Further reflection on The Know-It-All

[lillibet]

I should be in bed, but my mind is jumbling around a few different ideas and fitting them together.

For a while now, I've been intrigued by the portrayal of intelligent people in the media. Having recently read The Know-It-All, I find that a lasting impression from the book is how almost everyone to whom the author mentioned his quest to read the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica thought it was a crazy thing to do. His wife was completely unsupportive and went so far as to begin fining him $1 for every irrelevant fact he mentioned.

I really enjoy facts. They're fun toys. I'm not sure I'd like A.J. Jacobs as a close personal friend, but as a dinner companion or cocktail party guest, he sounds great. The facts he found interesting enough to share and discuss in his book were interesting to me. I doubt I'll ever duplicate his feat, but I'm sure that if I did, I would find it fascinating. And that most of my friends would think it a pretty cool thing to do. Yes, yes--randomly reciting facts can be annoying, but no more so than constantly complaining about one's health. Why were most of the people he talked to (except, notably the super-high IQ guy and the Jeopardy champion) so down on the notion?

The other piece that keeps knocking around is a passage I found deeply disturbing and offensive from Ron Suskind's NYT Magazine article "Without a Doubt":

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!" In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

I don't have any brilliant conclusion here, but I wonder things like "How could we change this?" and "What would it take to turn this around?" Smart people are important, and not just because I like them. Not liking smart people is, well, stupid.

Comments

[moria923.livejournal.com]

On a related note, it seems that the culture has convinced many of the smart people to be so busy all the time that they don't have space in their lives to use their intelligence fully. They don't have time for in-depth discussions of politics, books, the arts, or much else. Some time ago there was an article in HARPER'S -- I think it was the Nov. '04 issue but I'm not sure -- about the virtues of idleness, and how a certain amount of idleness is necessary in a democracy tecause you need time to think about the issues clearly.

Also, a lot of higher education has become specialized training for very specific jobs. To me the most appalling example was a woman I met on the T once who said she was majoring in "apparel marketing". Not just business, and not even just marketing, but apparel marketing. What happened to the value of the liberal arts?

[marmota.livejournal.com]

I don't like phrasing the problem as smart people vs stupid people, as something about that makes it sound like a problem of nature, not nurture. Just last night I was talking with quietann, and she was mentioning the resistance a childhood friend faced in escaping their 'white trash' upbringing. Apparently, any attempt to do anything more than their parents did was put down for being "uppity", a word that I'm not sure I've ever heard spoken aloud before. Somehow there is a culture out there, where bettering oneself is called arrogant and presumptious. That's the scariest bit right there. Surrounded by the educational and vocational options of a first-world nation, they willfully turn themselves into peasants instead of going for the gold. Somehow, they've been programmed to resist analytical thought and personal growth. I firmly believe that our educational system must have as it's highest priority teaching people how to think, and yet I saw no sign of that growing up even in a middle-class suburb, let alone anywhere today. I'm certain it's intentional, although for the life of me I can't fathom why anyone would want it this way.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I firmly believe that our educational system must have as it's highest priority teaching people how to think, and yet I saw no sign of that growing up even in a middle-class suburb, let alone anywhere today. I'm certain it's intentional, although for the life of me I can't fathom why anyone would want it this way.

It's easier to control people who don't know how to think. :/

[dpolicar]

How could we change this?

I dunno, really.

But I'll make a possibly related observation.

I've experienced being a member of a community about which many people hold sweeping negative beliefs. And in the context of that membership I've experienced, a few times, establishing relationships with people who hold those beliefs _before_ they know my membership, and having them figure it out later, once they've decided I'm a cool guy. And some of those times, that's had some effect on changing their preconceptions. Which is cool when it happens.

Now, that's not to say I advocate living in the closet, about anything. But given that we only ever show a slice of ourselves at a time, it's worth at least acknowledging that showing different slices in different orders has different effects.

I'm a smart guy. I'm also a funny guy. I'm also a liker of good pizza. I'm also a watcher of cheesy television, and a reader of scripture, and many other things.

I'm willing to bet that I could get a conversation going with one or two of those "busy working people" where they conclude I'm an OK guy... and there's a chance that when they discover I'm also an MIT-grad East-Coast liberal Jew with a same-sex partner of thirteen years, they'll conclude that maybe there's more common ground than they'd thought between 'us' and 'them'.

'course, I'm probably not going to bother. But if enough of us did, it might make a difference.

[clauclauclaudia]

As I see it, it basically comes down to empathy, not right-ness. I have a long post about this in my head half-formed--how to put it in brief?

It's easy to dismiss as image vs. substance, but that's a rather biased view. Take Jacobs's facts vs. someone complaining about their health. A lot of people would compare those interactions and say that Jacobs' fact was just trivia, a thing with no connection to anything else. Whereas the health of your conversational partner has an immediate effect, and talking about it forms social bonds.

Everyone wants a president they can feel that bond with. Right now it feels like things are so polarized, it's harder to achieve that for a supermajority than ever before. Not because the political positions are so distant, but because the dialogue is combative rather than communicative; each attempt sets up barriers rather than bridging positions.