@blakeyrat said:
So a smart person, randomly pulled off the street, would find, say, playing tight end for the Seattle Seahawks easy? Bullshit.
Should I stop assuming you're not an idiot and can understand the intent of statements? Do I need to state this explicitly in terms of Gaussians and expectation values?
So intelligence is just procrastination? Once again: bullshit.
This is the exact opposite of what I said.
That's your belief. Can you prove it?
It's not a belief, there's absolutely no belief of any kind in real, properly done science. It's a statistical fact. One cited even in introductory textbooks on psychology. Also in literally thousands of studies done ever since psychology became a real science (only like 20 years ago, but w/e).
Ah, but a little bit ago, you were talking about people who were (supposedly) intelligent, and yet didn't fit in with their peer group. So... which is it?
They fit in with their peer group just fine, just not others, because they don't identify with each other.
Are both politicians and rocket scientists intelligent?
According to studies, politicians, no, rocket scientists, yes.
What if the rocket scientist is being hit on at a party and doesn't pick up the cues, is he still intelligent?
This comment is based on one of the generalization fallacies. Intelligence (though a number of metrics) correlates with social ability (both positively and negatively, depending on metrics and groups they're interacting with). So for an individual, maybe, maybe not. This isn't a meaningful question.
Well, then they don't get to complain, do they?
Kind of like how you don't get to complain about people doing stupid things with technology, because you "choose to" work with them?
. They could simply not use too-fancy language, or not demonstrate knowledge of facts (which is fucking irritating, BTW), or not do "whatever". If they were intelligent, they'd probably figure that out pretty fucking quick, huh?
First, they do figure it out quick, which is why they tend to not be social outside their (small) groups. Also, why should someone change the way they behave to suit random other people they don't even care about?
And "demonstrating knowledge" of facts is not the same as randomly ramming facts down people's throats to show off, demonstrating knowledge is when you say "hey you know you can just e-mail this document to me directly rather than printing it, scanning it, putting it in a word file, and sending that to me?" And, as we all know, people do not always respond well to such suggestions.
You're really making no sense here. Intelligent people don't want to associate with others because they get "treated badly." Despite the fact that, according to your theory of what intelligence is, they should be easily able to fix that small problem.
You can't change how other people behave. What you're suggesting is that they should fix that problem by becoming different people which is a pretty stupid fix.
Then you're saying it's a tragic thing that they don't have a lot of social connections
I'm not saying that at all--I'm saying generally people don't identify well with people who are smart, and this causes trouble, just like when any group of people does identify well with any other group they are in contact with.
even though you admit that they're doing this voluntarily. So... which is it? If they choose to not have social connections, then why is it tragic that they don't?
This is like saying black people voluntarily act black, and if they would just choose to act more white, they'd have more white friends. Problem solved!
No, the issue is different groups that have trouble identifying with each other don't interact well, it doesn't mean that one of them has poor social skills! In particular, it doesn't mean the group you aren't a part of has the good social skills!
Wow, you're an asshole.
Yeah, I'm an asshole because I don't want to listen to 45 minutes of the person next to me on the bus ranting to me about this one time they read a book by that guy and they thought that vibrations were the cause of all disease, and if we could just learn to vibrate at the right frequency...
But seriously, and assuming this story isn't utter bullshit which I'm virtually certain it is, how did you start the conversation without small talk?
It is completely true, and I introduced myself by being observant enough to notice what annoyed him, and saying something like "I'm tired of having the same conversation with all of these people too!"
If you don't want people to be dicks, you need to figure out what that thing is, and stop doing it.
You're absolutely right, and all we need to do to stop terrorism is to figure out what we do that annoys them and stop! Perfect plan! I'll inform the Israelis, I'm sure at no point in the past several thousand years have they tried this plan!
I'll also call up my stereotypical black man and tell him the solution to stopping racism is to act more white! Brilliant!
And in any case, if you don't care, why the holy shit would you even bring it up here?
I didn't bring it up, stratos said:
@stratos said:
people who are diagnosed with high IQ at a young age can develop pretty shitty traits
to which I responded that that's not true, different groups, etc, etc. Because it seems as rediculous to me to suggest that smart people don't have social skills as it does to suggest that black people or asian people or whoever don't have social skills because they don't do things the way you do.
Maybe they actually wanted to do something productive with their lives
Except for the part where I said several times that that's not the case, but whatever, you can pretend I said whatever you like, don't let me stop you.
String theory is fringe. I give it 50/50 odds it's complete crap.
Based on your expert understanding of UV completions of quantum field theories, and decades of research in the field? No? Well, pretty ironic then...
and it's theory that doesn't make any useful predictions
Again, based on your years of intensive study into the predictions it can make? Or, say, based on, say, a crackpot's hilarious rants about it?
What kind of attention did he require?
The kind of attention an insanely brilliant person needs in a class that bores them to death. Say, for example, talking about things that might actually be challenging to him and would not waste his time.Or letting him work on an interesting research problem, or any number of a billion things that are different than totally ignoring him.
if he was having problems he should have proactively talked to the prof about them, that's why God invented office hours.
Did you miss my example above about how the typical professor's reaction to "this class is too easy" is "THAT'S UNPOSSIBLE!" (at least in my field and associated ones).
the point of schooling is learning how to interact with other human beings... if you have a kid who wants to learn new material, but hates interacting with other kids, he is missing the point of going to school.
Academic interaction isn't valuable when the people you're interacting with don't understand any of the things you're doing because then they can't associate well with you. And none of these kids hate interacting with other kids, they hate interacting with the kids who are boring and never have anything interesting to say. Academically interacting with people is no fun when, for example, you try to do homework with them, and the assignment you finish in five minutes they take weeks on. (And, yeah, at a grad school level the difference between the top and the bottom of the classes is taking minutes vs a week or weeks to do homework). That's no fun, it's just brutal.
He could just as easily learn on his own without bothering with school in the first place.
Yes because you can totally get a job in science by not getting a PhD and just saying "trust me, I know stuff!"
We're social animals. Almost by definition, any human who is anti-social is not very good at being human.
What about a person who's not good at reading? What are they?
The complaints you're making about his later career are due to your profession requiring people to jump through hoops to get degrees.
Yes--and these hoops shouldn't be there. They're the result of exactly the complaints I'm making! But in principle, in hard sciences, it's supposed (as in, it used to) to mean something because you had things to show for it. You had things to show for it because people paid attention to students and recognized the smart ones, and put them to work; e.g., Heisenberg started working on quantum mechanics as a teenager, right after he started college, because he was quickly recognized as smart. That doesn't happen anymore. But why is another discussion. The point I'm trying to make here is that there is nothing correct about the original social skills complaint: it is that smart people (statistically) think and behave differently enough that people (statistically) have trouble identifying with them, which causes one group to think the other has poor social skills, when really they don't. They're just different, and have no interest in being like the other group.
Why don't you cite some, Mr. Wizard.
Because it's the internet, and I don't have to. Also, because the 5 minutes it took me to type this response is much smaller than the 20 or 30 minutes it will take me to find and dig out my textbooks and track down specific literature sources, and I don't care to put an extra 500% effort to this post. Also, because it's textbook knowledge. Get a textbook.