Smarter Than You
A few years ago someone said to me, “You’ve got that whole smarter than you thing going on.”
I brushed it off and changed the subject; that was back in the days before I really started to lean into Merciless Authenticity. I think I would probably handle it somewhat differently now, as in:
Yes, I do. I’m smarter than a lot of people about a lot of things… and a lot of people are smarter than I am about a lot of things. I try not to let the first go to my head, and I try not to let the second bruise my ego.
If you find yourself discomfited by the idea that I might be ‘smarter than you’, I propose that you need to dig into that and figure out why it matters, and if it’s a comparison that makes you uncomfortable, do something about it. You have that power.
Have you ever taken an IQ test?
I don’t mean one of those 30-something question feel-good quizzes on Facebook or some such; I mean a real IQ test, of the type typically administered by a psychologist – a Wais IV, for example. Something that becomes apparent pretty quickly when you take one of those is that what it’s attempting to measure (what we call “smarts” or “intelligence”) is simply a form of pattern recognition, intepretation, and summary communication.
These things are skills. They can be learned and honed with practice and discipline. Most people we call ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ have a natural knack for them right out of the starting gate, and have often been trained in information gathering, information assessment, problem deconstruction, and critical thinking skills into the bargain. The thing you have to realize, however, is that these behaviors don’t exist in just the realm of science and engineering; any person who is proficient in solving a given kind of problem is almost certainly applying all of these behaviors, sometimes instinctively, even if they’ve never been formally trained in them.
When we talk about people being ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’, we’re talking about the perception of people applying some or all of these behaviors across the board to any problem or circumstance that crosses their path. People who do that, however, are relatively rare, and they’re getting harder to find in our society all the time. I think this is happening for two reasons.
- We’re specializing.
We’re focusing the effort we’re putting into these behaviors only on certain contexts, and we’re not typically exercising these behaviors in the rest of our existence, because…
- (and this is the troubling one:) We’re being actively, systematically discouraged from doing so, particularly the summary communication aspect.
These pressures are coming from a number of directions: socially – we’re told not to show off, not to correct misapprehensions, not to challenge opinions, not to cause a scene. Religiously, we’re told to what to believe, and to believe without question. Politically, we’re told not to question or defy authority, even when it behaves in egregiously atypical and damaging ways… and perhaps most importantly, our politicians are actively deconstructing the main avenues of teaching all those behaviors I outlined above.
People are easier to control when they don’t think and speak for themselves.
All this is a longwinded way of saying:
If you want to be smarter, be smarter. Educate yourself, and seek out more detail on what you want to be smarter about. Seek out differing opinions, particularly those that make you uncomfortable, and assess why they make you uncomfortable, and how you can synthesize that reaction and awareness of it into your own take. Learn to divorce your emotional response from your intellectual processing. Be prepared to change your mind, and don’t view doing so as a weakness or a flaw in yourself. Finally, share your conclusions and your thought processes, no matter what ripples they may cause.
Give yourself permission to be someone different from who you were brought up to be… because chances are, you weren’t brought up to be ‘smart’; you were brought up to be compliant.
[Postscript]
Yes, once upon a time I was administered an IQ test by a psychologist – it was probably 50 years ago or so, and I don’t remember which one. I also don’t remember what my scoring profile was, other than it was above the average intelligence but not ‘genius’ level.
I don’t know that that measurement is particularly relevant to the presence I bring to the world. What is far more relevant is that I am the son of a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project and a linguaphile who was an elementary and high school teacher. That reality doesn’t mean I have superior genes; it means that I have been compelled from an extremely early age to look at people and the world from multiple perspectives, and to express my interpretations clearly, precisely, and in detail… and that those exhortations have been ferociously developed and honed by my training and experience as an engineer, and as someone who has always wanted to be more than what their current circumstances seemed to be or to allow.
