Frank J. Fleming may be a satirist, but I think his point about not confusing “dumb” and “simple” is spot on:
[T]here does seem to be some trouble in this country in judging who is smart and who isn’t. The main problem may be confusing “simple” with “dumb.”
If something is simple, then dumb people will believe it. And if dumb people believe something, then soon some conclude that smart people should believe something else. There’s a flaw in that philosophy.
Why shouldn’t you touch a hot stove? There’s no complex, smart answer to that. You’ll get roughly the same answer from Stephen Hawking that you’d get from Forrest Gump: It’s hot, and it will hurt.
But say you were going to argue that you should touch a hot stove. That would have to be a very complex answer, since it defies basic logic. And some people could run with that, talking in detail about pain receptors and the brain’s reaction to stimulus, and come up with a very smart-sounding argument on why touching a hot stove is a great idea.
Others will go further and mock all those ignorant people in the flyover states for their irrational fear of hot stoves and announce, “The most enlightened thing to do is to press one’s face against a hot stove.” Those people are what we call intellectuals.
Similarly, when someone comes up with a well-reasoned argument backed by top economists that two plus two equals five, there’s no brilliant way to refute it. The only response is: “No, you’re an idiot; it’s four.” But if you say that, you’ll be called anti-smart people.
December 12th, 2011 | 10:10 am
One of the most annoying things about social networking sites is reading the articles posted by one’s friends that seem to suggest that politics and government are a free-form quiz show with style points deducted. It’s as if they think a dearth of verbal howlers and malapropisms would suddenly cause our national problems to disappear. Since ~80% of reporters vote left, the reportage and emphasis of dumb quotes can be a bit skewed, but that’s not even the issue.
The issue is the behavior of smart people in power. Some of them are primarily altruistic, some of them are entirely greedy, most lie somewhere in the middle, but none of them are good judges of themselves and their ideas. Knowledge can blinker as much as it broadens, because none of us can be objective about ourselves. What we know, it seems, is better than what we don’t know. The time we spent to learn it was better-spent than the time other people spent doing other things. The facts we’ve gathered must be the most relevant ones, otherwise why would we have bothered? It’s self-evident, right?
Well, that attitude produced the banking crisis, and it’ll do worse yet.
December 13th, 2011 | 3:54 pm
The problem with the intellectual elite is that they have managed to shield themselves from feedback. They think information is only meant to flow one way – from themselves to their inferiors.
Even the best brain needs accurate feedback from the rest of the body to function, and even the nation with the smartest people needs to have accurate information about the rest of the nation.
When our intellectuals are wrong, they neither know nor care.
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