The 5 Unique Ways Intelligent People Screw Up Their Lives
“There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.” — Thomas Sowell
1) They may believe that learning about something is the same as doing it.
When you’ve gone to school for years, read hundreds of books, and talked to “experts” about a subject, there’s a tendency to believe that you can learn everything you possibly need to know about something without ever doing it. Unfortunately, there are some things in life you can just never understand without personally experiencing them, as this quote from Good Will Hunting explains.
Sean: So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. And I’d ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, “once more unto the breach dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I’d ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms “visiting hours” don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, ’cause it only occurs when you’ve loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you…. I don’t see an intelligent, confident man…. I see a cocky, scared sh*tless kid. But you’re a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my f*cking life apart. You’re an orphan right?… You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally… I don’t give a sh*t about all that, because you know what, I can’t learn anything from you, I can’t read in some f*ckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that do you sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
Additionally, as Thomas Sowell has noted, “experience trumps brilliance.” If you had a restaurant, whom would you rather have running it for the next year? A seasoned veteran of a restaurant business with a decade of experience and an average IQ or Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant scientists who ever lived? Keep in mind that Tesla used to falsely claim that he had created a death ray, never married because he thought great inventors should remain celibate, and spent the last decade of his life obsessing over pigeons. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
2) They can be really good at coming up with excuses for failure.
Just as you can use a gun for target practice or a robbery and a knife to cut a steak or slash a tire, intelligence is a tool that can be used many different ways. One of the most common ways brilliant people hurt themselves is by using their intellect to devise excuses for why they’ve failed instead of coming up with new ways to succeed. People who are really good at this can come up with a theory about life, see it fail every test, and still be just as convinced they were right as when they started. These are the sort of people Talleyrand once described as having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
3) They sometimes become overconfident about their intellect.
If dumb people have a tendency to ask too many questions and move too slowly, their more clever brethren can make the mistake of asking too few questions and plunging in too quickly. This can often backfire because brain power is not applied equally across all facets of a human mind. You can be brilliant at math, but average at English; have a knack for dealing with people, but be unable to understand computers; be a marketing wizard, but a relationship disaster.
Many smart people make the incorrect assumption that because they’re smart in one area, they’ll be just as smart in every area once they “figure it out.” Napoleon was sure he would “figure out” how to deal with the Russian winter; Bernie Madoff thought he would “figure out” a way to get away with fraud; and William James Sidis, who may have been the most intelligent man who ever lived, was probably shocked to end up in a sanatorium for a year because of his decision to participate in a socialist riot. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as too smart to fail.
4) They’re used to being right so much that they stop listening to other people.
When you’re a genius, you get used to being right when everyone else around you is wrong. You outsmart other people, you out-test them, you outmaneuver them, and you get very used to moving forward even when other people are telling you that you’re wrong. This is not a bad thing. It just goes with the territory. However, whether you’re talking about you, me, Einstein — it doesn’t matter, everybody makes mistakes. The problem the smartest person in the room has when he screws up is that he may assume that this is one of those many, many times when he’s gotten it right and everyone else has blown it. Next thing you know, you’re Mike Markkula pushing Steve Jobs out at Apple or Lyndon Johnson dramatically ramping up our forces in Vietnam while simultaneously making decisions from Washington that made it completely impossible to ever win the war. No amount of intellect will ever replace the value of wise counsel.
5) They may try to show how “uncommon” they are.
Common sense doesn’t appeal to many intellectuals simply because it’s common. That may seem counter-intuitive, but think about it from their perspective: If they’re ever so much smarter than the average person, why are they doing the same things that average people do? Why would they believe the same things that average people believe? How can they be unique, special, and smarter than everyone else when they believe the same things as “average Alvin” and “dumb Dave”? If they’re so much smarter, shouldn’t they know better?
What you hear referred to as “anti-intellectualism” is often really just a reaction to this attitude. It’s why William F. Buckley once said,
I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
It’s also why Morgan Freeberg has noted that “intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous.” When smart people feel compelled to take stupid positions to prove how smart they are, they can turn their own lives and the lives of everyone around them into a train wreck in the process.
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More on how to Screw Up Your Life at PJ Lifestyle:
This is very insightful. Understanding what makes people — and ourselves — “tick” is one of the keys to success in life.
There’s one phenomenon I’ve noticed but have a hard time describing:
The idea that if you know something, that innoculates you from it in real life.
Hence: Doctors who smoke.
People who know better and do XYZ anyhow surely must thing their precious knowledge alone will protect them, like “I’ve outsmarted XYZ by learning about it. I don’t have to do the next step and take action for/against it.”
Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Because I see this all the time.
I think that this is akin to the “I’ll get it right this time because those who did it before were doing it wrong” syndrome (e.g., the western European-style “Democratic Socialism” as opposed to Soviet Communism and Italian and German Fascism). It’s like the junkies, alcoholics, or habitual gamblers who tell themselves that they won’t fall into the traps that took down their friends because they’re so much smarter and won’t fall into the same traps (instead, they fall into different ones).
Bingo, ThunderB. And it’s even older… it’s downright Feudalistic. Marx and Engles scraped the patent number off of Feudalism and updated it with newer, 20-dollar words. It’s still the same old redistrubution system under the control of the elites. The only time it actually worked was when it was first tried by Pipin the Short, and later controlled by his son, Charlemagne. It brought Europe out of the tribal wars that plagued Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, BUT… virtually the minute Charlemagne died, it started falling apart. It seems that only Charlemagne was strong enough to keep the underkings (today’s elitists) and their functionaries (today’s bureaucrats) in line… probably by threatening their lives.
A system that requires a Charlemagne to manage is doomed to failure from the start. It is never going to work without a strongman at the helm. And we ran out of Charlemagnes when the original died in 814 AD.
Doing the ame thing over and over again, each time expecting a different result, is not only insane, it is the How-To manual for statists types since human history began.
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” That is especially true when they are led by over educated, over credentialed betas.
Or maybe they don’t think they’ll beat the odds. I once dated a nurse who smoked; he said he’d prefer to die young and quickly of lung cancer than spend 15 extra years trapped in a slowly-failing body with an intact mind, or a healthy body with a failing mind. He had to see elderly people struggling with both every day and did not want it for himself.
(Of course, this was many years before Obamacare and the concept of “resource efficiency panels” deciding who can be allowed to have medical care…)
I have a relative who is dying of what the family believes to be chemotherapy-induced leukemia.
I’m guessing your nurse friend does not work in the chemo ward. Dying of cancer ‘quickly’ still takes months and is completely miserable.
Yes, what you’re referring to is simple denial. It’s not limited to people with intelligence, it’s human nature and quite a good defense mechanism. If we weren’t able to live in denial about all the bad things that could happen to us we’d be so paralyzed with fear we wouldn’t get out of bed.
Doctors who smoke are simply addicts. There are, however, people who get away with doing things that seem dangerous, because they do know what they’re doing. A couple of examples:
Lineman: work on live wires with thousands of volts on them every day. They know what they’re doing, and do it safely. You would be terrified to attempt the same.
Lawyers: work courts that could send you to prison or take your life savings away every day. They know what they’re doing, and do it safely. You would be terrified to attempt the same.
Then we have the intellectuals, who go to Iraq, and try to make peace with terrorists. They end up getting their heads sawed off on youtube.
E-cigarettes are the answer to the nicotine addiction. They work. I smoked for 50-years! I’ve been clean for 2 &1/2. Do I sometimes want a drag? Of course, that’s why I keep an e-cig handy. Works like a charm.
Now, how do I lose the 20-lbs gained after quitting?
Yes…. here’s a good example of this right here:
http://www.pbs.org/programs/doc-martin/
Kathy, a very asstute comment/observation on your part. I’ve seen it in aviation, and life manny times. With your permission I’d like to share thoughts with my fellow aviation “nuts”.
Steve
So agree. Doctors who smoke, Nurse who smoke!, fat pudgy doctors that haven’t seen a gym in 25 years telling you to get in shape and lose some weight. I have a great respect for bartenders who don’t smoke or drink! What sort of strength of will character does that explain? Divorced marriage counselors!
And politicians who don’t lust for power.
Would an example of this be: A person who knows that a certain neighborhood has a very high violent crime rate, but spends a lot of spare time there without fear? (He doesn’t live there.)
I believe that who an intelligent person reacts to their knowledge comes to define them:
Those who believe their knowledge makes them masters of the universe become liberals.
Those who are humbled when they learn how much they do not understand become conservative.
That, sir, is a profound insight.
Beautifula and profoundly humbling!
Yes, very well put.
Scott Adams is one of the more practically brilliant people on Earth. When Dilbert joined the local chapter of MENSA, Dilbert was surprised to find that his garbage man was a member of the local MENSA chapter. Dilbert asked why, and the chapter president replied “Intelligence has much less practical application than you’d think.”
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-02-03/
And so it is in real life. Being smart has only a peripheral impact on being successful in life.
I knew a really smart guy who chose to become a janitor instead of a career that used his degree. I think this was actually a smart choice. I worked as a janitor for a few summers. It was actually quite a great job. It was hard work but nobody was breathing down your neck and it was kind of meditative sweeping, mopping, scrubbing etc. Full time janitors can potentially pull in some good pay and benefits.
I knew a janitor who claimed to have an IQ of 174, and I believe he really had it. He was that smart.
But he wanted to be a janitor because if he used his mind to learn how to do anything that required his intelligence, “The System” would exploit him.
I could only marvel at the logic.
in your mind.
how else do you think it got here?
in your mind.
how else do you think it got here?
Dilbert is a genius. Scott Adams has talent, but is blinded by his own creation’s success. He believes in magical thinking, that he can will events into occurring while simultaneously denying the existence of free will.
Tolbert–
This sounds like an interesting post. Would you care to explain it? with examples from the strip?
It’s in a book he wrote, The Dilbert Future. I used to have it lying around, but lost it or I’d transcribe some quotes for you. I think he expanded on the theory in the book, God’s Debris, but I haven’t read that one.
There’s intelligence and there’s smarts. Smarts is the way to apply intelligence to
real life. Intelligence without smarts is frustrating and useless. All you to do is attend a MENSA meeting. A lot of intelligence, not much smarts.
Right you are….
McClellan was intelligent.
Sherman was SMART
It used to be called plain old “yankee inginuity” by the effeminate elites all over Europa at one time, didnt it?
The last picture misinterprets Randall Munroe’s joke. It misreads e^(i * pi) as e^ (2* pi). The former, famously, is -1, so it cancels the infinite sum following, leaving the original amount of $0.002 (which is, of course, less than a penny and rounds to $0.00).
He probably received an erroneous computer-generated phone bill for $0.002 and this was his way of getting back at them.
By the way, Munroe is better known as the creator of the brilliant “xkcd” web comic.
That’s what I thought, too.
If you’re going to be a wiseass like that, don’t screw it up with sloppy handwriting. I thing that’s yet another example of somebody being too smart by the square root of 1/4.
Your surmise is correct. He tried repeatedly to get the bill cancelled, but got nowhere.
So, he paid it.
Simple, really.
Yes, this is about a billing issue. Someone recorded his conversation with Verizon trying to complain about a bill. He was quoted a roaming data rate of “point zero two cents” and was charged point zero two dollars. He tries to explain this to the people on the phone, and one after another, they cannot understand that these two numbers are 100 fold different from one another. Insanely frustrating and a sad testament to mathematical illiteracy (innumeracy).
You know, I talked with a guy at Verizon last week with whom I was pretty impressed. His math skilz were sharp.
However, I wouldn’t have had to talk to him had the lady in the Verizon store had a clue, so I guess it’s a wash.
How about:
They believe that expertise in one limited domain implies global expertise.
“Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.” – Heinlein
Gawd! Oh, the embarrassing spectacle of brilliant scientists who spout off on specialties of which they know nothing, especially anything to do with politics. Geneticists who become health-food gurus, astronauts who found New Age institutes, pediatricians who become disarmament advocates, physicists who become global warming advocates…the list goes on.
CIP: Steven Chu.
What could possibly be so hard about green energy, if you know particle physics?
Some smart statisticians in France, of all places, determined that
a technological society is sustained by smart people, and advanced
by brilliant people. Forgive them their flaws; We need them badly.
BUT (this is a big but) -
Don’t let them manage anything. Completely different skill set.
See: Chu, Steven.
Wisdom is what recognizes the mistakes intelligence makes and seeks to avoid them.
To sum it all up in a single word: arrogance.
Intelligence and arrogance often go hand in hand, because our educational system praises and rewards intelligence far beyond anything justified by its practical value. By the time smart people graduate, they’ve been told for nearly two decades that they’re God’s gift to humanity, and they have delusions of grandeur as a result. Many of them never recover.
The worst cases are the people who go from college directly into academia, journalism, politics, or show business. They never have to set foot in the real world at all, and they go beyond arrogance into malignant narcissism.
This is a huge deal. I kinda have personal experience here, as I was always a good student, praised for my intelligence, etc. But I went into an engineering major in college, and the thing is, engineering is pretty results-oriented, and no matter how smart someone tells you that you are, your work still has to stand up to reality, and realty doesn’t care how many kudos you’ve got.
So along with my formal education, I also got an education in humility and in dealing with reality.
But “book smart” folks who go into “intellectual” careers – academicians, social “sciences”, etc, they just keep thinking they’re all that and a bag of chips. Then when they don’t get rewarded by the free market, they think the free market is broken.
I’m a pretty bright fellow who got a PhD and spent my entire working life as a professor. I’m more that a bit familiar with things intellectual. My contribution to the discussion is this: No matter how logical you are, you must always start the reasoning process with some assumptions about reality. Make a wrong assumption and you logically zip like an brilliant asteroid to a sometimes spectacularly wrong conclusion. On the other hand, if your assumptions are reasonably realistic, small errors in logic won’t produce outrageous conclusions, particularly if your conclusions are subjected to a “smell test” by a mind steeped in experience with life. So, prior assumptions are critical. And how does one accumulate a store of realistic assumptions about reality? By broad life experience in trial and error, that’s how. And that’s why the campuses produce so much outrageous opinion. That, and because it really doesn’t take even a lot of academic smarts to acquire a PhD in many of the soft subjects.
I’d make a caveat about this: that sometimes, even small errors in your assumptions can cause monumental problems; thus, there is a need to constantly check your assumptions, and even your results, with reality. Having said that, I remember hearing about a computer model that “didn’t” predict that an engine would fail in a certain way, and so when it was made into an actual engine, it failed. In this case, however, it turned out that the model *did* predict it, but either the managers or the engineers thought it was a small enough failure that they ought to have tried it out anyway. (While it was interesting that the model made the correct outcome, I think it was wise to try the engine out physically anyway, to test the model.)
Your “make a wrong assumption and logically zip off” comment, however, reminds me of how one of my math professors explained the difficulty of grading proofs: sometimes you make good, solid, logical connections…and then you insert a logical fallacy…and then continue on with your proof. Everything but that one logical fallacy is sound, yet it’s severely flawed because of that fallacy. How the heck do you grade that?
Fail.
After all, that’s what happens in real life when you do it wrong.
Yep.
And only an academic would find that a difficult call.
In life, the only acceptable grade is 100%.
There is not partial credit.
You may survive the 80%, and even leaned from it, but if it ain’t 100%, it cost you somehow.
Unless you are in education, academia, government, or the media, where one can be wrong every single time, yet get great pay, continuous raises and a nifty early retirement no matter how inaccurate you’ve been.
THAT, my friends is the present problem, in a nutshell. One privileged side foolishly wastes all our effort; the other MUST pay the bill, or suffer.
Once again, how does this really differ from antebellum slavery? Really?
1000 words or less. Due Monday.
Does a starving cave man get a half a meal from the rabbit that he almost caught?
Or you can direct your studies to esoteric areas of science that will forever remain comfortably untestable. Good ol’ string(cheese) theory, for instance (how many universes?).
Of course, twenty or so years ago, who could have imagined that there would be “scientists” of great prestige and influence who would be allowed to get away with keeping their data and notes locked up and refuse to let others examine them (“hide the decline”?).
If cold fusion ever received the support of the Great and Good how far do you think it would have gone?
John this is really a very insightful list. Too close to home…
John, one thing that served me well as an engineer … an outgrowth of growing up in a blue-collar family, I guess … is that I didn’t fall into the trap you describe in (3) and (4); the trap of looking down my nose at the technicians, assemblers and others who did not share my academic background, but did share in my projects.
I looked at them as valuable associates … teachers … who I counted upon to educate me on the myriad details of developing and producing high-technology products that you DON’T learn about in engineering school … such as ways to make a product easier (or harder) to assemble and test, and what has and hasn’t worked when it comes to product reliability.
I understood that wisdom and sound advice can come from almost anyone involved in the process … not just those who are higher than me on the totem pole of expertise, or those whose appearances suggested that I should consider them as my “better”.
Unfortunately, there are millions who do not share this attitude, and not only in the workplace … they reflexively pooh-pooh and dismiss anything that comes out of the mouth of someone who doesn’t fit their picture of an “educated” person, without even taking the time to seriously consider the value in what they are saying.
And then there’s the flip side … while straining at gnats over people like the younger President Bush or Sarah Palin (or straining at dogs over Mitt Romney, for that matter), these same people will swallow camels of failed ideologies, intellectual dishonesty, and even junk science just because it dovetails with their elitist perceptions of themselves, their views that the “non-profit” aren’t subject to the forces of greed and self-service, and/or their profit-phobia.
Such camel consumption almost led us into embracing the beliefs of the Climate Change Cult as national policy … and did lead us into embracing the idea that responsibility is a function of age and pocket depth, which has led millions to “outsource” their responsibility and initiative to a few self-selected Best and Brightest who, in the light of reality, often show up as dim bulbs.
Your post reminds me of the famous Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson. Back in 1943, the Army Air Forces wanted him to develop a single engine jet fighter. The project couldn’t interfere with normal wartime production and needed to achieve first flight in 150 days. Johnson established what would later be called the Skunk Works by taking a small number of engineers and master machinists to a separate facility. According to some accounts, there were times when the machinists knew what part was needed and went ahead and built it, then turned it over to the engineers to do the drawings. The plane, the XP-80, flew in 143 days. It took good engineers and machinists to achieve that, and that includes engineers smart enough to give credit to the intelligence and capabilities of the machinists.
In the Royal Navy of Nelson’s time, they referred to “happy” ships, ones where there was discipline, but where each man contributed his mite without browbeating, taking advantage of all the talent of whatever sort that stood available, from common seamen to the Captain Himself.
I used to know a man who once worked for Kelly Johnson. He also worked on the LEM project for Grumman. He always loved working on the LEM. He said it was the most efficient and professionally run place he ever worked at…except for the Skunk Works.
He use to refer to it as a “Happy Ship’. He would get tears in his eyes talking about it, because they accomplished such great things with seemingly so little strife or apparent effort. And hardly ANY MEETINGS! Or what people call meetings today, which simply waste a lot of time so everyone can claim that everyone else was informed, but with too many people involved to actually accomplish anything.
We now enjoy the trappings of effort too much to sully them with actual effort.
The best thing I ever did as a young engineer was embrace your attitude. It helped to have a father and a father-in-law that lacked formal education but were considered by their peers to be the best at what they did.
So lacking in Asian-American writers…
With the rise of Northern Asia…
It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know.
The trouble comes from people doing with what they know when what they know is wrong.
Do you mean to say that there might be something wrong with Obama’s plan to educate people to be educators, to educate more educators, to educate more educators, to educate more educators, to educate more educators…
Or how about his plan to hire more government regulators to make more regulations, which will need always more regulations and therefore require more educators to train all these new regulators…
Let’s just cut out production of EVERYTHING, and just have everybody educate and regulate for a living. Producing things is so smelly, noisy, and dangerous! I don’t know why we even have to do this? Aren’t we now “light people”, who can live on Iphones, YouTube, and Facebook? Dirt and sweat is so 1900!
I just hope they never get hungry or cold. Californians are bitching about gas prices? Hah! As you have decided (volunteered, even) to be the canaries in the green mineshaft, how’s that workin’ out fer’ ya’? You already forgot the rolling blackouts of s few years ago. Well, stupid people die first.
Have fun!
Humility beats the consequences otherwise.
Two groups, the French and the Jews, come to mind for consistently devising clever arguments with internally consistent logic to do stupid things.
My favorite example of the French attitude was the executive who was angry at an American counterpart and yelled, “Of course it works in practice but does it work in theory?”
As for Jews, a population with a median IQ one standard deviation above the rest of the population, after four years of blatant antisemitism, disasterous economic policy and catastrophic foreign policy from the Obama administration the prediction is that Obama’s share of the Jewish vote in November will drop from 80% to 60%.
“To err is Human.. To repeat error is of the Devil.” (Seneca)
that’s me.. ;\
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – Albert Einstein
Hey, stupid, you made a mistake. It is 2012 and not 2006. The six years difference, adjusted by a sliding time diffential multifactor, should double the amount of the check divided by 1/2.0001. Check it out and send the check to me at Folsom Prison.
I am reminded of Carl Sagan, a brilliant astronomer who should have stuck to astronomy.
He was the one who started the Nuclear Winter scare during the Gulf War when the Iraqis set the Kuwaiti oil wells on fire. All that ash in the upper atmosphere, he said, would cool the planet dangerously. Of course, it turned out, as oilman Red Adaire predicted, that oil smoke is too heavy to go anywhere. It fell back to the ground within 200 miles of the fires. Sagan started a hand-wringing fear that we were all going to get snowed in here in Florida, and nothing came of it.
Q: “How does one gain 3-5 years experienc if every job requires 3-5 years experience?”
A: Repeal Minimum Wage Laws!
Thank your crooked, traitorous, bribe-taking Congressmen for your problems.
I know this is a Holy Grail issue for many Republicans, but it really isn’t the federal minimum wage that bars entry level employment. Even Southern “chicken plants” with illegal workforces pay more than the MW usually. About the only people making the MW are wait staff and they get tips and initial hires who haven’t demonstrated that they understand coming to work and following instructions. Even where the federal MW is the starting wage, the raises usually come quickly once you establish that you are reliable and begin to develop some skill.
First, you can write off a machine in a shorter time that its usual life so you get some period of “free” labor from a machine, e.g., the bar code readers that have supplanted retail clerks and checkers. The bar code reader also doesn’t give special prices to friends. Automation has supplanted human labor in most low skill repetitive jobs where not only does the employer have the tax advantage of depreciating away the machine quickly and then getting free labor for awhile, there are no limits on the work schedule and no overtime, days off, or holidays, but the machine is more more reliable, e.g., the ATM rarely makes errors and doesn’t embezzle from you, so there goes the bank teller who is likely to do both.
The discrimination litigation environment is such that advertising a vacancy is just about the same as posting an “Invitation to Sue” notice in the legal notices. Cultivated discrimination suits a a major industry in many areas. Machines don’t sue.
The regulatory environment for using human labor is oppressive, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. A big company can afford corporate counsel and a specialized human resources and labor relations staff, a small one is on their own with at most the help of a trade association and private counsel on an ad hoc basis. There is also the political side of the regulatory environment that causes the government to quite literally put a business out of business with its regulatory and law enforcement powers if that business incurs the wrath of that government. Human labor is a major contributing factor in this dynamic as well as the complaining employee is the common factual predicate of enforcement actions.
While payroll tax compliance isn’t a big issue for larger companies, it is a real grind and a financial burden for a small business to adequately maintain its tax reporting and pay the employer contribution. The temptation to either draw the money or put it into the business while thinking, “I make it up at the end of the quarter” has caused a LOT of small businesses all sorts of legal troubles and caused many to fail. Barely dodged that bullet more than once myself.
There are still lots of entry level jobs that will take somebody with a GED or a HS Diploma and no experience, especially if they can pee in a bottle and pass a background check. There are lots of entry or low-level administrative or technical jobs that will take someone with only a general bachelor’s degree, though many of those are in government. They aren’t good jobs in the sense of giving you enough money to buy a fancy car or an 80″ flatscreen, but they start demonstrating your work habits and character and providing valuable real world experience. For my entry-level clerical jobs I came to prefer the young people who’d dropped out of school, gotten a GED, and gone to work over the HS grads who usually had zero work habits or sense about the requirements of a work environment and rarely had any ability to orally communicate with anyone other than other teenagers. I guess the key to these entry jobs is that in many of them, you really should start while still living at home, build up some work experience, and then when you have a job a bit up from the MW level, think about things like a place of your own and a life of your own. Too often there is no expectation that kids work in either HS or college. All too often they develop live together, marriage-like relationships either immediately out of HS or while in college and want to strike out on their own while one or both are unemployed or in entry jobs. Frankly, welfare is a much better economic situation than trying to start out on your own with MW or near MW jobs and no work experience; it is going to be a long unpleasant grind before you have any of the things you expected while still living with your parents.
I have a high regard for Thomas Sowell, but his statement about needing a high I.Q. to really screw things up just doesn’t pan out; The current President and administration in Washington for a prime example.
The I.Q. of intelligent individuals is not static. Unless there is a pathology present, intelligence can progress.
My most valuable skills learned in college was the art of listening and asking the proper questions.
If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, and the left side of the brain controls the right side, then, only left handed people are in their right mind.
Permit me to pose my own theory I call “Edison’s Imposters”.
First, a few quotes attributed to Edison himself.
1)“We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work”
2)“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
3)“Vision without execution is hallucination.”
4)“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Edison himself was not perfect. When he honed in on his imperfections, he thought perfectly. When he congratulated himself, he collapsed his own wisdom.
So it is with Edison’s Imposters. They break every one of the rules contained in the four quotes above.
You can always tell the Imposter, because work never appeals to them. They skip briefings; leave the heavy labor to others; refuse to budget time, materials, money, or energy; and speak in broad platitudes rather than concrete facts.
The Imposter does not find glory in the 10,000 wrong options, he forces the conclusion of one of the wrong ones and refuses to admit that it is wrong, even in the face of abject failure.
The Imposter believes in 99% inspiration and 1 percent perspiration, then rails at that 1%, who do all the work, pay all the price and shoulder all the burden. The only thing “inspired” by this, is totalitarianism.
The Imposter is all vision, no precision. Someone who lives life completely reveling in his own visions, invents a reality only he can see and then tries to find weak-minded people to adopt this pathology as their own reality. The “vision junkies” therefore come in two forms. The cult leader and his lemmings.
The Imposter is all theory, all hypothesis, and testing is bypassed because it all was “settled” the minute the hypothesis was handed down to the lemmings. From that point forward no lie is too big, no fraud is too small, no distortion too obvious that it can’t be implemented to defend against disproving the theory.
The Imposter must hide his past, because 10,000 failures do not reveal his genius, they expose his scam.
When the Imposter and his lemmings seize history, seize communications, seize academia, seize popular culture….brutal tyranny is sure to be close on their heels. Truth dies, news is untrustworthy and propaganda abounds. You simply cannot be led by an Imposter who is not a dictator.
The sainted Eleanor Roosevelt wanted FDR to be a dictator. In tyranny, the delusional elite see benevolence. Heaven help us from the Imposter and his “benevolence”. From such, we will never recover.
Good and true essay. Thanks.
On the other hand Mao was against intellectuals, those who wore glasses, those who chose reading or the arts vs those who toiled with their hands and served the State, on and on. So how did that turn out ? The problems stem from those who presume to know what is best for others and then set about acquiring power for the purpose of dictating and punishing those who don’t comply. We are in the midst of such tyrany. Misdirected intelligence kills. Buckley was SO right.
What philosoraptor asks is something I would like to know, myself.
There are really only three ways that ANY person can screw up their lives: Drugs, Sex, and Violence. Get rid of those three tendencies and your life will always be fulfilling even if you don’t succeed at anything.
The trouble is that it’s common to think that intelligence is everything, when it is not. I divide it up like so:
Raw Intelligence (inborn brain power)
Information Retention (really just memory & memorization)
Knowledge/Experience (ability to incorporate information into the worldview and practical applications)
Understanding (ability to comprehend the place and function and importance of knowledge and its applications)
Wisdom (weave all of the above into a philosophy or worldview that is flexible enough to accept new knowledge and strong enough to add humility to the list of virtues)
I’ve know lots of people with little native intelligence who are very wise–usually they’re pretty old, but that’s the advantage of seasoning over time. I’ve known others born with brilliant brains with little knowledge, less understanding, and no wisdom. Information retention is important, but without practical application it becomes just a footnote. I’m fortunate that I can’t learn to DO things from books–until I’ve actually done it for real it just doesn’t sink in. As I’ve gotten older what I once considered a handicap has turned out to be a gift from Heaven.
The most dangerous thing for somebody born intelligent is to believe everyone constantly telling him how intelligent he is (and the same goes for females). If you think you’re smart, take up Adam Smith’s challenge and figure out the exact cost of an ordinary shirt. Not price, not wholesale cost, but the actual percentages of all the costs of all the components required to get that shirt to the store so you can buy it for $45. When your mind boggles, you can then be assured that you’re not smart enough to understand or govern the economy of a village, much less a nation of 300 million people. If not for Adam Smith I might still be as intellectually arrogant as an Obama.
It is not easy being smart. Some people notice it and worship you –and most people don’t know how to deal with that kind of adulation. Most of the time, you feel ordinary and you feel surrounded by dull people.
This is where teaching kids civility, respect, and understanding helps. As much as I enjoy being with smart people, they are often boorish and disrespectful because nobody ever thought to teach them common civility. When they do discover that they can be very smart, they act like snotty bullies.
I realize that being smart is not enough. You have to learn stuff too. And you can learn new things from anyone…
“they are often boorish and disrespectful because nobody ever thought to teach them common civility”
most of them have been taught “common civility” but because they are smart they realized that it is a waste of time
Civility is never a waste of time. It costs nothing to be civil. People will remember an insult long after you have forgotten who they are.
If you’re extremely intelligent, and you know it, you don’t go around bragging about it. You keep your mouth shut and listen. People will talk and talk and tell you their innermost secrets, as long as you just keep quiet and listen. And when they start winding down, just throw a question at them. Just one question. And that will rev them right back up an get them talking again. Humans love to be listened to. Believe it or not, but that is the secret to success.
there are not enough wise men on earth to convert 7 billion morons to intellectuals. your method doesn’t even work to convince your child why he does not need an iPod or $200 sneakers.
I call it the Goya Effect:
Goya was a genius painter who came to a miserable end after enduring, among other things, personal tragedy and the Napoleonic war in Spain. He had three major problems: One, he was smarter than the people he worked for (The Spanish Nobility and court). Two, he knew it, and Three, it didn’t do him a bit of good.
Smarts is like 4-wheel drive: it gets you stuck in the woods much farther than the rest.
Reminds me of when people want to sound smart or tough, they say, “Failure is not an option.” In the real world, failure is always, always, always an option.
Intelligence is a tool. Used inappropriately, you turn out like fred capio or Ron in VDH’s most recent post here on PJMedia; they did really really well on ONE particular exam but they don’t use their smarts to accomplish anything but convince people they’re complete jerks.
What I don’t get though, is that when people hate being wrong, they spend lots MORE time being wrong than they have to. I guess it’s that people would rather “get their way”, than “be right”?
dear jeanette, please call me stupid if you like but don’t call me “democrat” (ron)
…oh no I DON’T want to be an Alpha…I’m so glad I’m a Beta so I don’t work so hard…I will not play with Gamma children, they wear Khaki and that’s so ugly…
Or “God bless the Squire and His Relations/And Keep Us All In Our Proper Stations.” Remember to curtsey and add “Amen.”
Yes, the world would be so much better if we could just get rid of all the intelligent people and spend all our time playing with our Devices, tweeting OMG and LOL until a railroad train runs over us or we fall down the stairs into an open manhole…yep, we’d all be happy little peons Demanding “Affordable” this and “Our Fair Share” of that; until we have torn off our clothes, eaten up all the substance in the world and burned down the shelters…and not a one of us knows enough to feed, clothe or shelter ourselves…and if there are any intelligent people left, they’re keeping very, very quiet.
Isn’t this the perfect description of Barack Obama? To come up with the material to write this article, all JH had to do was to compile a list of The One’s all too obvious character flaws and then serve it up as the template for The Intelligent Man as Failure. Brilliant! Unfortunately, Obama—who is, according to his own modest appraisal, The Smartest Man in the Room [tm]—is screwing up not only his life but ours as well.