Microblog Memes

I used to work in an engineering firm and the way I'd explain some of my coworkers' inanity to my wife at dinner is that the engineering mindset is to search for simple, elegant solutions to complex problems, and in cases where there is no such simple solution (let's take social or political issues as a common thread, here) that tends to lead to the engineer preferring a spherical-chickens-in-a-vacuum oversimplification over the complex and nuanced reality -- usually accompanied by protestations that "If only people would act rationally!" their ideas would work and make things better.

There's some overlap as well between engineers and the sort of mentality that one is a disembodied intelligence piloting a meat puppet, which feeds into those sorts of thought patterns. Like, dude, you may think of yourself as a purely logical being, but the fact of the matter is that like all of us you're a bodge-job mess of higher-order thinking strapped to a tribal ape with duct tape and baling wire. You can't ignore the rough edges that come with that if you want to find social or political ideas that actually work.

(and I'm fully aware this comment won't land well in this community)

What do you mean?

Jk jk jk

I've worked with plenty of people who were regarded as "brilliant" by management and a few other employees (from different departments). And nearly every time it was they were just really charismatic. Like, they could have easily have been highly successful as a used car salesmen at a junk yard.

Not trying to boast, but I appear to be one of the "smartest" people in my field. My evidence for this is that regardless of what company I work for, and I've worked for several at this point in my career, I become the "go to" person for solving complex issues that stump my co-workers. I often can solve whatever problem brought them to me in a reasonable time frame, or at least propose a solution that will lead to the desired outcome.

Personally, I would mainly attribute this to my propensity for learning everything I can about everything I touch. I'm not just looking for the "how do I make this work" of it, I'm always looking for "why is it broken and what do I need to do to make it not broken". It's a small difference, but the former is very results focused, fix it, regardless of whether the solution makes sense, and the latter is understanding the issue and finding a way to make it work from there. I don't think I have any special ability or intelligence that others don't have, nor that I'm smarter or better than anyone.

I spent years studying human behaviour. I'm certain I've lost friends due to my efforts. I spent a lot of time carefully paying attention to everything from body language, tone, phrasing, vocabulary, speech pacing.... Just everything I possibly could. I examined the presentation of statements and the responses based on all those factors to try to find trends for how to approach making statements that people reacted positively to.

I'm neurodivergent, I have ADHD. I may have a touch of autism in there but that's never been checked nor verified, so I hesitate to say that I'm on that spectrum. I feel as though people are far too frequently saying that "I think I'm autistic" or something of the sort, without any proof thereof, and IMO, that cheapens the diagnosis. We've seen such callous disregard of serious disorders before, particularly with OCD and statements like "I'm a little OCD". Unless you've been diagnosed with the condition, you're not. You probably don't understand OCD well enough to say whether any activity is classifiably OCD or not, and the misuse of the term has led to it becoming a meme at this point. I don't want to contribute to that happening to another condition.

Regardless: after years of effort and observation, I have been described as helpful and approachable, which has always been my aim.

I know of people whom I would consider to be easily more intelligent than I am, who get regarded as combative and difficult; mainly because they haven't spent as much time as I have examining the nuances of communication and putting in active efforts to adjust how their statements are made so that they are recieved in a more positive light. They have, instead, spent most of their time enhancing their knowledge, and have understanding in many complex topics that I simply have not spent the time learning in order to understand.

I explain all of this to contribute to your point. Social capability does not and should not imply someone's intelligence or knowledge. There's a lot of factors that go into someone's perception of another person that aren't things that you can really quantify well. From emotional intelligence, tone, the phrasing of the words used, even the selection of words, among many other factors, can be very deceptive in demonstrating someone's intelligence.

There's also the factor of having a deep knowledge in something you're interested in, and a very limited knowledge of everything else. You can be extremely well spoken in your area of expertise and make completely irrational and insane statements regarding things you know little about. There's also the matter of vocabulary. Even very well larned topics can be portrayed as something you know little about, simply because you either lack the vocabulary to speak about it, or that your vocabulary on the topic is so advanced that it comes across like you don't know what you're talking about, since nobody knows what you're saying, and it sounds like you're making things up to sound like you know more than you do.

There's a lot of factors here and there all important to the perception of whether a person is intelligent or not.

This phenomenon is known as the "curse of knowledge".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Understanding the subject is necessary but not sufficient to being a good teacher.

In my experience, half of my engineering professors were terrible teachers