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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?
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.
Bankruptcy and economy are not quite the same thing.
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.
While perhaps not a perfect fit for the sentiment, I believe it's fairly well covered under "anti-intellectualism."
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*Just a slob like one of us?*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Perhaps with other narcissists.
No, I'm serious and not trolling. You state that the 'masses' are limiting you. You clearly value the things that "matter" to you above those that matter to the masses, and are using intelligence ("smart[ness]") as the justification. There's a reason that this sort of attitude is treated like a teenager's rant - many people go through this sort of thinking/feeling in their teens, then grow out of it. If you are still experiencing the world in this way, perhaps you are less developed in some areas than others.
Maybe the reason people react to the things you care about as being things that "don't matter" is because of your attitude towards them.
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.
Of course! That's why East Asians generally score higher on them than Whites! Nice try, negro.
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
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.
"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
Hey everyone guess who joined slashdot
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.
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?
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 can't win as a high-IQ.
If you don't explain every single step of your stuff, you get exhibit A (the parent). If you do, you come across as belittling, patronizing and treating everyone like a three year old.
Finding that sweet spot between skipping too much and explaining too much is harder than you might imagine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Trump is an asshole, but he ain't dumb.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
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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
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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"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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
Also very frightening. If the claim is that Clinton is hyper intelligent that she must have known she was talking utter shit and that proves she was being malicious, rather than merely deluded.
& 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.
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'
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.
You are assuming that people who call other people smartasses are correct in their assessment of behavior. The nature of empathy is that it's easy to be empathetic to people that are like us, and much harder to be empathetic to people that are different from us. This also applies to conceptions of behavior being appropriate or inappropriate. "People are pieces of shit, especially to someone different" is an adequate explanation for the given information.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Decrying the value of intelligence greater than one's own, which implies that one's own inteligence is adequate, is practically the motto of "Mt Stupid," so I doubt the accuracy of your reading on Dunning-Krueger here.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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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...)
Almost. Generally, women want a man they can conquer. It needs to be a challenge, but they'll give up if they find they can't succeed.
I was over 45 when I started testing such theories, but quickly found that the "dating game" was quite predictable and easy to game.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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
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.
Would you care to provide reasons why you think Obama was stupid and irrational? Reasons why you disagreed with him or his policies don't count.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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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
He's very good at acting just like a dumb person.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Stupid: Could not function well without teleprompter, as evidenced on multiple occasions.
irrational: Giving Iran a secret load of unmarked bills and gold, and expecting they would actually honor a deal made... well Ok, that's actually an example of stupid as well.
Pulling out of Iraq without leaving behind support, so we had to go back in and clean it all up again - SO STUPID. And again irrational, like what did he expect to happen to a nation just freed?
That's fundamentally the reason I say stupid, Obama was simply not capable of thinking of long-term consequence for actions. Perhaps all the irrationality stems from that because choices you could see him making seemed irrational only if you thought about consequences.
There are countless other examples, those are just some obvious ones. Not going to debate it further, but it is clear Trump is way smarter and more rational than Oabma, as Trump has accomplished a lot more over his life - he also not only thinks about consequences of actions, but plans around them (like trash talking with NK with the ultimate goal of peace talks). He's just simply a smarter more capable person. That's obvious - even if you disagree with him or his policies. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
I thought /. was anti-social media?
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 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.
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.
What's the difference (if any) between a dumb person and someone acting as a dumb person?
There's none, IMHO, as we define someone as being dumb based upon his actions.
Once the actions are those of a dumb person, that one is a dumb person.
Maybe just like me.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
My point exactly, if he's smart he never, ever shows it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So all intelligent people are good at off-the-cuff public speaking? In my experience, some are, some aren't.
You do realize that that was Iranian money we'd sequestered, right? Sanctions weren't working. Iran was working on nuclear weapons with them in effect. Direct engagement and diplomacy couldn't do worse, and had prospects of doing better.
There's a lot of stupid in that comment, sure. What did we expect of a nation just freed? I expected about what we got. The only way to avoid that was to never free Iraq, and that wasn't in the cards. Bush negotiated the pull-out with the Iraqis, and Obama stuck to that schedule. Obama tried to negotiate a longer stay, but the Iraqis were not budging on their insistence that US soldiers in Iraq be subject to Iraqi law, which I don't think anyone in the US wanted to have happen. Given that Bush negotiated the pull-out, the Iraqis would not offer acceptable terms, and Iraq was going to have to be freed sometime, I don't see what Obama could have done much better.
Then cite some actual examples. You don't seem to have any grasp of what the consequences of doing something different would be, but Obama did. I'm not saying he necessarily made the right choices, but that they were made while considering the consequences, and were reasonable decisions. You seem to think Obama could have kept things the same without adverse consequences.
Excuse me? Trump couldn't even issue a reasonable executive order when he tried to block immigration from the Middle Eastern Muslim nations that hadn't participated in the 9/11 attack. His Presidency has been one screw-up after another, since he can't pick decent people and doesn't foresee the problems he creates. As far as trash-talking North Korea, you're pulling that justification out of your ass (or it was pulled from someone else's ass - either way, I'm not touching it). Whatever intelligence and foresight Trump had, he doesn't show it now.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes