same thing can be said for too many conservatives. They praise free markets, but too often seem unaware of how and when they have failed humanity. People here rightly praise Adam Smith and company for the work they did on behalf of free markets back in the 18th Century. Unfortunately, there were some real problems. For instance, eight year old girls were herded into factories and made to work such long hours that it affected their health, stunted their growth, shortened their lives and in other ways negatively affected 18th Century England. Things like that led to child labor laws.
Getting my point?
Anyone who, at this stage of the game, has looked at history–particularly 20th Century history–and still believes that, despite all the lives it has taken and all the wealth it has looted, that the State is our best friend, and that the more power we give it, the better off we’ll be, has obviously put himself oout of the “smart” category.
Bob,
I read Frank J regularly. I even read Sarah K regularly. But in this case, I think the pertinent part of the discussion on this blog is what Rand added to their topic:
You know how I know that someone is a few ears short of a bushel in the smarts department? When they brag about their IQ. And tell us all how smart they are.
To use an expression from another blogger, some people self-identify as rubes.
A well rounded person needs more than intelligence. Humility is a good place to start. Other qualities should follow. Often they don’t.
That video (with that intellectual giant Bill Maher) calling the voters stupid tells the story.
Everyone is dumb, just about different things.
But ignorance is Bliss Pete?
Knowledge: Knowing that trains run on tracks.
Understanding: Walking on tracks is dangerous.
Wisdom: Get off the damn tracks.
Actually I think we should allow people to start working earlier in life. Even if it was just on a part time basis. One large reason why we got to our present predicament is because there is a growing dissonance between education and real working life.
How do you sort people out? Examinations (a test, or an interview) and resumes (experience, et al). At least this is how everyone I know does it. Usually everyone has some area of expertise. Something they are best at. If you want someone to execute a certain task you will want to measure their proficiency or skill at doing it.
Stupid and smart have so many different connotations it is hard to know what someone means. Are they talking about rate of learning, or accumulated knowledge, and in which areas?
As a libertarian, I would very much rather we never emulate the European system of giving people tests and dividing them into tiers in elementary school – one to be masters, the other to be … er, workers.
I think everyone who wants to pay for classes should be able to go to college. Everyone who does well in those classes should get a degree. Prior aptitude should only matter for scholarship foundations and the like.
While not everyone is cut out for college, they themselves should be the ones making that decision, not some control-freak third party! (And if you have any doubt that the “sorting class” will eventually end up flooded with ideological control freaks, …)
America is a great country because those who could do, were allowed to. We don’t need education to become an actual patent of nobility system.
PS – I say this not as a disgrunled outsider who was rejected from academic life – I have a degree and am going back for more.
I say that as someone who believes that the measure someone uses for someone else’s fitness or intelligence should be sustained performance the task. For a job, it should be prior work experience and references. For degreed academics, it would be the coursework and research, not some hour long test given in elementary school that brands you with an IQ number. I don’t care how good the correlation is reputed to be – why use it when you can measure the actual aptitude, and allow people to build and correct their competence?
The problem I have with officially sorting people into classes is that the ones doing the sorting always end up ruling, and the ones who are rejected are given no chance in life.
Hmm, doesn’t look like anybody else has stepped up on the Downs thing.
Any thoughts I might have had that human nature varied by IQ were annihilated by a few years of volunteering in a program for mentally handicapped people. They are exactly as likely to be sweet, annoying, cooperative, truculent, empathetic, or heartless as the rest of us.
From a certain viewpoint, we are all living in Flatland. That’s how equal we are. Egalitarianism, properly construed, cannot be overdone.
@ASEI:
There are private universities in Europe as well. They are often perceived as inferior by employers since all the top students in a given year manage to enroll in state universities. However there are some good private universities which are highly respected. Private systems in the US are not immune to this “Ivy League” like syndrome. It happens in every country.
The place where you got your degree is only important for getting your first job. After that most employers will look at your track record and your references.
The advantage of a written test, or asking someone to perform a test task in a job interview, is that this is an expedient way to measure candidates which may come from highly diverse backgrounds. This is important when there are a lot of candidates for a limited number of vacancies and you need to do a pre-selection. In that case you may not have the time to interview each and every one of the candidates.
Musk says the company is continuing to look for people who think and act like entrepreneurs. In fact, he considers this entrepreneurial mind-set to be even more important than the smarts of his new employees, opposing the more traditional hiring practices of his competitors.
“For instance, eight year old girls were herded into factories and made to work such long hours that it affected their health, stunted their growth, shortened their lives and in other ways negatively affected 18th Century England. ”
Because in pre-industrial England, children were healthy, happy and spend their childhood picking daisies when they weren’t riding unicorns!
Who “herded” these children into factories? Sounds like something statists would do.
CD needs to read “Capitalism and the Historians,” edited by Hayek. Particularly the chapter about the myth of “Merrie England,” which CD seems to have bought into.
The point about Forest Gump was that he actually was a genius. Reality not human society being the final judge. But that is not to say that individuals and human society should not try to make the best selections they can before the ultimate life and death test of reality.
I find the “pro life” position disturbing because it often entails evolutionary suicide – it goes against evolutionary morality. The laws of a country should try to accommodate a broad system of moralities but it most especially needs to accommodate evolutionary morality – the real world natural order of things which most other moralities eventually come back to.
It is often not in the best interests of an unborn fetus to compromise the future success of its parents and siblings by gestating at the wrong time. Evolutionary morality (which is more general and pervasive than religious morality) suggests that you try to bring into this world the best people that you can, including diversity enough for a broad, strong and robust society. Humanity’s odds at long term survival are not that great, it desperately needs to be the best that is can be if it hopes to survive. Humanity really can not afford to compromise itself with stupid evolutionary selection.
Palin’s position does not really support such rational life and death decision making – which brings into question her general competence as a leader (not that any leader is perfect). It is fine to be personally against abortion (not that anyone likes it) – but it is not alright to force that position upon others in a non libertarian/big government manner.
I have known two people that grew up with intellectually handicapped siblings – in both cases it destroyed the family. For every such life given, another more capable life is taken away, people tend to be morally blind to this “murder” for the sake of stupidity.
Pete, are you suggesting that eugenics works if we get smart people to do it? No Pete, you’re better than that.
Palin’s position does not really support such rational life and death decision making
Actually, it does because you aren’t realizing the decision point. The decision point is before conception. That’s adult responsibility.
I do generally agree that big government is part of the problem.