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JanetK comments on What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought - Less Wrong
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Or the other way around - sometimes the 'book smart - street smart' is a put down of the geek as well, not just used against the non-geek.
People said of my brother 'How can someone so smart be so dumb?'. He was both book smart and street smart. In fact he lived to 60 without having a wife, a house, a car, a permanent job, more belongings then he could carry and so on. He was never an alcoholic, addict, gambler or anything like that. He spent his life as a nomad and came to no harm. He knew his streets. He was almost saintly in the way he treated others. I never heard him say something unkind in his whole life. He had a very high IQ and knew a great deal fact-wise. His memory was good. He played an excellent game of chess. What he didn't have was any sense of perspective or way of making plans that would work out or way of accurately judging others and so on. He had no way of using his book smarts or his street smarts. I have often wondered if there was a word for what his was missing in his makeup. Anyone have a word?
Two words: He had no worldly ambition.
[missing the point]
That was five words.
[/missing the point]
<witty and insightful> I like the implication that if you'd missed off the second set of tags, everything you wrote from now on on LW would be irrelevant.
Whoops, I think you forgot your closing ta-... </not paying enough attention> Ah! I get it now. I should've closed that tag years ago.
That's not particularly well-formed, is it now?
I'm very strongly tempted to respond with a "Yo mama" joke here.
Not to worry, a user-agent will usually add closing tags as needed, except where it's ambiguous. Most likely the error would not have proceeded past the end of the current block-level element.
Of course, that's assuming those bbcode-style tags are being rendered straight into html...
Presumably the people who said those things about your brother might have said similar things about Socrates, Buddha and Jesus. All three of those personages have had their share of critics during their lifetimes. Few of those critics' names or ideas (to say nothing of their wives, houses and belongings) survive to the present day. The few that did are mostly preserved and presented as negative examples and antagonists.
Based on the description provided, I am not sure I would say there was something missing in your brother's make-up; no major desirable traits, anyhow. Have you ever considered that your brother's sense of perspective may have far surpassed your own?
As to words, how about 'ascetic'?
Well actually no. If he had had a sense of perspective then I think he might well have been ascetic. Of course, being my brother I had a lot of respect and love for him, but I have to be realistic about his abilities.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "he didn't have ... any sense of perspective or way of making plans that would work out or way of accurately judging others". Did he have a form of high-functioning autism or Asperger's?
Yes I have thought that Asperger's was a possibility but along with something else. In any case I seems to me that book smarts and street smarts does not cover the spectrum of what we call intelligence. It is like, as an analogy, someone knows how to add and how to multiple but has no idea when it is appropriate to add and when it is appropriate to multiple.