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Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Intelligence makes for better leaders -- from undergraduates to executives to presidents -- according to multiple studies. It certainly makes sense that handling a market shift or legislative logjam requires cognitive oomph. But new research on leadership suggests that, at a certain point, having a higher IQ stops helping and starts hurting. The researchers looked at 379 male and female business leaders in 30 countries, across fields that included banking, retail and technology. The managers took IQ tests (an imperfect but robust predictor of performance in many areas), and each was rated on leadership style and effectiveness by an average of eight co-workers. IQ positively correlated with ratings of leader effectiveness, strategy formation, vision and several other characteristics -- up to a point. The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120, which is higher than roughly 80 percent of office workers. Beyond that, the ratings declined. The researchers suggest the "ideal" IQ could be higher or lower in various fields, depending on whether technical versus social skills are more valued in a given work culture. The study's lead author, John Antonakis, a psychologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, suggests leaders should use their intelligence to generate creative metaphors that will persuade and inspire others -- the way former U.S. President Barack Obama did. "I think the only way a smart person can signal their intelligence appropriately and still connect with the people," Antonakis says, "is to speak in charismatic ways."
Idiocracy is officially here. President Camacho, here we come.
Just when we've begun to convince women not to dumb themselves down....now if you have a vision for an organization, you'd better not - as Kipling would say - "look too good or talk too wise."
The upside, though, is that those who didn't fit in can honestly say, "I guess I was too smart to work for company X," or "I was too smart to work in the ___ industry." While that won't help anyone find work, perhaps it will help some to sleep at night.
So all those AIs in sci-fi, not the Skynet kind but the ones where they try to help humanity and humanity gets indignant for being too dumb to understand, are accurate?
That doesn't mean we need to go in the complete opposite extreme!!
C'mon. What could be more charismatic than that?
Well, that explain everything! This is why creimer is dislike so much on Slashdot!
To a smart person with they see the world in a particular way. So when they try to explain themselves to the public they are talking above their comprehension. This is often insulting to the other person because it sounds like you are using your vocabulary and more advanced reasoning to show that you are better then them.
Someone else with a lower intelligence, works more off of instincts, which does have the advantage of making faster decisions which are more often then not correct. However to a higher IQ person this is just ignoring factors which should be addressed. And such reactions is insulting for not listening to the rational argument.
A high IQ person leading people with low IQ often creates conflict because the low IQ people just fail to see the big picture or know to follow the more abstract steps. They want right and wrong. Not careful balance of what is going on and actions based on situations.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is just another 'ism' like sexism and racism. but this one is so in the closet it doesn't even have a name.
Its very much a society thing, not just related to Leaders. All smart people are Disliked. Its part of the human condition.
Bankruptcy and economy are not quite the same thing.
smart males. They want to be able to feel superior to their mate just like underlings want to feel superior to their boss.
they can run the country with good 'ole fashion common sense. It doesn't help that it looks easy. After all, anyone can tell somebody else what to do, right? It's like writing. You learn to do it in grade school. How hard can this Shakespear stuff be, amiright? The trouble is it's scary to think that the problems of the world are too complex for you to understand and solve. Rather than face that fact and seek help a lot of folks deny it and try to force the world to conform the the reality they've chosen to believe in; with predictable results...
Also, a significant portion of the population really, really hates to feel talked down to; and, well, it's easy to rile these folks up, drive them to the polls and get them to vote you into office. Clinton (Bill) used to do it. When he talked to old people he dyed his hair gray. Young folks got a brown dye. And his southern drawl pretty much vanished when he wasn't on the campaign in the South.
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I wondered why so many people dislike a stable genius.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
of Ian Bank's Culture novels.
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The difference between the average person (IQ 100) and and a legally retarded guy in a helmet (IQ 70) is the same as between a bright college guy (IQ 115) and a really dull witted convict (IQ 85) is the difference between a professor (IQ 130) and average guy. Maybe the gap becomes too big for the brainy prof to care about winning popularity contest?
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
want to know how citizens respond to stupid, irrational leaders
You know the answer to that already: "One of US, one of US!" An idiot can be an effective leader by collecting much smarter people around him or her, and listening and moderating their advice until a reasonable solution can be extracted from the conflicting expert priorities. Once the idiot sees the solution, it can be communicated that much easier to the general population. This way the painful effort becomes worthwhile.
One of my favorite headlines.
Hitler, David Koresh and Charles Manson were charismatic too. Shortly after Obama was elected the wiki article on Charismatic Leaders was deleted. Charisma will lead the sheep to slaughter but it doesn't indicate strong leadership or managerial skills.
It only says that popularity of smarts in leaders peaks at 120, not why it does this.
Thus I conclude at least the headline here is clickbait. This fits with expectations from this bunch of editors.
Now we know why the libs hate Trump so much. After all, he scored highest on his cognitive tests.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-...
And also because he was the best baseball player in New York in the early 1960s.
https://www.sportsgrid.com/as-...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Thank you for being an example of one of the those who dislike intelligent leaders.
The simple reality is that experience often trumps intelligence. In fact, the ability to create and understand abstractions often interferes with the ability to learn from observation of tangible results. Take, for instance, the idea that Libya and Iraq are now free when the observed reality is that most people there are far less free than they were under dictators. Yet our very intelligent Harvard and Yale ruling elites went ahead and spread the same "freedom" to Syria.
The worst managers in my company generally rate the highest from the people they manage, because those people are afraid of getting on the bad side of said managers.
Ever seen Obama without the teleprompter? Makes Bush and Trump look downright charismatic.
The people that you get to vote for are hand-picked puppets of the establishment. They do what they are told. They are figureheads.
When one comes along that decides to buck that system, they are attacked constantly. The public is easily swayed to see them as crazy, stupid, or evil by PR smear jobs.
Social experiments are difficult. Did they correct for the issue that very smart people are likely to lead groups with different functions than moderately smart people? Maybe there is a correlation between high intelligence and leading groups that work under very large time pressure or under poorly - defined constraints?
Say the guys who voted for a narcissistic psychopatic megalomanic manipulative pedophilic con-artist and sexual predator as POTUS.
I guess it's true people vote for candidates they can identify with.
Well, aside from the idiocy of many in the American public being anti-intellectual false populists... I would venture to say that in fact, most of our policy problems are not problems that an individual's incrementally higher IQ is needed to solve. We're not stymied by cold fusion or quantum tunneling or something like that. Our problems are social, not scientific.
Those of us suffering under the current US administration want to know how citizens respond to stupid, irrational leaders.
You had eight years to figure out the answer to that; if you still do not know we cannot help you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some people are dumb as shit and don't like you because they cannot comprehend the message you are attempting to convey.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Any time I show off my high IQ all the haters come out.
IQ focuses on a very narrow measure of intelligence: prowess in things like match, science, and reasoning. Good leaders need much more than this. They also need prowess in dealing with politics, getting people to be enthusiastic about their work, dealing with difficult people.
Often, those with very high IQs have specialized (intentionally or not) in only the traditional subjects measured by IQ. It's no accident that many brilliant people have trouble with human relationships.
To a degree, mental energy and skill in areas of human relationships can take away from "IQ," but also makes a person a better overall leader.
Apparently there's only one kind of intelligence that matters.
Mitt Romney is one of the smartest presidential candidates this nation has ever seen, as well as a fundamentally decent human being. People tore him to bits over offhand comments and talked endlessly about his unforgivable sin of having - 30 years prior - taken his dog on vacation. (One New York Times columnist published no less than 86 columns talking about that incident, which seems like obsessive enough behavior to qualify for institutionalization.)
Donald Trump is one of the least intelligent presidential candidates this nation has ever seen. Blatant lies, boasts about sexual assault, and so on only served to feed his campaign. At least a third of the country is still really excited about having this "stable genius" lead them even though he clearly struggles to understand any of the issues a President faces.
Look at Churchill's speeches or FDR's fireside chats. Now look at Donald Trump's twitter stream (MY EYES! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!). This is the evolution of civil discourse in just one lifetime.
I get that sometimes someone who speaks blunt falsehoods rather than complex truths can be seen as a "man of the people." I don't think this has to be so. I don't think this has been true in all cultures and at all times through human history. I don't know how we can overcome the anti-intellectual pressures that have been building in this country for 70 years, the politicization of journalism and education, the degeneration of political discourse at all levels into dick jokes and cursing, and so on. But if we don't find some way to overcome it our civilization will collapse.
"So when they try to explain themselves to the public they are talking above their comprehension."
Bullshit!
A smart leadership person is able to communicate effectively and clearly to their target audience.
Communication ability to the apex of the leadership pyramid.
If you talented but have not invested time and effort in mastering communication, whatever you --- you aren't "smart" in the leadership skills department.
Leading people means you MUST be able to communicate to PEOPLE.
Admittedly without reading the linked article, it looks like the consensus is that people somehow despise leaders too intelligent. However based on my anecdotal experience sometimes people "too smart" think they have all the answers and act without input leading to arrogant and potential uniformed decisions. Being a leader isn't about being the smartest person in the room, it's more about knowing your own limits and making sure the right people are where they need to be.
Trump DID beat something like 17 supposedly very well qualified Republican opponents who had that Washington DC establishment stamp-of-approval.....
and then he beat Hillary Clinton, who Democrats told us was the smartest and most-qualified candidate ever (at least now that Obama was ineligible to run again) even though she rigged her primary and outspent Trump by something like 7-to-1 AND had ABC,CBS,NBC,MSNBC,PBS,CNN,NPR and nearly every newspaper on her side - oh, yeah, and a lot of the Republican establishment backed her too.....
Now it appears that even the Obama FBI and the Obama DOJ were pulling for Hillary.
The "stable genius" was so stable and so genius he remembered that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania exist - apparently quite a feat.
Sure, people don't like you because you're too smart. And that guy you met didn't ask you out because you're too beautiful.
They do. But those with really high IQs are more likely to have learned over a lifetime that their value-add is to solve problems in the technical domain, and are likely to continue to do so even when their job scope has widened. But when they're the top guy they need to spend perhaps the majority of their time on people and business problems, and less on making technical decisions.
they can run the country with good 'ole fashion common sense. It doesn't help that it looks easy. After all, anyone can tell somebody else what to do, right? It's like writing. You learn to do it in grade school. How hard can this Shakespear stuff be, amiright? The trouble is it's scary to think that the problems of the world are too complex for you to understand and solve. Rather than face that fact and seek help a lot of folks deny it and try to force the world to conform the the reality they've chosen to believe in; with predictable results...
You perfectly describe the well-documented Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Growing up, being a bit smarter than the average bear, I used to hear "you think you're better than me?!?" a lot. One time, after I made a wisecrack to a guy, he said: "What are you? Some kind of smart-ass?" Couldn't help, but to blurt: "Yeah, but it's sure better than being a dumbass like you!". Sure, he beat me up, but I've never once been afraid of being smart - even today in R/TrumpLand, where Dumb is Double-PlusGood as long it praises our Glorious Leader!!
The problem, I think, is that "smart" is not the only quality that makes up human beings, nor the only quality that is valuable. More of a good thing is not necessarily better. Many people like a couple teaspoons of sugar in their coffee. Almost no one enjoys half the cup filled with sugar.
The point I'm getting at here, is that people are a composite of qualities. And perhaps a disproportionate amount of intelligence isn't the asset it's made out to be (usually by the highly intelligent themselves, of course!).
It's rather obvious that the people most successful in their fields are not necessarily the ones with the highest IQ's. Rather, they tend to be smarter than average, but have other valuable qualities as well.
The point here is that perhaps the "best" people are not the most intelligent ones, but the ones that have an optimal aggregation of valuable qualities. Perhaps an over abundance of intelligence upsets the balance of those qualities in a non-optimal way, the same as adding too much sugar to our hypothetical cup of coffee spoils it.
We have the answer why the Democrats are so incensed over President Trump.
The Democrats couldn't find their ass in a dark room with both hands tied behind their back. They are too busy chopping dicks off and calling themselves girls so they can go in to the locker rooms and rape everything in sight.
The ability to explain to a target audience, using appropriate words and manner of speech, is completely separate from the ability to make such an audience understand abstract concepts and big-pictures.
It doesn't matter how simple your words are, you cannot make someone with an IQ of 60 grasp the complex details of tax law. They simply do not have the cognitive capacity. Similarly, when dealing with an audience largely composed of 100 level IQs, there is a limit to how big of a picture they can grasp, to how many details they can factor in at once, and to how many abstract concepts they can grasp.
It is true that speakers need to take responsibility for being understood. It is also true that the super-intelligent can understand things that the average simply cannot. And that higher understanding will lead to important and right conclusions that "the masses" will consider to be lunacy (or evil), precisely do to their inability to understand.
Right. The heat in this building was so-very-unbearably ineffective during that recent cold snap with a severe windchill. Had to wear heavy clothes just to keep comfortable. Oh, how oppressive can this Trump get?!!
it's just smarmy, arrogant, narcissists that people hate NOT smart people.
How many Americans hated Einstein? None that I can recall.
Interesting that Obama is cited... an arrogant narcissist who divisively attacked half the country repeatedly as hicks who cling to guns, religion, etc and did not understand the brilliance of the socialism he adored (remember his attack on "joe the plumber"?). What's interesting is that we have no evidence that he is smarter than or better educated than Donald Trump. Obama proved his ability by winning the presidency, as Trump has done, but unlike Trump all of Obama's academic records are sealed so we have no idea what classes he took, what grades he got, etc. and in fact the general public has seen interviews with classmates and professors of people like Ted Cruz, Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, the public has never seen interviews with Obama's professors, classmates or even the students he is supposed to have taught. I allege no conspiracy here (other than the curious apparent desire of tram Obama to hide such stuff) and only point out that all the claims of Obama's supposed genius are apparently just the confirmation bias of liberals assuming anybody who agrees with them must be super-smart. I have seen Obama stutter mercilessly when his teleprompters hang, and have seen him use TWO teleprompters to talk with a group of elementary school kids - meanwhile Sarah Palin gave her entire GOP convention speech on live national TV with NO teleprompters (they failed just as she began talking) and NOBODY in the public noticed (go watch the YouTubes of that event and be stunned).
People need to stop being manipulated by the pre-washed pre-spun narratives of the media. A guy like Obama might look great on TV but it's not evidence he is smart. A guy like Reagan or a gal like Thatcher can be mercilessly portrayed by the press as a dottering old fool while winning a decades-long cold war (without firing a shot) and freeing more people from tyranny and political oppression than any other person in history - pretty smart in MY book.
...are the ones that think they're smart.
*Just a slob like one of us?*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've found that effectively managing requires a number of skills. Being intelligent is really only one of those skills. A big part of what I do when I'm managing is figuring out how to sell the idea to subordinates. Yes, a manager can force the issue with threats or buy them off, but doing so kills productivity and morale. If you sell the workers on why something is important and what you're trying to accomplish, you spend a lot less time fighting the employees temperaments and can focus on getting things done.
I think the main reason why highly intelligent leaders are disliked is probably because they're neglecting the other areas of leadership that are needed in order to lead effectively.
It's also worth nothing that roughly 120 or so is a common peak for the benefits of IQ. It shows up time and time again in different studies.
First, the Scientific American blog misrepresents the study's claim by extrapolating from their narrow test pool (assessing leadership competence of low-middle managers at corporate firms) to a broader indictment of leadership.
Second, the paper reveals the models are badly overfit and the proposed right-tail non-linearity in the predictive relationship is based on 10 data points. The authors also use a relatively lax standard of significance and don't correct any of their tests for the multiple comparison problem. Also, it's observational data purported as being causal -- the authors use the word "effect" when they mean "association". This is not good science.
Slashdot editors who are not equipped to connect scientific media reporting to the source studies, or who are not equipped to read the source studies, should refrain from posting them. It's embarrassing.
Umm . . . you must be hallucinating, ... Bill Clinton didn't run in the last election, at least not directly. He was paired with Hillary.
Why are you a fan of that?
The assumption of the article is that higher IQ is "better". By what metric? If higher IQ is necessarily more advantageous, why did humans evolve to have average IQ's of 100 rather than 180? You would think if the higher IQ was more advantageous, the 180 IQ people would have displaced the lower IQ ones. Yet, that hasn't happened.
Nor do I see that the people with the highest IQ's are the most successful in their fields. There are plenty of virtuoso musicians I can think of that are actually drooling idiots when they put down their instruments, and plenty of geniuses that can't carry a tune in a bucket.
Perhaps our problem here is the assumption that intelligence in the end-all and be-all of human achievement. Perhaps it ain't necessarily so.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
President Trump is really really smart. That is why all the liberals who are really really dumb don't like him. They refuse to accept this reality and instead live in a dream world where they are the smart ones and The Donald is a buffoon.
On a more serious note the reason is the same reason most blacks don't like white people. Evolutionarily like tribes and like people coagulate together to form a United front and ensure their genetic heritage is passed on. Smartness is only conducive to survival if all the smart people kill all the dumb people. Baring that all the dumb people need to kill the smart people. Killing people is illegal in a lot of counties, so the dummies just really dislike the smarties and vice versa. This should be obvious, but for some reason is not.
Of course! That's why East Asians generally score higher on them than Whites! Nice try, negro.
The truth will out.
MAGA!
Why aren't you smart enough to pretend to be dumber?
(part of my daily affirmations)
Mere intelligence is not enough, you also need to know that someone is trustworthy. If someone is a little bit smarter than you, you can understand what they are saying and therefore comprehend their plan when they explain it. You don't need to trust them, you can understand that by making abortion legal, you can expect population growth to slow.
But when someone is a LOT smarter than you, you can't do that. You literally are not smart enough to understand their plan, even if they explain it slowly. In other words, when you try to project the results, you think their plan will fail. You have to trust them. So when they tell you that legalizing abortion merely delays the decision to have children, rather than reducing the total number of children, and therefore legalizing abortion will NOT slow population growth, you are not sure if they telling you the truth or tricking you.
Worse, everyone of normal intelligence knows that some people are untrustworthy. So unless they have earned your trust, you are more likely to DISLIKE a plan that you do not understand, which is usually the plan a really intelligent person will put forth.
Note, I would bet that the number they discovered '20 IQ points'- is a constant across multiple IQ catetgories.
That is, people with an IQ of 100 trust people upto 120, and people of IQ 110, trust people upto 130, while people with an IQ of 140 will trust leaders upto an IQ of 150.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Whoops, I did the math wrong their at the end, it was supposed to be people of an IQ of 140 trust those with an IQ up to 160.
Guess my IQ is not 160.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Because people are assholes
His name is Tom. He's a freelance reporter. He likes when I fart because he appreciates a warm breeze.
I too, chose to be a one-percenter, and it has paid off.
Boy is it funny how none of the problems the commonfolk choose, affect my life at all!
I get taxbreaks all the time, yet the paupers keep whining about a couple thousand dollars out of pocket. That's just chump change, who even cares.
All these folks choose to work multiple gruelling minimum wage jobs and insist on paying way too much rent and then choose to be unable to afford food or healthcare or a proper Harvard education for their kids! Then they choose having no retirement or even a portfolio so instead they keep crowding the streets with their homeless smelly asses. Stupid shit I tell ya. They even drive cheap shitty cars and never wear Armani.
Losers. Everybody should just choose to be a billionaire, that would solve all the problems they complain about.
Lookeeeee here.. looks like we got ourselves a thinker!
"IQ positively correlated with ratings of leader effectiveness...The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120"
If two people have an IQ difference of more than 2 sigma (2 standard deviations, or about 30 IQ points), it becomes very difficult for them to communicate with each other effectively.
I would have this was pretty well-known and well accepted by now. TFA specifically looks at office workers of various types, so it's a good bet that the average worker will have an IQ in the 100-110 range. So a manager with an IQ of 120 is just enough smarter to do the job well, but not too smart to run into communications problems. A completely believable "sweet spot" for your typical office. But probably not for JPL or a construction site.
If you get beyond 2 sigmas: For anything more than small talk, the smart person feels like they have to "dumb down" everything they say, and even then it's hard to get across anything complex. Meanwhile the lower IQ person realizes that they're being "talked down to", that they are being seen as dumb, and they resent it.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I can't see the original paper so the authors might account for it, but it strikes me that they have a huge selection bias problem.
I basically see three reasons why people become leaders.
1) They're connected.
2) They've got great leadership skills.
3) They're extremely competent in the field.
The connected people are probably of average intelligence and leadership skills.
But as to the other two groups, you're comparing group #2 selected for their leadership skills to group #3 selected for their brains. An inverse relationship between intelligence and leadership is an expected outcome.
I'd be more curious to see what happens if you take 10 random people and assign one to be the leader for some task. Do you still end up with the inverse relationship?
I stole this Sig
Guess my IQ is not 160.
It probably is....it's so high you've transcended math and the rest of us aren't able to follow it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A super-smart person can't be likable. The problem is that they make others around them appear dumb, simply by comparison. That's why bad leaders find dumb people. They look better by comparison.
But the smart people don't relate as well. Either you dumb yourself down, or others will notice. That's the same reason good car salesmen look and act dumb. If they are dumb, then you'll feel you got a good deal.
That's why there are so many Autism diagnoses. Parlty Munchausen by Proxy, and part belief that shopping for Autism proves intelligence. You see it a lot on Slashdot, all the people bragging about "the spectrum". Of course, "emotional intelligence" was made up by dumb people to make them feel better. But not having empathy is a sign of sociopathy, not intelligence.
Learn to love Alaska
This study must be fake news. Trump is both extremely intelligent, smartest president EVER! Also he is best president, if not bestest! Fake news!
Right?
(Please mod: Flamebait:-1, Interesting:-1, Funny:not at all, Insightful:+3.14)
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Hey everyone guess who joined slashdot
... is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Because if one can't follow, then it just looks like nonsense.
I see this all the time, in IMDB movie reviews.
And the worst part is, that of course, if I think something is nonsense, I can't tell if it's just me either. By definition, if I'm stupid, I can't tell if I'm stupid. No matter how intelligent I seem to me.
I noticed the same pattern for many other things too. Not just the technology/magic one. It seems that ...
Examples that seem to fit the pattern for me, and that might be different for you (which I'd be curious about), are:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Any sufficiently advanced mind is indistinguishable from insanity.
Any sufficiently advanced evilness is indistinguishable from stupidity.
(Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.)
Any sufficiently advanced concept is indistinguishable from bullshit.
Any sufficiently controversial statement is indistinguishable from trolling.
Any sufficiently advanced playing is indistinguishable from cheating.
Any sufficiently specialized language is indistinguishable from word salad.
Any sufficiently deadpan satire is indistinguishable from being serious.
Any sufficiently comforting lie is indistinguishable from the truth.
-- (I post anonymously merely because I stopped making accounts at social media sites.)
My god, you are an idiot. trump is a flim flam artist, a car salesman. He only knows how to enrich himself and blind people into contributing to his
wealth. That has nothing to do with knowing about economy. He knows about manipulating people, but he has no plan or understanding beyond that.
would not want to become leaders. All that hassle with stupid people with all their irrational fears and believes.
Yes I have. I suspect you have not.
You could simply choose *not* to suffer under the administration. ISIS is all but defeated, jobs are coming back, taxes were reduced, many people are getting bonuses, North Korea is coming to the Olympics, and we're no longer in the TPP.
Not to mention, if you happen to live in Puerto Rico, free paper towels.
Who doesn't love free paper towels?
He really was. I would have killed a newborn baby if he had told me to. I would do it even now that he's unfortunately no longer our President. I would kill anyone for him. I'm a nonviolent person and I hate guns but I would kill my own mother for our great and eternal Leader, Barack Hussein Obama.
... pretty much anything that is smart.
Well, maybe "hate" is too strong a word, but I dislike them indeed. And the reason for this is that they have an annoying tendency to skip steps in their reasoning, making the result of their work much less useful. A normal IQ person writes down all the steps while solving a problem, while a smart ass would jump straight to the solution, leaving their thinking process undocumented. It's much harder to verify and reproduce such results, and they have much less didactic value for the others. I believe that high IQ people should be barred from science as well, not just from the executive positions.
Intelligent leaders are not per se better than less so leaders. The point here is : if you are psychopath enough to get to position of leadership and I have a choice whether you get there or less intelligent guy I will vote for less intelligent guy and that is reasonable because intelligent psychopath which effectively we cannot control is worse then less intelligent psychopath that we cannot control. Damage is less painful. There are cases when the psychopaths in power do good things. I ever wanted to know why would they. I am not holding my breath while searching for an answer to that - in fact I stopped asking the question. For obvious reasons.
Every article from Slashdot teaches people to be stupid and achieve less. Can't you smell George Soros's feces nearby? This website should have never been sold to globalist goons. They birdshit all over everything.
Mary: It's okay to be smarter than everybody else, but you can't go around pointing it out.
Sheldon: Why?
Mary: Because people don't like it!
Sorry for the quote. It's rare that BBT-quotes are on topic, so let me have that moment.
People don't dislike smart leaders. They dislike people that make them feel stupid. And with half of the people that's pretty easy to do if your intelligence is even just average. What they like is people that make them feel smart and superior. And that's easy to do for someone who comes across as an idiot.
That might have been true for Bush Jr., but not for Trump. Trump is an asshole, but he ain't stupid. He doesn't even fake being stupid. Then why does Trump "work"? Well, mostly because Hillary didn't, but even that's secondary. Trump offers easy answers to very complicated question. Answers that can be understood by anyone, and as long as nobody questions them or even has to implement them, that's fine.
Unfortunately that only gets you so far. That's basically what fell the Soviet Union. Lots of rhetoric but very little substance in the end, and the smokescreen of martial words and promises eventually evaporates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You could simply choose *not* to suffer under the administration. ISIS is all but defeated, jobs are coming back, taxes were reduced, many people are getting bonuses, North Korea is coming to the Olympics, and we're no longer in the TPP.
Not to mention, if you happen to live in Puerto Rico, free paper towels.
Who doesn't love free paper towels?
Puerto Rico's power grid was all fucked up from piss-poor management and corruption long before the hurricane hit:
July 2, 2017: Puerto Rico’s Power Authority Effectively Files for Bankruptcy
Feb 1, 2016: How Free Electricity Helped Dig $9 Billion Hole in Puerto Rico
Part of this probably has to do with the fact the brain as any other organ is constrained by resources, space and genetic makeup.
So a person with an high level of general intelligence, that fits the measures of IQ, might have issues with other forms of useful brain activities.
And general problem solving is an high intensity set of tasks for the brain and require a lot of conscious activity, this has a way of shutting down other more autonomic responses.
Neural pathways connected with social, personal interactions might be overriden or used for other purposes, instincts might be subjected to repression due to higher level functions kicking-in and creating a doubt over the initial judgement.
For most people with very high IQ we probably will have more people with either problems communicating or personality issues than people that fit in well with the background.
There are not a lot of Carl Sagan's around, and less of Richard Feynman's, and these are rather the outliers when it comes to ability to fit in and communicate while being exceptional.
The problems of ability to communicate complex information and navigate emotionall responses is one that has caused a lot of grief throughout all of history.
People often kill the messenger if they don't like the message, they persecute, imprision and ostracize anyone that has said something that triggers an emotional response or is contrary to their beliefs and values.
Many times it is politically expedient to remove intelligent people to limit competition.
There is a large amount of people with low ability for general problem solving, that rely on cristallized patterns of behaviour, that use emotional heuristics and have very low understanding of abstract concepts.
They are tied to their social networks, to their costumes, to their mannerisms and routines. In a sense, some were the result of a process of domestication or selection processes that actually were contrary to the build of high intelligence.
Because of this, I fear, that the technology has actually over-paced the population ability to adapt. And we are at a cusp of a man made planet wide catastrophe.
Because Thomas Jefferson.
The argument that "too much" intelligence makes for a bad leader is always made by someone who is trying to rationalize the unpopularity of his own pet ideas.
Headline: "Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders"
Story: People Dislike Really Smart Leaders
FFS.
The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120, which is higher than roughly 80 percent of office workers.
I call BS. Higher than 80 percent of office workers? Do they have any proof of that? Did they do IQ tests on the office workers?
My guess is that the office staff have more people with an IQ over 120 than under 80...
IQs in the general population are skewed above 100 because people with the low IQs either died earlier or are more likely to be institutionalized (either in long term care facilities or prisons).
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
As a result, we don't have enough data to draw any conclusions about the performance or popularity of actual smart people. Most of human history is filled with leaders that were game show hosts or kleptomaniacs.
Good thing a no-bid contract to a company with no disaster recovery experience and virtually no employees was awarded to fix that mess!
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Smart leaders tell you what's really going on not what you want to hear to make yourself feel good. In order to be competitive, you need good intelligence to formulate effective strategies. If all you want is people who tell you what you want to hear regardless of reality then you will ultimately fail because you won't be making decisions based on what is actually going on in your company and in your market.
It feels good for awhile with all the "yes people" and positive vibes then the money runs out, the doors close and it's time to find a new pasture to do it all over again
We'll make great pets
Nor 140
By predator you mean all males that have any sense of sexual feeling between their ears and legs? I wonder why do we have to follow vision of secuality only limited group of humans - not only all females follow this view of people. OC they are then bashed as C. Denevre was when she expressed her view last week. You people are bigots that pretend to protect the week but at the end I am not sure what you achieve. Then again what have which hunts ever achieved? Have events in Salem achieve anything?
That's why libs hate The Donald so much.
A smart leader can also intuit how to break things down and communicate effectively in a manner which will be broadly understood.
Twinstiq, game news
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>I too, chose to be a one-percenter, and it has paid off.
>Boy is it funny how none of the problems the commonfolk choose, affect my life at all!
I'm not in the one percent, but I'm doing quite well and I can't believe how few people think this way. If you choose to solve your own problems, and have a modicum of ability but a strong will, it is amazing how soon you find yourself lacking problems.
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"Smart people" are some of the worst people and done some of the most inhumane things. Last thing we need is another Technocracy.
The ability to manipulate symbols not in itself sufficient for leadership. News at 11.
obeyme - pseudo intellectual
And the Titanic was doing pretty well on April 13. Full steam ahead, right?
Those are not all good things. Reduced taxes now means even higher taxes later. What, you think the deficit and debt will magically disappear? The cuts make them even worse. You're trading short-term gain for long-term pain. No one should rejoice in that move, unless they have a terminal illness.
TPP was a good thing. It gave us more influence and more strategic partners in Asia. And it cost us virtually nothing: no changes to our own laws required. Now we've ceded that ground to China.
You can choose to be happy without celebrating the idiocy happening right now. What you're doing is fiddling while Rome burns.
I could type for an hour on the subject, but I won't. I'll just summarize by saying trying to understand people and be empathetic has made a way bigger impact on my personal and professional lives than being able to code faster or better. 20-year old me is still kind of upset about this, but pushing-40-year old me has sort of accepted it as a necessary skill for living in a world where people (generally) are more influenced by emotions than by logic.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I stop subscribing to this rag for this type of writing. By any objective narrative, the previous administration caused incredible harm. Now, citing advanced intelligence, one is left wondering who has the lower IQ, Obama or the reader.
It's not about intelligence. It's about being charismatic and the ability to blow smoke up people's asses to the point where they believe everything that comes out of the blower's mouth i.e. alpha males. In my experience, the alphas usually don't have the highest level of intelligence in a group but they will have several characteristics that less intelligent people gravitate towards e.g. height, deep and authoritative voice, the ability to take over and control a conversation, the appearance of being a badass, war stories that usually turn out to be false, and a generally a whole lot of bullsh*t.
People are stupid but they don't like feeling inferior. Instead they demand that everybody stoop to their level.
Idiocracy was a work of Prophecy.
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Studies like these are why the social sciences really bug me. The whole thing is built upon weak premises, such as using IQ as a metric and contrasting it with whatever method they had for rating the effectiveness of these leaders. When none of your variables are concrete, how can the results of the study really tell us anything? To extrapolate a conclusion from this hodgepodge of data would be foolish.
When it comes to social sciences, I'll take a holistic, less scientific approach such as Malcolm Gladwell's or Steven Levitt's. Some studies just don't fit well with the scientific method, and misapplying it leads to nonsense research like this where the researchers can't see the forest for the trees.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
IQ is measured in standard deviation based units, not an absolute "smartz" units.
15 IQ is 1 standard deviation, so 70 IQ is 2 standard deviations below the median.
If you have a relatively small number of actually brain damaged people (a few percent of the population), they'll "fill in" the slots at below average IQ. 70 IQ is 2 standard deviations below the mean. If actual large-scale brain damage (congentital, chemical or injury based) covers 2% of the population, then that level of brain damage becomes 70 IQ. If we go and fix those problems, then 70 IQ gets redefined to be whatever the lowest (on the scale measured) 2% of the population scores at.
Such changes would have next to no impact on who scores at 130 IQ (a fraction of a point), while causing massive swings at the below average IQ range (10s or more points).
In short, IQ is not space where you should be comparing distances over non-overlapping ranges.
160 IQ is 99.997th percentile -- 1 in 30,000 -- a kid in your school board
145 IQ is 99.87th percentile -- 1 in 750 -- a kid in your elementary school
130 IQ is 98th percentile -- 1 in 50 -- a kid in your grade 3 class.
115 IQ is 84th percentile -- 1 in 6 -- a kid in the row in your classroom
100 IQ is 50th percentile -- 1 in 2 -- median
85 IQ is 16th perentile -- 1 in 6 -- a kid in the row in your classroom
70 IQ is 2nd percentile -- 1 in 50 -- a kid in your grade 3 class
55 IQ is 0.13th percentile -- 1 in 750 -- a kid in your elementary school
40 IQ is 99.997th percentile -- 1 in 30,000 -- a kid in your school board
If you'd lived more than a few minutes on this planet anytime during the last, oh say, fourthy years, you'd know exactly what I mean by sexual predator. You'd know the long history of Trump in matters of sexual harassement and assault. You'd know about his antics backstage with the candidates of miss teen usa pagent, and the numerous other things he's been accused of throughout the years.
But your ignorance only prooves my point, that people really get the kind of leader that they deserve.
And by the way, if you already knew about Trump's long history of sexual misconduct, but actually saw nothing wrong with it, then it makes you a disgusting piece of trash, just like he is. Maybe next time you could vote for Harvey Weinstein as next POTUS.
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Explains so many CEOs
You might want to work on elevating your mean, before my dog is the best fit for your president. You're not far-off today.
Wow, that came out a lot more flame-baity than I had expected. Must be my IQ -- my mother had me tested. Let me try again.
That explains your current president, a perfect fit for a dumb population.
That doesn't seem any better. Still flame-baity.
Maybe there is no way to talk about leaders needing to be dumb and current american presidents without sounding, ehem, "mean"?
Irony.
You're digging into the differences between management and leadership.
Too few managers (and their employees) do this.
Good leaders don't need to be a manager to get someone to change what they're doing, how they're doing it or why they do it.
& the "Leveraged Buyout" business model he and his company pioneered. Also his complete lack of caring about the common man. In photo ops He and his wife seemed to barely contain their disgust for common folks. The "Chocolate Goodies" comment was a bizarre example of it. The part about having to sell the stock his father gave him to sell got on my nerves too. I grew up in a broken home with a dead beat dad like a lot of Americans. Having somebody tell me they were so poor their dad had to give them tens of thousands of dollars didn't go over well. I bet a lot of Americans felt that way.
Oh yeah, His old company outsourced hundreds of good paying pharma jobs _during_ the campaign. The folks losing their jobs showed up at one of Romney's events to try and petition for his help. He didn't just say no, his people had the cops escort them out of the building. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't work there anymore, but he ran the company so long that he established their culture and business practices. And regardless, once again we show how little he actually cares.
Romney was, to me, exactly light Hilary Clinton. A right of center politician who was going to ship more jobs overseas not because they're evil, but because they view the folks getting screwed like ants, which is to say they don't even think of us when they step on us. I didn't want that for my president.
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who claimed he could strike up a lively conversation with anyone just by knowing their IQ. He's at a party and asks the first guy, what's your IQ? They guy says 170, and so they start talking about quantum physics, calculus and cellular biology. He asks another guy and he says 100. They talk about football and fixing cars. Lastly he asks a third guy who says 70. So he asks the guy, well, what kind of sticks do you us?
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This can be remedied. You CAN relate to other people or large groups of people. It just takes EFFORT. (Surprise, right?). I wasn't given a choice. Throughout childhood, thanks to my psycho father, I was screamed at, berated, and chided if I talked over his head on technical issues (usually relating to something computer related he messed up). While damaging and somewhat cruel, it taught me to quickly distill my thoughts into easy to understand language.
What I don't get is these "supposedly" genius people who somehow have no brainpower to realize that people do, in fact, process things differently and adapt.
Good god, NK isn’t going to the Olympics because of something Trump said. They’ve reached a major milestone with their nuclear program and are testing the waters. They yelled at all the other kids, didn’t get what they want, they took a shit in a corner of the sand box, and honestly want the other kids to play with them now.
They weren’t developing a nuclear program to commit suicide in the most extravagant way possible, they did it with the intent of asking for concessions from their “frenemies” and soon everyone else.
I assumed the credit the SK leader gave Trump was sarcasm, we didn’t scare someone to the Olympics... it follows the “I have big red button and rocks to throw” message from NK, DUUUUUUUH....
Once you get beyond a certain level of intelligence, it's very plain to see that many high-IQ, academically-accomplished and super-smart individuals don't have emotional intelligence. To be an effective leader, you need at least some charisma, some ability to influence others, and likability...the more the better. This is why people tend to follow alpha-male types even if they're not super-brilliant. They don't want to be talked down to or made to feel stupid by someone who is much smarter than them and lets them know about it constantly. They want a used-car salesman, an ex-fraternity type who seems like they'd be down to party with them any time, and not a brilliant scientist who can't communicate effectively.
I'm by no means a super-genius, but on some matters I tend to know a little more than the average person I work with. What's gotten me farther than anything else in my career so far is the ability to explain things to people clearly without talking down or making them feel dumb. A counter-example is this -- I'm a systems engineer/architect type in a company doing traditional infrastructure deployments. Of course everyone's on the DevOps bandwagon like they were on the Agile bandwagon last decade, so we're adapting. OMFG, you have no idea how much the "DevOps Expert" crowd avoids explaining things clearly and back-handedly insults people. Like any group there are a mix of personalities but the really brilliant ones just seem to have little ability to explain things, assume everyone else is as smart as they are or just want to keep knowledge for themselves. Going from hand-building systems up from nothing to chaining together 500 strangely-named single-function open source tools to do the same thing is a big leap for a lot of people. I've been trying to impart the knowledge I've been gaining, and so far it's working...I should start a blog or something, but definitely not call it "DevOps for Dummies." :-)
I recall reading an earlier study that showed leaders had problems leading people whose IQs were 30 points or more lower.
There's an interesting Mensa article called The Outsiders that suggests extreme IQs, having no functional comtemporaries around them signicantly different from caring baboons, are effectively feral humans raising themselves, at least as far as intellectual development goes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You realize that company had crews fixing the grid, until they didn't get paid? The crews went home.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm pretty sure people being kicked out because Trump is racist, or muslims who aren't allowed to enter the country to see their families, or transgender people who Trump tried to make jobless because they dared to try and serve their company aren't choosing that misery.
I'm pretty fucking sure it's being forced on them.
> It was old and tired a full year ago. No one cares, you can't change anything, and... the country's doing pretty well right now.
Yes, in the same way that taking $50,000 out in unsecured lending on something like a credit card means you're doing pretty well, well, at least until the $50,000 runs out and you have no mechanism to repay it. The article is right, you like him because he's dumb, because you're dumb.
Idiots like you bitched and moaned about Obama for 8 years, if you think telling people to shut up is going to work, hah, good luck living in fantasy land. You're getting a taste of your own medicine and when the far right agenda collapses as it's already beginning to do so, people will come and laugh at you and make sure it doesn't rise again for another generation. If you'd been less of a dick people would've been sympathetic, but you weren't, so we'll literally laugh our asses off at you.
So enjoy it whilst you can, the clock's ticking, your brand of fascism has a much much shorter expiry date than liberalism as liberalism is, has been, and will continue to be the direction of humanity for thousands of years, hence why we no longer behead people in the West, why women have the vote, gay marriage is being increasingly legalised, and so on, and so forth.
If you honestly believe that you have no means of increasing your income, then for all practical purposes you are right. And everywhere you look, you will see evidence that you are right. Your unconscious mind will very compliantly present you with evidence for your convictions at every turn, keeping you forever trapped in circumstances that you dislike.
Or, you can face the facts. You can go to school. Not all degrees are equal. You must apply the power of your brain to the task of finding a degree or trade that pays, and that isn't flooded with a ridiculous labor supply. Research to discover the facts, face them, and make intelligent decisions, and you will prosper.
Or, you could just keep insisting that the cards were stacked against you. If your feeling of victimhood is more fulfilling than buckets of money, who am I to judge?
"IQ positively correlated with ratings of leader effectiveness...The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120"
If two people have an IQ difference of more than 2 sigma (2 standard deviations, or about 30 IQ points), it becomes very difficult for them to communicate with each other effectively.
I would have this was pretty well-known and well accepted by now. TFA specifically looks at office workers of various types, so it's a good bet that the average worker will have an IQ in the 100-110 range. So a manager with an IQ of 120 is just enough smarter to do the job well, but not too smart to run into communications problems. A completely believable "sweet spot" for your typical office. But probably not for JPL or a construction site.
If you get beyond 2 sigmas: For anything more than small talk, the smart person feels like they have to "dumb down" everything they say, and even then it's hard to get across anything complex. Meanwhile the lower IQ person realizes that they're being "talked down to", that they are being seen as dumb, and they resent it.
If I can communicate effectively with a dog I can communicate effectively with a normal person. That sounds terrible but that is how I have learned to get by. Throw on the charisma, toss around the self deprecating humor, pick up a substance abuse problem, get into bodybuilding to work their filter system so their autopilot puts you in the right box, act like you do not understand their current conundrum and ask the right questions so that they answer their own questions, if anyone gets suspicious always be ready to redirect to how smart someone else in the room is.
Fail at this and you are a witch. They will hate you because they think you can read minds and see the future. They will hate you because you are cheating by "knowin' stuff". They will hate you because you have a concealed weapon you can use at any time. They will hate you because you will mess with how they have always seen themselves "But.. but.. me smart!".
If the people who hate you are responsible for your promotions.. guess what.
As for "JPL or a construction site.", you can find closeted smarties in every field*. IQ after a certain point doesn't have much to do with success. After you hit the tipping point it is all about drive.
*For example: Long ago (he is dead now) my cousin was the smartest person ever to enter the US Air force. The first time he took the test they told him he was cheating. The second time he took the test it was just him and an instructor in the room, they then told him again that he was cheating. The last time he took the test he was in his boxers and surrounded by MPs. After that they explained that he was the smartest by a good margin to ever try to get into the US Air Force and asked why someone like him would want to join the Air force. My cousin said "Because you will let me fly planes", they couldn't fault that argument and so they let him fly planes.
I found out this year that my dad did the same thing in ROTC in college though he only had to take his test once. Apparently my nerdy engineer father was in ROTC and knows how to field strip an M14. Who would have guessed? He refused the commander's begging him to join the Army "We need people like you!"(I suspect dad was in ROTC to avoid 'Nam).
For fuck's sake, do you really believe that your ridiculous attempt at rhetoric is actually smart ? Guilt by association ? Trying to imply that a concensual extramarital affair is equivalent to sexual assault ? The tired old "yeah but Hilary" argument again ? Are you really that pathetic ?
Each time one of you Trumptards opens his mouth, it only proves more and more how moronic and clueless you are. Having sunk to the absolute bottom of the whole, you still somehow manage to dig yourselves a few inches deeper.
This is beyond pathetic. You really get the kind of leaders you deserve.
The problem therein lies in assuming IQ is a sufficient measurement of all forms of mental acuity. Or that IQ point differences reflect the same difference between any two points on the scale. I don't think they do. I don't think the difference between a 170 and a 140 is the same as the difference between a 70 and a 40.
and due to my extremely (I just bought that word) limited intelligence (they threw in that one as a BoGo), I was tricked into clicking it. I'm off to craft a new protest sign.
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These people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what being a leader is.
The qualities of a Leader don't require that you be wicked smart. And being wicked smart doesn't mean you will be a good leader.
You have to be smart enough to find, employee, and evaluate the results from wicked smart people. But you don't have to be smart enough to perform the tasks wicked smart people perform.
Was Roosevelt a good leader? 98% or people would say resoundingly, YES!
Could Roosevelt have planned and executed the D-Day landings? Not a chance. He had wicked smart military leaders do that. And each on of those leaders had their own wicked smart people to rely on.
President Carter was pretty damned smart, but a poor leader.
President Reagan wasn't smart in the academic sense. But he had lots of common sense and led the nation through some pretty tough times and accomplished quite a bit.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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you want your followers to be smart enough to oh FOLLOW what you are doing/saying
so if you have a 120 IQ then you will need followers that are at least say 105 so they understand what you are doing.
(of course you need a few rock headed JarHeads about when you need somebody to apply brute force but...)
You are assuming that IQ scales linearly with intelligence.
Perhaps an over abundance of intelligence upsets the balance of those qualities in a non-optimal way, the same as adding too much sugar to our hypothetical cup of coffee spoils it.
Except the evidence does not bear this out, over 75% of people in the US still are religious in some sense a sizable chunk rejecting scientific knowledge and having negative effects on policy.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/151760/christianity-remains-dominant-religion-united-states.aspx
The west wing says it better than I can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD52OlkKfNs
These people should not be allowed in a voting booth.
Consider it: Within the public sphere of viewing (politics, entertainment, history), how is high intelligence portrayed? It's either evil or it's magic.
Your evil genius and mad scientist is a trope to be sure, but it's one that American's love. From Bond villains to Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau to Professor Moriarty, the idea that there's a fine line between genius and insanity (Sheldon Cooper) perpetuates the fear of very intelligent people.
And then there's a magical intelligence. Since American's can't stand (as a whole) to be told they need to know more than they do, they'll treat the high intelligence of people they like as magic. Consider the leader character from Numb3rs (Charlie Eppes)-- every time he would have an idea to use math to solve a case beautiful graphics of numbers and abstract equations would float around his head. If you don't see those numbers when thinking math, you probably can't do complex math (or so the trope suggests). Or consider two of the more well-known geniuses to the common man: Einstein and Tesla. Einstein myths include that he was been a poor student in school ("So, it's OK if you dropped out!") or that his ideas were so out there that only a handful of people could initially understand them ("And thus you're a genius for 'getting it'."). Tesla is mythologized to be a down-trodden genius whose most amazing discoveries are being covered up by conspiracy. He's embraced because people can control and mythologize him from the distance of history. Were he alive today and doing similar work, he would be labeled a mad scientist or fit into the exception below.
I think the only exception here is that Americans on both extremes of the political spectrum are both leaning toward more authoritarian preferences (wishing for benevolent dictators) and should a left-authoritarian party faction off, they may try to get Elon Musk to run for president because they correlate the developments of his companies' engineers to his own mental capability.
Americans really like their smart people, but they tend not to want them to lead because they may eventually display with ulterior (evil) motives. That's why they'd rather elect someone "who they could have a beer with" (Ronald Reagan, George W Bush-- even Obama made sure he had photographed conversations with people while drinking beers). They'd much rather very smart people be used as magical pets to be summoned to solve explicit problems in the safe confines of their cages. And they don't want the smart people to try to teach them anything. That would imply that the American public isn't already exceptional by virtue of being American.
WTF does that have to do with the GP's point?
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Intelligence is variable. Lots of people are understandably unhappy that university degrees are used to signal intelligence and that things like farming are not. Many tasks and ways of life require at least as much intelligence, dedication, and application as university degrees. Some of the people who live such lives resent being told that they should abandon what they do and send their kids to college. Intelligence is not limited to what people do in school.
Overall it is much easier to be popular using primary school name calling, no matter who is in the audience, than to actually come up with a good plan, poplularize it, and implement it. Intelligence doesn't really come into it. It is also much easier to do whatever makes you money, stick to it, and claim to be honest than to actually be honest in politics. Shamelessness helps too, as admitting to mistakes is the only American political error ("I would not have done anything differently knowing what I know now" - George W. Bush).
The basis of American politics is making sure that no one who is rich stops being rich. The secondary basis is increasing the gap between the stratifications of wealth. The third is shrinking the top tiers. That is limiting economic mobility and having smaller numbers of people being extremely wealthy, very wealthy, and wealthy, with more people being more and more interchangeably middle class, working poor, and poor. It's very much a class system and it's aiming for historical times with a historical distribution, i.e. a few aristocrats and lots of peasants.
Note, I'm doing fine, not top 1%, but at least top 20%. When you criticize wealth and you're called a hypocrite and when you're poor you're told that you're jealous. You're just told that by the bought media who want to please the very rich instead of reporting anything real.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
and idiocracy rules!
Instead we get this guy that keeps working with the Russians, probably paid off solely from Putin's own vodka stash.
Personally, I don't think that Trump is paid off by anything. He was aided by Russian interference, but I don't think he was an active colluder. A puppet, but an unwitting one.
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Christianity provides, among other things, a valuable heuristic for maintaining a stable civilization. Many of the "smart" guys are busy inflicting various tragedies of the commons on the world around them and tearing down whatever is necessary in order for those individuals to climb to the top of the dung heap. In the meantime, a large percentage of the population continues on with the basic necessities of work, food, babies, and education that keep society running, using an ethical framework that has more-or-less worked for thousands of years.
Yes, there is an unfortunate religious nut fringe in the US, but using religion as an inverse intelligence marker is disingenuous. It suggests a very poor grasp of the subject.
Personally, I don't think that Trump is paid off by anything. He was aided by Russian interference, but I don't think he was an active colluder. A puppet, but an unwitting one.
Apparently, it's pretty well known that Trump had financial problems in the 90s-00s, couldn't get loans in the US and got in bed with Russian money. If he is conspiring to launder Russian mafia money , he's susceptible to blackmail, and that's obviously a national security concern.
Christianity provides, among other things, a valuable heuristic for maintaining a stable civilization.
You're delusional if you believe this, in this point in time. The oligarchy is at war with the bottom 90% of society and the public still believes in capitalism, capitalists have literally had the US in a state of lawlessness and endless wars for the last 200 years, there is nothing stable about "christian civilization".
Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.
http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/
Manufacturing consent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM
https://vimeo.com/39566117
Testing theories of representative government
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
Democracy Inc
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed- Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X
From war is a racket:
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]
"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23] "The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]
General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.
http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/
I thought bankruptcy, especially multiple bankruptcies were signs of a poorly run business? But then again facts and science have a liberal bias
Hillary didn't win, you moron.
Speaking of facts, the markets are up more than any time since FDR - even the sellout traitors at Apple are bringing jobs back to the US, expressly because of Trump's policies. If you're being objective Trump is definitively the best thing to happen for the US economy since FDR, but of course there wouldn't be any cognitive dissonance if you were capable of accepting that basic fact. Hell, I bet you think Bill Gates is a hero instead of a traitor for siphoning money out of our economy with the sleaziest of business tactics only to give it, along with that of many other US billionaires, to third world nations without a hope of doing more than having unsustainable birthrates with it.
You're making that up.
Leaders absolutely have to be able to manage their followers. I'm not sure where you got the idea that you can just show up with a compelling vision and everybody follows it to victory. But, that's never how it works. Having a vision and being a leader requires managing things.
Nobody that's acknowledged as a good leader isn't also a good manager. Had MLK not had those managerial skills, his corner of the movement would never have gotten anywhere. The movement got where it was in large part due to the organization and management by the leadership. It's how they were able to stay coordinated and why subsequent generations of leaders have failed to make much progress.
You can be both intelligent and tactful. General Norman Schwarzkopf ("Stormin' Normin") had an IQ of 170. According to Wikipedia, "A hard-driving military commander with a strong temper, Schwarzkopf was considered an exceptional leader by biographers and was noted for his abilities as a military diplomat and in dealing with the press."
As for willingness to follow someone whose IQ was way higher than mine - I'd rather have my leader be super intelligent and experienced, especially if my life depended on it. An intelligent and experienced general would say, "Plan A looks good, but in fact, it would be a disaster. We'll do Plan B instead."
21st Century Phrenology
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
This reminds me, half the population has an IQ under 100.
You have to be smarter than the machine you're working with.
Obama spent the whole time trying to shutdown Guantanamo cuba but congress would not allow him to do that. He got some people out despite a huge amount of political attacks over the few he let out and found a place to send them (and they were innocent-- but the argument was we can't let them out because they might hate the USA after all those years.)
It was not a lie. He tried and not being a dictator, he was unable to do it= he failed to fulfill the promise. He was trying for nearly the whole time he was in office. It's frustrating big mouthed ignorant people like the parent go around spreading misinformation.
Everybody running makes promises that a reasonable person would realize are promises of a position and an effort not guaranteed results. Products have false advertising laws and they go pretty far without getting into trouble but they have ACTUAL LAWS they can be held to. Politicians have zero accountability unless they are a democrat (where they are impeached or forced to resign.)
If you want to be liked, you probably won't be a good leader. If you want to do rightly, you're gonna be hated. Patience and humility, generosity and sincerely pure intention bear fruit after the day is done.
Republic and Democracy are two different, and not mutually exclusive, concepts. A country can be either or both; the US is both.
Don't fool yourself, there are no democraty in the world.
Using democray for a republic is like greenvashing or rebranding. Looks good, but it's not true.
In a democraty in the etymological sense, all the elligible citizen can vote for a new law, modify the law or cancel a law.
People = legislative authority
In a Republic (Roman Empire was a Republic), some representative (whatever mean of selection) vote the law.
A Few (with a mjority with interest != general interest) = legislative authority
Vote for a represntative system does not mean that the power is to the people, it's just mean that we ""choose"" our masters among a limited list of ""good looking"" foal not selected by us, but by the people who does not share general interest, only their interests.
It's like asking mices to choose among cats wich one will be their leader.
And to be a ""good looking"" foal, you have to bend the knee to those who have the powers behind the curtain.
"You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect