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.

I don't get adultery

For those of you who know the Pompotous personally the title is a bit of a joke. Prior to meeting my lovely wife I spent most of my adult life, as someone once put it, "serially monogamous with the significant others of others." Let me be clear: I didn't go looking for affairs with married or engaged women, they came to the Pompotous, I wasn't the one breaking any marriage vows, and there were no children in any of the marriages. I was just instrumental in helping the women break vows they made to someone else. (In an amusing similarity, all 3 of the wives showed me pictures or videos of their wedding day right before moving to Stage 3 of the adulterous affair (the sexual intercourse bit)).

In the 15 years that these relationships happened I was manipulated and lied to and used and, oddly enough, ultimately blamed for the affair by all of the women involved, who somehow seemed to forget the effort they put into seducing me. Particularly by the last one, the one who had to manipulate and work on me for months to seduce me, and only managed to get sexual intercourse out of me the first time by encouraging me to take a nap and then having at me so that I woke up with the process already begun. From a purely physical standpoint, not a bad way to wake up, but from a question of responsibility viewpoint I never did figure out how that one was initiated by me.

Anyway, in addition to having the "it's not my fault" trait in common, all of the women had been married for 4 years when the sexual aspects of our affairs began. Perhaps because the 4th anniversary gift is supposed to be a household appliance. Well, I've been married longer than that and I have to say: I don't understand adultery.

Which isn't to say that I can't predict it. I pegged that third wife as an adultery risk the first night I met her: she was having to commute a long way because of her husband, she described him as a saint to whom she was totally devoted, the nicest guy in the world, yet there were undertones of resentment and need. No, I know the behavior back and forth, I know the tells that give away intentions, but I still have no clue as to why these women would deliberately set out to screw over their husbands by screwing someone else.

I've now been married as long as they were back then. My wife is my partner, my helper, the one who can drive me crazy in ways both good and bad. She's certainly not perfect nor a saint, nor am I, but if she wasn't like that I wouldn't have married her, if for some reason that went away, well, why wouldn't I divorce her?

At this point, my understanding of adultery has changed, and joined together with my understanding of rape: I don't get it. Why would anyone want to stick their dick into someone who didn't want it? What's the point, what are they getting that they couldn't get with some vaseline, a hand of choice and a good fantasy? Why would anyone want to screw around behind their spouse's back? What are they getting that they couldn't get with either working on their marriage or abandoning it all together? I know what I got out of these affairs: I got the illusion that someone cared about me while at the same time indulging in my self destructiveness. But these women had people who already really cared about them. If I'd had that (and I do now), no way would I deliberately betray that.

I get that these married women were all looking for something. The first ended up with both a string of marriages and a string of affairs. The second eventually divorced and became an alcoholic. The third, after four years, revealed that she'd been "hiding" her intense Christianity so people wouldn't make fun of her, stayed with her husband, who sank into depression, and now home schools the kids she had with him after she ended our affair forever for the third time. I get that they were looking for something. Aren't we all? What I don't get is why any of them thought that lying -- and lies are at the base of all adulteries in my experience -- could possibly be a path to finding what they needed.

As Merlin said in _Excalibur_, "Truth! That's it, it must be truth! When a man lies he murders some part of the world."

I've forgotten how to write

I can't find some important documents. (Once we get back to Lexington I'm never moving again. Which I guess means we'll have to stay in the Gondola house, too.) Anyway, as I was looking for them I can across a ream or so of writing from 10-15 years ago. Now I've never been any great shakes writing fiction, but portions of what I was doing back then had promise.

Then I started to look at my emails from that time period. Something has definitely slipped.

I blame Lexmark and the stupid people who use print and multifunction print devices. After a decade where the goal of all of my writing was to communicate as clearly as possible in as few simple words as possible, I find that I am out of practice with writing for people like myself. You know, smart people, the ones who don't necessarily move their lips when reading and can actually follow an argument for longer than a sound byte. And communicating via Twitter and, yes, blogs like this hasn't done my style any good, either.

Allowing my talent for elegant writing to so fall into disuse that it appears I no longer possess it is depressing. I should do something about that.

Joe the Plumber, Yahweh the Mechanic

In a recent radio ad for an oil change store in Jackson, Mississippi, all doubt about where to go for a lube job was wiped away by a bit of name dropping: this place uses "God" to check out your car when you come in.

Yes, that's right, G-d, the big Yahweh himself is making the switch from carpentry to auto mechanics. Now they didn't get into whether G-d was a salaried employee or whether he gets overtime as an hourly employee, but who needs a 27-point safety inspection when G-d is on the job to change your oil, lube your joints and ensure that your tires are inflated to the proper level for both safety and gas mileage? I mean, having a mechanic whose skill is divinely inspired, rather than the result of training and experience, just HAS to extend the life of your car.

Unless, of course, G-d has decided to take you into his bosom, in which case you're fucked, he'll probably cut your brake lines. And you'll have deserved it.

Jackson, MS "Perps"

Every city has a driving foible. In Chicago it is the idea that lanes are really just suggestions. In Lexington, KY it is the "Red + 3" rule, where when a turn light becomes red, the next three cars in the turn lane (which haven't entered the intersection) are allowed to bull through.

In Jackson, MS, the driving problem is the "perp." Most of the roads in the area where I live are four or, more usually, 5 lanes, 2 going each way with a turn lane in the middle. Businesses and such have entrances directly off the streets.

The "Jackson Perp" comes about when a car is trying to turn left and gets tired of waiting: time after time after time I see people pull out perpendicular to oncoming traffic, blocking two or three lanes while waiting for an opportunity to complete their left turn.

Cull the Jackson Perps!

Gods for atheists

There ARE indeed gods that atheists can get behind. Kipling wrote about them.

Unfortunately, those kinds of gods aren't terribly discriminate, and many of we sons of Martha will shoulder the price, too.

AGR+ Militant Atheism

The Pompotous of love is married to a wonderful, intelligent, kind, patient woman. Who is a Christian of sorts, an Episcopalian to be precise, but not one of the "let's go to church because that's where the money and status congregate" types of Episcopalians I knew as a young Pompotous. She does indeed believe in some sort of supernatural something or other.

Everybody has AGR. This religious belief of hers (along with her perpetual optimism about what she can actually accomplish in a limited amount of time) rank as her high points of AGR.

But over the years of our interactions I've think I've identified some things that may be the roots of the "militant atheism" moniker that has been the topic of discussion lately. (Various blogs have touched it, the most excellent vjack's is always a good place to go.)

Here's the thing: for those of us steeped in the humanities, you go off and do history and historiography and philosophy and cognitive science and phenomenology and psychology and so on and so forth, each discipline taking itself as the lens through which the entire world can be viewed, and if you are interested in consciousness, one of the things that you eventually come across is that sanity is primarily a socially defined construct.

Yeah, yeah, almost everything is a socially defined construct, got it, when does the interesting part come in?

Well, we have all these social constructs that point out what is right and what is wrong, what is "other" and bad, what is acceptable and what isn't. (Think of homosexuality being in the DSM until what, '73? Or putting "God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950's to distinguish the US from "godless" communism. The various ways various groups (Irish, Italians, Jews) have been integrated into American society over time.) The more complicated a society is, the larger it is, the more communication and interactions between people, the more stress will be placed on competing social constructs.

As a professional interaction experience designer, additional interactions complicate things almost exponentially. If you lived in a primitive village and never knew what happened 1/2 a mile beyond the boundaries of the village the simplistic "everything not mandatory is forbidden" (with, of course, memetic variations) might be workable enough. But an empire has to be more flexible. ("Forgive him Caesar- he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature," as Shaw wrote.)

Reason and the scientific method provide us with the tools to examine social constructs as objectively as humanly possible. Most people cannot use those tools. Some of them can only use those tools in limited areas (think so-called "scientists" who claim the scientific method should only be used in the job or in the lab, not in real life, where faith should prevail).

But enough people have been exposed to the scientific method and the fruits of scientific discovery to see, hey, it works! Like the cartoon, only some really fringe anti-evolutionist cases are going to take the antibiotic that worked 20 years ago instead of the one designed to combat the evolved form of the infection.

So when an atheist steps up and says, "Keep your baseless historico-social construct out of my life" what we're really saying is, "You have high AGR -- you have a disconnect with reality." If you believe in something without evidence to back up your beliefs you are, in point of fact, insane.

If some politician started making decisions based on World of Warcraft lore and trying to make policy based on Horde versus Alliance affiliation, that politician would be widely viewed as insane. But from the Pompotous's viewpoint, a politician standing up and talking about faith being a deciding factor in decisions is much the same as yelling, "Horde rules!" during a senate debate. It reveals a disconnect with reality, it reveals high AGR.

My wife knows I think she is insane. But she knows that I admit my own insanity -- everybody has AGR to a greater or lesser extent.

Religion and faith play by different rules. A religionist looks at somebody else who is a different religion and they are wrong or heretics or apostate or whatever, and you may kill them or torture them or pray for them or whatever, but the other whackos are playing at a similar level of AGR.

I've seen several atheists use the argument that religionists are atheists to every god except their own and that's just not true. A religionist's denial of other gods is not based on reason and evidence and all those other good things, it is based on faith and thus isn't atheism. Religion is not rational. That doesn't mean that any specific theist is dangerous -- not all crazy people are dangerous -- but it does mean that every specific theist is irrational on the subject of religion.

Any atheistic declaration is an attack on the theists sanity in a "you people aren't connected to reality" way. That's the attack. That's the "militant" position. It's not comparing apples to apples in a communal way of "mine is better," it's saying, "all of your apples have the same existence in reality as the 'tea' my 2-year old daughter pores for me out of her empty play teapot."

Atheism based in rationality and the scientific method is utterly at odds with religionists about how reality is determined. That is a deep conflict. Imagine someone made it to 40 still believing that Santa Claus personally put his presents under the tree after coming through the chimney -- wouldn't an anti-Clausian's attempt to persuade the poor fool of reality be seen as an attack upon his world?