Thinking about thinking about th--

[kiya]

rasfc is currently having a discussion of sorts on the subject of intelligence and what it's good for, and whether it's an important factor in appreciation of books, and so on. Overall, it's one of those conversations that I find fascinating in the "I want to poke at this" sense but am wary of saying anything in, because the embroilment potential is very high.

There's something of a cultural divide going on, I think, though I can't figure out where the boundaries on it are, quite, since bits of it appear to be me and folks in the UK (or Commonwealth nations) on one side of the line. (I theorise a little that we're back to Yankee-people-and-their-culture on this, but who knows? I was raised in a culturally odd environment.)


From a post to a different thread on the newsgroup:

I sometimes get the impression that my father's secret ambition is to be that daft fellow over there, you know, the eccentric one, the one you need to be careful talking to lest you get a lengthy ramble about Pelagian theology, the current status of Defense Department radar systems technologies, or the significance of Madagascar to the early plans of the Third Reich.

(oldsma may recall that last one, as she got both barrels of it.)

And from the quotes file:

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive, it just enables you to get stuck in more remote places.
--Garrison Keillor

Part of the cultural thing on rasfc at the moment is rooted in when it is acceptable to state traits about oneself in conversation. I was raised in such a way that those circumstances are extremely rare; saying "I am smart" or "I am beautiful" or "I am wealthy" or "I am a good musician" or any of a number of other things was the sort of thing that boors did, introducing the sort of awkwardness that makes a conversation skip a beat that someone was so bold, so crass, so rude as to say such a thing. Other people saying such a thing is still uncomfortable for me; my sense of inculturation did not have a graceful way of dealing with the subject at all. I am most comfortable dealing with things, accomplishments, artifacts of getting-things-done; if my crafting of a piece is good, skilled, then my skill/capacity/innate whateverness are made clear without me having to ostentatiously state them.

(This background makes stuff on this subject actively difficult to write.)

At the same time as this, I was raised to be an intellectual snob. I grew up knowing that I was considered extremely intelligent, and was intelligent in ways that my father both understood and valued. I was told that I had great capacity, had the ability to learn a broad variety of things, that this made me valuable. I picked up, at some level, the belief that this made me a better person, a superior one; that somehow I had an Importance beyond that of other people. I put intellectual achievments at the pinnacle of human accomplishment, not so much in the sense of number-of-degrees, but in the sense that the closer things approached to pure intellectuality the more valuable they were, the more significant, the better the people involved were.

I did not wind up being terribly good at concealing this arrogance. (And the fact that I did not have a good-fit school system as a child and thus got shuffled around a lot to try to meet my needs did not help.) When I was isolated in it, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was hated because I was smart and smart is different. It was a cold, sorry comfort, but it was something.

Somewhere in high school, I fell in with a crowd of folks that were enough like me that the smug security in my superiority didn't wind up being a factor. So I stopped being quite so bloody uptight about things. And I took a number of classes in the general population of the school -- not just the IB/AP courses, but the things that had me in contact with the general population of the school, the ones who weren't imported in to fill in the gifted classes like I was.

I discovered that I wound up treating the people in those classes like they were in the accelerated programs ... and being surprised when I learned that they weren't. That was one of the first lessons I needed, I think.

I burned out hard in high school and managed to finish it, and then had a major breakdown when I reached college and wound up dropping out. This intelligence thing that I had always thought would carry me through wasn't sufficient to make up for my lack of other critical factors. It didn't, as Garrison Keillor noted, get me out of getting stuck.

That was another lesson: intelligence is insufficient. Focus, support, general sanity level, dedication, diligence, ability to make connections, interest, all these other things, those matter too. Often, they matter more. Being able to, in the abstract, fit this stuff in my head doesn't mean that it gets there.

I temped for a bit. I temped some tech support. I cleaned offices. I wound up taking a job in a law office for a year and a day. And I learned that I enjoyed doing someone else's filing. Not enough to do a 9-5 of it indefinitely, but I was a good secretary (I was a terrible receptionist, however). There was no intellectual challenge, it wasn't cutting edge, it wasn't going to shake the world with its brilliant significance, but I was a big part of why that office was functional. Sure, someone else could probably have done the job about as well (and almost certainly better for the bits that involved the phone), but I was the one who was there and did it. And it felt pretty good.

Third lesson.

My father wants me to go back to school. I go back and forth on this, honestly; I have goals that in no way depend on having a degree, and those are among my more important ones. There is stuff I would love to learn, but there are levels and types of effort that aren't going to fit well in the current structure of my life.

My brother and I used to have tremendous sibling rivalry based in part on intellectual stuff. I'm told that he was furious with me when I dropped out, because I was 'the smart one', the intellectual achiever, and I had betrayed that role by going mad. (I don't know how much to trust that report.) I know that my intellectual tendencies are similar to my father's in a lot of ways, which means that I found it easy to get his support for them -- my brother, being far more social and socially adept, not as much of an abstract scientist type, found it much harder to do so. (He was in electrical engineering for a while in college in part, I think, because he thought Dad would respect that; he did much better when he swapped to political science.) I think he shook the sibling-competition thing by getting a degree, since I sure haven't managed that.

I think, sometimes, I let my father down by not going back to the intellectual stuff as soon as I was able, by not making it a priority. I know that he has a hard time with the intellectual arrogance, partly because I patterned myself on him for a very long time, partly because I've seen it as an adult -- his mild disapproval/disappointment with friends of mine (or partners, for that matter) who aren't in a field that he considers 'good enough', intellectual enough. I'm fairly sure this is family line stuff -- my cousin gets it from Dad's sister too (said cousin also dropped out, and is working on making a career as an independent hip-hop artist -- and he's good).

But I know that my ambivalence about discussions of intelligence like those -- like the level of intelligence one needs to appreciate a book, or what have you -- is rooted not only in my cultural anti-bragging stuff, but with knowing viscerally that putting too much trust in intelligence is picking a very narrow strut to put weight on.

Comments

[tiassa]

Interesting read, this...strikes a lot of very familiar chords.

[luellon.livejournal.com]

I'm finding myself saying "me too" to much of the intellectual parts.

[luellon.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention that I was always the one to do good in school (as opposed to my brother) and now he's the one going for his PhD in Computer Engineering and I have a BA in Religious Studies and I'm not going to grad school.

[ibnfirnas.livejournal.com]

If my education taught me anything, it was that being brilliant is never enough. I could run intellectual circles around a whole lot of peers who did much better than I did, because they were harder-working, better students, better networkers, more emotionally stable, more used to taking notes, and so on, while I'd always coasted on my intelligence and memory capacity. And when it came down to it, those crashed and burned at a certain point, and I had to learn a lot of new ways around things, and ended up at quite the disadvantage.

[larksdream]

That was another lesson: intelligence is insufficient. Focus, support, general sanity level, dedication, diligence, ability to make connections, interest, all these other things, those matter too. Often, they matter more.

Ayup.

It was a long, long time before I stopped pursuing other people's goals. Strike that. It was a long, long time before I realized most of the goals I'd been pursuing were other people's. I'm still trying to shake out what's mine and what isn't.

[artan]

This all resonates quite solidly, though the familial intellectualist background wasn't really there. I just got by without trying, they cheered, etc., until I screwed up and they harassed me for the failure. Then much later came the realization that raw intelligence is stagnant. It's only one facet of personal identity and only one aspect of mind. It's a tool. Properly prepared and of higher quality than others it can achieve greater results with less effort, but in the hands of a master trained in its use something of beauty can be made.

Without actual application to something it mostly just allows deep meaningful understanding of that evening's sitcom. I spent most of my time coasting. My brother I think did more of the sibling rivalry thing, but I never noticed much. By the time I realized that I had to actually put in effort to use the intelligence to do the things that I wanted it was too late, and the burnout followed quickly on the efforts of catching up.

saying "I am x" ... or any of a number of other things was the sort of thing that boors did

Though reinforcing such things to others and to self are two completely different patterns. Reinforcement of self-being state is actually quite important for personal definition. Also there's the factor of style; someone with more social flare can go about saying all kinds of I AM statements and have the charisma tow to drag others to support this assertion with fanfare, whereas the pure intellectual is seen as detached and removed from the social scene and similar statements are interpreted as hollow boasting.

Stating "I am" in any identity sense can be a strong reinforcement of that aspect for personal self. (note: must remember to research more on E-prime, I'm not sure if I find it an interesting intellectual exercise or deeply annoying)

At the same time as this, I was raised to be an intellectual snob.

Oddly I wasn't. It just arose naturally.

I put intellectual achievements at the pinnacle of human accomplishment, not so much in the sense of number-of-degrees, but in the sense that the closer things approached to pure intellectuality the more valuable they were, the more significant, the better the people involved were.

"Better" is of course a strongly relative term, which I'm sure we both understand from current viewpoints.

That was another lesson: intelligence is insufficient. Focus, support, general sanity level, dedication, diligence, ability to make connections, interest, all these other things, those matter too. Often, they matter more. Being able to, in the abstract, fit this stuff in my head doesn't mean that it gets there.

Yeah, I picked that stuff up along the way as well. Currently working on implementation.

I'm told that (brother) was furious with me when I dropped out, because I was 'the smart one', the intellectual achiever, and I had betrayed that role by going mad.

And now for more quotes:

"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence." - Henrik Tikkanen

...knowing viscerally that putting too much trust in intelligence is picking a very narrow strut to put weight on.

Back to that Intelligence is only one facet of self and mind. Experience is equally important in [understanding][comprehension][recognition]. Together they work quite well. Separately they tend to loop in upon themselves and get stuck. Throw in some other factors such as Will, sanity/stability, emotional resonance, intuition (often overshadowed by the purely intellectual, but how many great discoveries began with some scientist saying "I had this dream..."), maybe some purpose for motication, and actual work (gasp!) and we might be able to stagger towards something truly great, or at least be happier being where we are and where we're going.

[mindways]

[lilairen]
I was raised in such a way that those circumstances are extremely rare; saying "I am smart" or "I am beautiful" or "I am wealthy" or "I am a good musician" or any of a number of other things was the sort of thing that boors did, introducing the sort of awkwardness that makes a conversation skip a beat that someone was so bold, so crass, so rude as to say such a thing. Other people saying such a thing is still uncomfortable for me; my sense of inculturation did not have a graceful way of dealing with the subject at all.

Most of the time I see this sort of thing come up, "I am X" is being given as necessary background for understanding something further, which isn't too hard to deal with - wait for the something further for which this bit of exposition was required.

If it's just someone making the assertion and looking for a response...yeah, often harder to deal with gracefully.

It seems to be more acceptable (both in a general sense and in a feels-more-comfortable-to-me sense) to make assertions for which there's unambiguous external evidence. If I state "I am tall", that's more of a "duh" than an assertion; stating "I am a good DDR player" isn't too bad (because there's an external yardstick one can use to judge); stating "I'm a good GM" is something I've only been able to bring myself to do recently despite decades of people telling me that they've enjoyed the games I run (which is an external yardstick of sorts, but far less objective than DDR scoring), and I still want to stick all sorts of caveats on the word "good" whenever I say it. :P Probably because the less objective evidence there is, the less it's a statement of established fact and the more it's a value judgement?

(Though it seems to me that past a certain point, denial - or to a lesser extent, lack of assertion - of one's own capabilities can turn into deception and/or self-limitation. Not that one need be a pushy jerk; one can have a firm sense of self-worth/capability and be truthful about it... yet humble in attitude / communication.)

There is also the complicating factor that reluctance to make assertions about onesself can spring from fear as well as politeness - the fear that one will be seen as arrogant; the fear that those assertions (about one's self - an emotionally charged subject) will be contradicted by others; the fear that one is wrong.

[arawen]
Though reinforcing such things to others and to self are two completely different patterns.

Different, perhaps, but interacting. Asserting things about onesself to others can be a powerful tool for reinforcing them in one's own psyche; truly believing something about one's self can sometimes cause it to come across to others (even without any need for explicit declaration).

[oldsma.livejournal.com]

I believe I got all those in one session with your father. And standing one leg, too, which is killah impressive.

I have the odd experience of being raised to be an intellectual snob by parents who later went over to the other side: stock car racing, matching recliners, TV on all the time and no new books, etc. It's like the air went out of them.

They resent the hell out of me, or are confused by me, or something. But I am at least more or less who they raised me to be and who my grandparents were and raised them to be. They make me feel like the cuckoo, but they are the ones who ended up in the wrong nest.

And since their major transformation came while I was (a) on the other coast and (b) they weren't speaking to me to punish me for having an unacceptable partner, it is like pod people took over suddenly. I really don't know them at all. I mean, who are these tchotchke-collecting, dirty-house racists and what did they do with my parents?

And what on earth do I talk to them about? They don't eve read anymore and I don't have a television.

MAO

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I feel like I should be commenting on this entry but all I can really think of is "Seeble".

[frozencapybara.livejournal.com]

As others have said, this sounds very familiar to me. It's only in the last few years that I've realized that I'm not necessarily a failure for not getting a Ph.D., although I'm still working out what I want to do with my life - so much of it was spent with the assumption that I would get through high school, and go to college, and then go to grad school and get a Ph.D., and then life would magically fall together and be perfect. Turns out it doesn't work that way - go figure.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I don't know you, but I like this post!