Poll: Would you rather be lucky or smart?
- Thread starter Drathnoxis
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Lucky! Because you'll be better off, and dumb enough to convince yourself you are smart anyway.
I mean, people under-rate luck in the first place. In my case I am damn lucky I am a human being, born to wealthy parents, now in a stable job, in a stable country, in a part of the world that I can pass as a default acceptable guy. Yes, I am lucky to get all this dreaded privilege, to the point that it'll probably outweigh any other major factor in my life.
Contrapoints described wisdom as "just the means to sketch the bars to your own jail cell", and you could well be an intelligent person in a really rubbish set of circumstances that prevent you from really applying that intelligence in a meaningful way, and you could end up horribly bored with your job/livelihood.
I mean, people under-rate luck in the first place. In my case I am damn lucky I am a human being, born to wealthy parents, now in a stable job, in a stable country, in a part of the world that I can pass as a default acceptable guy. Yes, I am lucky to get all this dreaded privilege, to the point that it'll probably outweigh any other major factor in my life.
Contrapoints described wisdom as "just the means to sketch the bars to your own jail cell", and you could well be an intelligent person in a really rubbish set of circumstances that prevent you from really applying that intelligence in a meaningful way, and you could end up horribly bored with your job/livelihood.
Ignorance is bliss. I guess blissful ignorance, even moreso.
Smart but unfortunate...? Eh, I don't envy Hawking.
Smart but unfortunate...? Eh, I don't envy Hawking.
Not to sound arrogant, but I have tried the second option, and it has NOT worked out well for me so far. I have a very high IQ but fat lot of good it does me since my body has broken down and become profoundly disabled with a myriad of incurable, untreatable chronic and progressive illnesses that have stolen the last decade of my life after poisoning the first two and now seeming to deny me a future as well as a present without profound suffering. This has all been down to a lifetime of extremely bad luck. I tell people I am cursed with profoundly, ridiculously bad luck but they don?t believe me of course, that is until they are around long enough to see the pattern, like my husband. He is the one good thing left in my life, knock on wood!
On top of the obvious, the smarter you are, the more you see... and the more darkness you see in the world. Extremely smart people are notoriously plagued with existential depression, which is not an issue for the blissfully unaware. The saying, ?Ignorance is bliss? is a saying for a reason, because it has a universal truth to it. This is not to discount the vast and unassailable beauty also in the world, but when you are aware of the burgeoning darkness and how unnecessary so much of it is, when you try to devote your life to bringing light to that darkness however small, and that life fails and your efforts are neither understood nor appreciated because others canot understand you or follow your train of thought but merely gawp at you as if you were an alien with three heads, it can easily lead to despair.
Further, studies have actually beeen done on a closely related idea, that of skill or intelligence versus luck, and which matters more to outcomes with regard to leading a successful life. Guess which wins? Luck wins out over skill handily, which explains why for example I could never get a promotion when I was able to work because very high intelligence is threatening to those who do not have it, which is the vast majority of the world. Instead, I found myself reporting to bosses who were not just less intelligent but profoundly so, and the higher up the chain you went, the greater the incompetence. It?s a miracle anything gets done in large organizaitons, really, because people tend to be promoted to the level of their incompetence, rather than the level of their skill. Luck plays an even greater role in entrepreneurial ventures. Just ask my husband, a lifelong entrepreneur. Here is one article that touches on this interesting subject, though there are others and maybe better ones.
https://www.wired.com/2012/11/luck-and-skill-untangled-qa-with-michael-mauboussin/
It seems we are not adept at recognising the role that luck plays in our lives, and thus we naturally undervalue it. I have not had that luxury, as my luck has been SO bad as to be catastrophic. I have worked at the problems all my life with every ounce of intelligence I have, including going to medical school myself and working in biomedical research to attempt to unravel the mystery of my failing health, but my health failed faster than I could keep up and I was unable to complete the full program. My health is not the only area in life in which my luck is abyssmally bad, just the most serious, because without our health we cannot do much of anything else. Most of us take our health for granted as a matter of course, without a second thought. It is a luxury beyond measure.
So yes, I would vastly prefer ignorance and luck... in fact, there have been times when I have thought I would prefer ignorance full stop on its own. Great intelligence is a great burden, and it is not appreciated or valued by our current culture. This is a disposable culture of soundbytes and vast ignorance. People react with open hostility to anyone who even sounds remotely smarter than they are, and even to the idea that we are not all ?equal?and uniform in every way. IQ research is fascinating but to the rest of the current Western culture, it is taboo. How ridiculous when it is patently obvious that some of us are smarter than others. We are not all carbon copies of each other, and thank goodness for it! We would all be so much better off if we were to value and leverage our intellectually gifted people as a society, but for now at least this is not happening. Truly smart people are shunned and ridiculed, passed over for job opportunities, marginalized and isolated. Being highly intelligent is in itself isolating, because there are so few people statistically who can relate to and understand your more esoteric thought processes.
Please note, I am not arguing against intelligence in a general sense. I wish our society would properly value and utilize our intelligent members. We would all be better off for it. I am merely expressing my personal opinion about my own life, since I have (I hope) unique experience in one part of the subject matter of this quiz. Though I am grateful for the beauty I have experienced and for the intellectual gifts I have, I would not wish this life on anyone, not even an enemy.
On top of the obvious, the smarter you are, the more you see... and the more darkness you see in the world. Extremely smart people are notoriously plagued with existential depression, which is not an issue for the blissfully unaware. The saying, ?Ignorance is bliss? is a saying for a reason, because it has a universal truth to it. This is not to discount the vast and unassailable beauty also in the world, but when you are aware of the burgeoning darkness and how unnecessary so much of it is, when you try to devote your life to bringing light to that darkness however small, and that life fails and your efforts are neither understood nor appreciated because others canot understand you or follow your train of thought but merely gawp at you as if you were an alien with three heads, it can easily lead to despair.
Further, studies have actually beeen done on a closely related idea, that of skill or intelligence versus luck, and which matters more to outcomes with regard to leading a successful life. Guess which wins? Luck wins out over skill handily, which explains why for example I could never get a promotion when I was able to work because very high intelligence is threatening to those who do not have it, which is the vast majority of the world. Instead, I found myself reporting to bosses who were not just less intelligent but profoundly so, and the higher up the chain you went, the greater the incompetence. It?s a miracle anything gets done in large organizaitons, really, because people tend to be promoted to the level of their incompetence, rather than the level of their skill. Luck plays an even greater role in entrepreneurial ventures. Just ask my husband, a lifelong entrepreneur. Here is one article that touches on this interesting subject, though there are others and maybe better ones.
https://www.wired.com/2012/11/luck-and-skill-untangled-qa-with-michael-mauboussin/
It seems we are not adept at recognising the role that luck plays in our lives, and thus we naturally undervalue it. I have not had that luxury, as my luck has been SO bad as to be catastrophic. I have worked at the problems all my life with every ounce of intelligence I have, including going to medical school myself and working in biomedical research to attempt to unravel the mystery of my failing health, but my health failed faster than I could keep up and I was unable to complete the full program. My health is not the only area in life in which my luck is abyssmally bad, just the most serious, because without our health we cannot do much of anything else. Most of us take our health for granted as a matter of course, without a second thought. It is a luxury beyond measure.
So yes, I would vastly prefer ignorance and luck... in fact, there have been times when I have thought I would prefer ignorance full stop on its own. Great intelligence is a great burden, and it is not appreciated or valued by our current culture. This is a disposable culture of soundbytes and vast ignorance. People react with open hostility to anyone who even sounds remotely smarter than they are, and even to the idea that we are not all ?equal?and uniform in every way. IQ research is fascinating but to the rest of the current Western culture, it is taboo. How ridiculous when it is patently obvious that some of us are smarter than others. We are not all carbon copies of each other, and thank goodness for it! We would all be so much better off if we were to value and leverage our intellectually gifted people as a society, but for now at least this is not happening. Truly smart people are shunned and ridiculed, passed over for job opportunities, marginalized and isolated. Being highly intelligent is in itself isolating, because there are so few people statistically who can relate to and understand your more esoteric thought processes.
Please note, I am not arguing against intelligence in a general sense. I wish our society would properly value and utilize our intelligent members. We would all be better off for it. I am merely expressing my personal opinion about my own life, since I have (I hope) unique experience in one part of the subject matter of this quiz. Though I am grateful for the beauty I have experienced and for the intellectual gifts I have, I would not wish this life on anyone, not even an enemy.
Yeah, the forum doesn't like certain characters. I'm guessing you copied your post from Word or something similar which uses the quotation marks with the little tails on it. I always do a find and replace through Notepad.Lifeonerth said:
"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be' - she always called me Elwood - 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.'
Well, for years I was smart.
I recommend pleasant.
You may quote me."
- Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey"
Well, for years I was smart.
I recommend pleasant.
You may quote me."
- Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey"
The exaggeration and hyperbole don't really help make this a discussion so much as a me needing to correct you about my actual stance in really obnoxious waysAddendum_Forthcoming said:
You clearly don't understand everything you read given there is nowhere in my post that I said that I did. It would be a significant reduction however. Less options. Certain things I enjoy now I would not be able to enjoy the same
Your post is an annoyingly long talk about how we don't all understand everything. Yes. Duh. How you could possibly *genuinely* think I said otherwise escapes me.
The fact there's many things I don't fully understand in no way implies that I should be fine with a further reduction and that it would not affect me.
Being dumb would also make it harder to have a generally okay grasp of things I don't want to spend all my time investigating
It may mean that things I do want to understand I may never be able to. And before I get an asinine reply of that already being the case for some subjects being dumb would expand it to more subjects
Lucky. Being smart is no guarentee of success. Plenty if smart people have toiled away in obscurity.