What Is A Smart Person?
Why Do Smart People Sometimes Say & Do Stupid Things?
David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com — https://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Grace-Author/124906167653902?ref=bookmarks)
My Other Medium Posts: https://medium.com/@davidgraceauth
Since people who are supposed to be smart often say and do stupid things I asked myself, first, “What does it mean to be smart?” and second, “If someone is smart, why do they sometimes do such stupid things?”
Being smart is not just being able to recall lots of facts. My hard disk can recall lots of facts and it’s not smart at all.
Being smart is not being able to do one specific task really well. The person who can calculate the cube root of 7,257 in their head or write a complex C++ app as fast as they can type is not necessarily smart. They may be smart but those narrow skills don’t tell us whether they are or not. The fictional Rain Man could do amazing things, but very few people would think that he was smart.
I think that a smart person can do four things: (1) see useful information that other people can’t see or don’t notice; (2) draw accurate, useful conclusions from that information; (3) design a useful goal that takes advantage of that information and (4) create an efficient and effective plan of action to attain that goal.
More simply, really smart people see the dots other people don’t see; they connect those dots into an accurate picture; they derive a useful goal from that picture, and they plan an efficient, effective way to reach that goal.
But wait, you say, by that test the character, Sherlock Holmes, is very smart. He notices all kinds of details that others miss. He deduces accurate conclusions from those facts. He picks a useful goal, solving the crime, and he designs a plan that brings the criminal to justice. But would people necessarily pick Holmes to run their company or be their Governor? Maybe not.
While Holmes is good at noticing physical details – there was mud on a man’s cuffs and nicotine stains on his fingers – that doesn’t mean that Holmes is necessarily smart in the general intelligence sense. Leaders need to be smart across a broad range of problems. My definition of “smart” needs to be modified to widen the scope of the information that a smart person can see and accurately interpret. The smart person needs to see more than just physical details. He/she needs to be able to deal effectively with data of any kind.
In almost any situation that is thrown at them a smart person is able to see the dots that others miss and to connect those dots into an accurate picture and then derive a beneficial goal from that picture and then to create a workable and efficient plan to reach that goal.
Since I seem to be obsessed with fictional characters today, let’s talk about another one – Dr. Gregory House. If you’ve watched the TV show, House, you know that Dr. House was the master of noticing what people said and did and then embarking on a line of deductions – “You said ‘black’ but if that were true then you would have done X but you did Y which means that it wasn’t black. And if it was white you wouldn’t have said anything at all which means that it was neither black nor white. And judging from your fondness for fancy clothes and your obviously expensive haircut your saying ‘black’ could only mean that it was really purple,” House might say.
Most people who watched the show thought that House was really smart. The problem with Greg House, though, was that no matter how well he connected the dots, the actions he ended up taking in response to that picture were corrupted by his inner demons. Put another way, while he got the picture right, the actions that he took in response that picture turned his life into a train wreck. The plan of action he created in response to the dot-picture he built made his life worse. House picked self-destructive goals (bad strategy) and made things worse by trying to achieve those toxic goals with ineffective tactics.
Why?
Because, like a lot of people who would otherwise be considered “smart,” House viewed his connected-dot-image through the prism of his own warped, irrational, self-destructive, and false notions about human beings and the world work.
My interpretation of House’s rules is:
Everybody lies about everything of any importance so you’re better off never believing anybody.
Everybody is just out for themselves so distrust any favors anyone offers to do for you.
Only a fool does anything without getting something in return so unless there is something in it for you, don’t help anyone.
You’re going to let everyone down eventually so you may as well let them down right at the beginning so that they will know to expect nothing from you.
Eventually people will betray you so don’t trust anyone
Eventually people will hurt you so don’t care about anyone.
Do anything necessary to keep anyone from besting you – win every time at all costs.
House was unable to recognize that his rules’ premises were inaccurate or that the conclusions he derived from those premises were false.
So, if being smart about dealing with people means figuring out how humans react to different situations and from that knowledge evolving a set of life-rules that will get people to act in a way that is beneficial for you, House was not smart at all.
Why am I babbling about this fictional character? Here’s the point: smart people can nullify their intelligence by adopting a set of rules that inaccurately reflect how the world works. When your ideas about how the world works, how people work, how society works, how nature works, which strategies will fail and which will succeed, are false, it doesn’t matter how good you are in seeing the dots and connecting the dots because your set of inaccurate rules will lead you to stupid/bad, that is to say, unsuccessful decisions.
EXAMPLE: An otherwise smart man notices a series of small facts about his wife. Taken together he correctly and cleverly deduces that his wife is having an affair. He noticed the dots. He correctly connected the dots. So far, these are the actions of a smart person. But, how does he use that information? He has to do two more things: (1) figure out what goal he wants to achieve based on that information (strategy) and (2) what actions he will take to achieve that goal (tactics).
Which of the following goals is he going to pick?
(1) end his marriage and get as much of the property as possible
(2) punish his wife for cheating on him
(3) fix his marriage so that they can return to an earlier, happier state
If he no longer wanted to be with his wife then goal one would benefit him in the material sense. If he still loved his wife then goal three would benefit him in the emotional sense.
If he engaged in a risk/reward analysis he might have picked either goals one or three.
Unfortunately, the husband has the following rules in his head:
- No one can be allowed to get away with disrespecting me
- A woman who betrays her husband is evil
- Evil must be punished.
Based on these rules and guided by ego, insecurity, and a desire for revenge the husband decides that the right goal, the thing he needs to do, is to punish his wife. He looks at his connect-the-dots image through the prism of these warped rules and he chooses a strategy that is going to make his life much worse. He fails the third of the four steps in being smart – picking a beneficial (to him) goal.
Having chosen revenge as his goal, he could have engaged in a risk/reward analysis to determine the course of action that possessed the best combination of low risk and high reward in achieving the goal of punishing his wife. Instead, he decides to kill his wife because that provides the most effective match to his three rules. Again, he chooses adherence to his emotional/religious/philosophical rules over taking actions that will increase his own happiness.
He murders his wife, goes to prison, gets raped dozens of times, has all his teeth knocked out, gets AIDS and dies in a cage ten years later. His rules led him to choose actions that wrecked his life over other potential goals that would, instead, have increased his happiness. His rules poisoned his intelligence.
You can be 99% healthy but add a 1% dose of poison and you will be dead. You can be 99% smart, but add a 1% adherence to rules that inaccurately reflect how people and society function and you can turn your right answers into wrong decisions.
Condensed: Smart people make stupid mistakes when they act in accordance with false beliefs about how the world does or should work.
But, you say, if someone were really smart, wouldn’t they pick an accurate, effective set of personal rules? If someone is really good at seeing the dots and connecting the dots, wouldn’t they use that excellent ability to deduce a set of personal rules that do accurately reflect how people work and how the world works, rules that would result in their making successful (beneficial) decisions which result in them leading a happier and more successful life?
If people were all like Mr. Spock (yes, another fictional character — substitute soulless robot if you prefer) that’s probably right. But here’s the nasty little problem – people do not run their lives primarily based on logic and on intelligent, enlightened, long-term self-interest. More often than not people act out of emotion, ego, greed, arrogance, insecurity, past pain and loss, fear, irrational desires, hormonal urges, hatred, prejudice and, most of all, personal philosophical beliefs that confuse how the world does work with how they think the world ought to work.
All of these irrational ideas become a swirling, shifting cloud that obscures their carefully calculated picture of the connected dots and which distorts the true connected-dot image into something that would have excited Salvador Dali.
Put another way: emotion and philosophy not only affect what patterns we see in the data we notice but, more importantly, they affect and distort what actions we decide to take based upon that vision.
People make dumb choices every day, not because they aren’t smart but in spite of their being smart. A really smart person follows rules based on how people and society actually work, based on rules that accurately reflect reality as it exists. But most people live by a set of false rules that they have latched on to because they mimic what they fear or desire reality to be.
Why am I going through this exercise? Why do I care, why should anyone care why smart people make stupid choices? Because it’s often those smart people who end up as our politicians, CEOs and voters, and they use the cloak of their apparent intelligence to lead the rest of us into disaster.
“I’m smart. Follow me,” they say. And then, relying on their warped, inaccurate, false view about how people and society work, or how they think they should work, they lead us right off a cliff.
The German people wanted some reason that would excuse why they lost WW I. They didn’t want to admit that the Allies were tougher, smarter, better armed, or whatever. For emotional reasons they wanted some excuse for their failure that made it not their fault. “It was the Jews,” Hitler told them. “We lost the war because the Jews stabbed us in the back.”
Completely untrue but emotionally it felt good to them. Were there no smart Germans? Was everyone who believed this nonsense just stupid? No, of course not. Smart people latched onto this false view of reality because it was emotionally satisfying. Because, emotionally, they wanted to believe it. And look what happened next.
Communists believed that the principal of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was a great foundation for a political and economic system. It doesn’t take more than about ten seconds thought about how human beings actually work to realize that such a system could never be successful.
We all know that people are reward driven. We all know that people care about first, themselves, then their family, then their community, then, maybe, some stranger living a thousand miles away. After only a moment’s thought any intelligent person would have realized that talented, skilled people were not going to work their asses off so that untrained, untalented people could have as much of a reward as they did; that if you could get rewarded by doing nothing that there was no reason to do something. It really doesn’t take more than a very basic understanding of human beings to see that.
But lots of really smart people believed in communism. My point is: How could smart people believe that a system that was so obviously unworkable was a good idea? Because the philosophy of communism sounded good to them. It sounded fair. It sounded right! Smart people will believe dumb things in the service of an inaccurate set of rules because the false idea feels good. Because that’s how they would like the world to work.
EXAMPLE: The wife, a brilliant Ph.D., finds her husband in bed with her neighbor. He tells her it wasn’t his fault. That he took an antihistamine and it made him groggy and that he didn’t know what he was doing and that he’ll never do it again. And she believes him. Why? Because she wants to. Smart person, dumb decision, because she wants reality to be other than it is. “Believe it fervently enough and it will come true” is how many otherwise smart people choose to live their lives.
Climate change is really bad news. We all wish it wasn’t true. Many otherwise smart people flatly refuse to believe it. Why? Because they really, really, want it not to be true. They want to “believe it away.” Magical thinking.
How many false ideas do smart people you know hang on to because they want them to be true, because the idea feels so good to them, because it matches their prejudices or their personal philosophy?
What do you think the odds are that you can convince those smart people to give up those dumb ideas? Did I hear you say ‘zero’?
How many false ideas do you hang on to because you want them to be true, because they feel good to you, because they match your personal beliefs about how the world ought to work?
Something to think about.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com
