Smart doesn't matter much

I know someone intelligent but crazy as a bedbug. In a blog she nicely and correctly attacked the existence of "race" as a load of hooey. I still prefer Hitchens, but, hey, he's a professional. Then, however, like a Charles Manson speech at a parole hearing, the blog went from the reasonable to the absurd. Here are my comments.

Yes, of the multitude of ridiculous memes that have been made up out of thin air, race ranks right up there with religion as a force for holding humanity back from advancing in all sorts of different fields. Which is why Christopher Hitchens refuses to fill out questions about his "race." I myself mark "Other" and, when possible, enter "Human." Which, given the perspectives and level of reading comprehension in Mississippi, will probably get me classified as a Hmong tribesman one day.

On the race question I tend to agree with you, but I have to take exception with the hypothesis you present for your thought experiment.

"If we were all suddenly unable to distinguish color, what would happen? People would be judged on merit and ability. It wouldn't happen overnight, because the money is in the hands of those whom the current system has favored, but our country would change irrevocably. Power would go into the hands of the most talented, the most capable, the most intelligent."

"Talented" or "capable" are ambiguous terms. Talented at what? The most common sense definitions create a tautology: power goes into the hands of those most capable of attaining power. (Of course, we're begging the question of what "power" is.)

I don't particularly care about those issues because whatever definitions are used, "the most intelligent" is not going to be a significant determinant for power, nor should President Obama's election be taken to mean that the country is moving in that direction. Yes, he is indeed smart and articulate and, yes, those attributes probably played a role in his election by providing a sharp contrast with the snickering, fumble-tongued President Bush. Obama's erudition, however, was hyped and in many cases believed as a disadvantage within the Republican base, they marked Obama as "an elitist" because he could construct a reasoned and extended argument and could think on his feet and communicate his ideas.

For all of the politics present in academia and artistic organizations, they are oriented more towards individual effort (or small scale political effort), leading to more chance for intelligence to be properly utilized. Exposure to a large organization where each project requires work from dozens of departments and hundreds of people will soon disabuse you of the value of intelligence. As the sign says, "None of us are as dumb as all of us." It took several years working within the context of a Fortune 500 company before I finally accepted that, yes, indeed, I am a genius and that, yes, that creates problems for me.

Exceptionally or profoundly gifted people are not just intellectually gifted, they are emotionally different as well. (http://www.gt-cybersource.org has some brief yet interesting reports on this sort of thing.) As one of the authors pointed out, no one expects a 40 IQ child to be mainstreamed, yet this is often considered acceptable for a child of 160. There are emotional and social differences regardless of which side of the bell curve you are on.

These differences do not go away simply because someone moves from childhood to adulthood. Extremely intelligent adults making reality-based decisions will, within large organizations, rarely advance quickly unless they are so profoundly gifted in their domain that they change the nature of the domain. Usually, either their expertise is needed in a particular position or their inevitable conflicts with the inevitable incompetents will impair their advancement opportunities. Intensity is difficult to mask, and being required to step outside of reality based thinking is incredibly difficult for myself and the other extremely gifted people with whom I've worked. http://www.sengifted.org/articles_adults/Nauta_GiftedAdultsInWork.shtml has an interesting take on gifted employees in working environments:

Table 1 Characteristic statements made by gifted employees and people in their working environment concerning adaptation problems
What the working environment notices		What the employee states
1	Many conflicts with management and authorities	I have a great sense of justice
2	Cannot listen to what others say	My ideas are not understood, but I’m usually right
3	Difficult to place motives. What’s behind it all?	Apparently I’m a threat to my colleagues
4	Bad timekeeping, for example in meetings	I’m being held back all the time, it all goes so slowly
5	Strongly fluctuating performance, without any clear cause	I have no idea what I want, I find almost everything interesting
6	Not clear where the employee’s optimal work position is; concerns him/herself with all kinds of things	I get too little appreciation, people don’t see what I’m capable of
7	Lack of perseverance and discipline	I’m easily distracted
8	Is difficult to approach, not social	I dislike social talk
9	Makes all kinds of demands concerning work environment factors	I can’t understand how other people can work in that noise

I've experienced most of the above personally. Large scale organizations tend to give power to people that fit certain social and personality templates, whether consciously or unconsciously. The more profoundly gifted you are, the less likely that you will fit within such a template. (Unless fitting in or management is your template, I knew some managers that fit into that mold.)

Smart doesn't mean much in large scale organizations and, quite frankly, it never will.

Attenuated Grasp of Reality

The Pompotous speaks about AGR (Attenuated Grasp of Reality). After a decade working for a Fortune 500 company in a capacity that had the Pompotous interfacing with numerous departments and executives (not a lot of love there, let me tell you!) the concept of AGR became obvious.

Let's get the freshman and or grad student objections about reality out of the way. This is a complicated subject that many have written on, but mainly the subject is one of mental masturbation -- yeah, it is fun enough, but there are more pleasurable things to be done with a partner around, so let's get on with things.

1. There either is or isn't an objective reality. If there isn't an objective reality, it is still reasonable to act as if there is an objective reality.
2. No, we don't have any "direct" experience of objective reality. We do have communication and the scientific method, which is the closest that we're going to get and, being the only game in town, is close enough for jazz.
3. My personal opinion is that we probably don't have free will -- at the same level of discussion of saying that we don't have "direct" experience of objective reality. There are many, many good reasons for acting as if we have free will, and that's good enough for the Pompotous.

So what is AGR? One of the Pompotous's buddies did a humorous chart of the "10 levels of AGR" but I'll be a bit more serious here. Everyone on the planet has some level of AGR. Both because we have no direct experience of reality and because no human is omniscient. Because of those two things everything that we do is a "best guess" at the moment, and those best guesses may be wrong.

If you keep in mind that you may be wrong, if you communicate and investigate and apply the scientific method in gathering and analyzing information, you will minimize, as much as possible, your human potential for AGR.

A couple of things can massively increase the amount of AGR you have. One is emotion. Ever been in love with someone bad for you? 'Nuff said.

The other is incompetence. Time and time again I'd run into incompetent people who would do or say things that seemed intended to actively hurt the company. Each time I'd point out their errors they wouldn't consider the matter in anything other than personal terms: I was arrogant, things had to be "my way", I just wasn't a team player -- and these are issues on which I had scientifically gathered evidence in a variety of forms.

Eventually I had to accept that the studies out there are depressingly correct: incompetents are completely unaware of their own incompetence, that is the first and foremost condition for being incompetent. And the only thing that they do well is ingratiate themselves to those like them and those people whose jobs are above the "detail" level of getting things done.

I do not know how incompetent people reach decisions. It is, I think, much like faith. The idea pops and there it is. To stay. In the decade of the Pompotous at that Fortune 500 company I usually prevailed, almost always through bitter fighting. But not a single incompetent learned a single thing. Not a single incompetent ever remembered being wrong. Not a single incompetent remembered the evidence that demonstrated that they were wrong -- sometimes they'd reverse the evidence in their heads and spread the incorrect data! And so the fights continued, year after year, with more fighting each year as I'd continually have to correct the errors of old as well as the errors of the present.

Attenuated Grasp of Reality: it is a bitch. There are people with hardware problems who have AGR because the equipment they use is damaged in some way (Oliver Sacks has a couple of good books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat that deal with these kinds of problems.) And it is tragic to review those cases. But when seemingly neurologically normal folks of probably average intelligence have high levels of AGR it sends the Pompotous off bellowing, "CULL THE HERD!"

Which is perhaps (and perhaps not) unfair of the Pompotous. Rational thought and the scientific method, with their built in checks and balances, are the best method that we as a species have ever had for reducing AGR, and reducing AGR is the best way to find correct answers to problems, and damn, do we have a lot of problems! In the next posts the Pompotous will speak about how the concept of AGR extends into some of the threads others have been talking about.