The cost of intelligence is the level of trust you put in yourself and your own experience over the experience of others. This may be due to the fact that you can trace your own reasoning, while the reasoning of others is more difficult to first understand, second explain, and third implement. The experience of others, to a smart person, may be like scaffolding instead of an actual blueprint; look at other's experience as the path and not the way points, or you may not even reach the intended way points. Experience and the then created wisdom is better than intelligence and sheer brain power. A wise yet dumb person would implement experience from a person who has successfully navigated through that specific situation. How ever, a foolish smart person would, based on the knowledge of their own intelligence, put their own experience, for better or for worse, in front of another person's experience, simply because they already have an idea, and know that they have the capacity to make smart decisions. However, due to uncertainty, they may end up in a box because they didn't anticipate their faulty decision-making. At this point, it may be too late, and they may have to simply start over, if possible. However, they will have learned from this, and may be able to apply what they learned to similar situations, on the spot, and not need another person's counsel. This added freedom in decision-making, also makes them more self-reliant, leading to a repeating cycle of uncertain decision-making and varying chances of success and failure. However, once they have failed enough, they will then know enough about said subject, that the chances of failure will decrease to close to zero. But even that takes another ability, and that is to accept failure. The first step of accepting failure is to acknowledge failure, which may be difficult, since you to not expect to be wrong if you are intelligent. The second step is to discover why it failed, which may be easier, and is the part of the process that makes one wiser, and perhaps more intelligent. The third step is to move on, because dragging around failure causes depression, which slows all processes down. Moving on from failure is perhaps the most difficult step because if you don't fully acknowledge failure, you cannot see how to move past it. If you refuse to believe that a portion of wall is there, then you will continue running into it until you do believe it is there. If you mess up any of the steps, then you are stuck, and may not be able to move forward. Success brings motivation, and success is sweetest when you do all the work yourself. But do not risk self-motivation at the high likelihood of failure. Instead, work out the simpler problems by yourself, slowly working towards life goals while at the same time building meaningful experience.
Why intelligence is actually not a very good thing, and how to fix the problems it makes.
- Thread starter Masterisk
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Ok what is intelligence, are you talking about IQs over 130, 150, 180 and what is dumb someone with an IQ below 130, 100, 50?
Who is to say that the "faulty decision making" could have been anticipated. If the person is really smart they would have alternate strategies, it's called mitigating risks.
The scientific method is premised on the asserted hypothesis is probably wrong, it's called skepticism.
I can agree with this, a good example of not dealing with failure and simply abandoning an idea or project is M-Theory. M-Theory could not solve the problem of why gravity is the weakest force. All the math that described other forces in M-Theory worked out. Now M-Theory, which was known as String Theory at one time, had taken decades to develop and renowned scientists had devoted their careers to the idea, so it was kind of a "Too Big To Fail" theory. So what happened? One scientist reached for a very exotic and not very seriously taken quantum theory called parallel universes or worlds to save M-Theory. The fix was to allow gravity to leak from some other universe to make gravity weak in other universes such as our own. Problem? The other forces don't leak, conveniently, and no one knows how to find or detect a parallel universe. Effectively M-Theory can be classified as a religion!
You have to define what you are talking about when you say intelligent and dumb which aren't good terms to begin with. But it sounds as if you are talking about prediction virsus reaction. Where prediction can be wrong, the risks must be mitigated and new direction or action has to be initiated. I describe a good example of this in my blog: Predicting vs Reacting to an environment – Knowledgeable Machines. It involves a snake and a mouse and it's one of the problems facing AI today.
im 15 with mild depression, 145 iq, and a hyper-realistic view of my already suboptimal life. whaddah ya want from me?
Let's hope your suboptimal life improves. But realize that a good hypothesis or idea is one that can be tested. If we can't gauge ideas then we end up with superstitions like fairies, goblins, and parallel universes...
This statement isn't factual. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you will be arrogant, or closed-minded, or etc. If anything, it's all the more reason you should understand that there is something to be learned from everyone, regardless of who they are or how intelligent they are or aren't. Intelligence is just how quickly/how well you are able to learn.
Intelligent people tend to score higher in Openness on the Big 5 in general, btw.
It's the ones that are insecure about their intelligence that are sometimes too closed off to others; they don't want to admit to making mistakes, etc. because they will feel stupid. Being confident in your intelligence - or confident despite the lack thereof - sometimes entails the willingness to admit mistakes more easily, as it does not threaten the (fragile) ego. The fragile ego just wants to prove it's smart via independently "proving it."
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Recently empathy has been associated with intelligence. I do think it's a positive thing, as it forces everyone to develop social skills, because you have the worst people with social skills and they abuse it to do whatever, so you must teach that to the 99 percent of the population who is shy and struggles with it and who is a good person, so you protect them from that kind of harm, so I personally agree with it.
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