Yeah, exactly like Einstein.Like this schmuck ?
I disagree with a lot of what you said. People can think totally differently, and be a brain surgeon, and pretty much everyone will say hey that guy must be pretty smart. or if you came out of your garage with a cure of all cancers, i think basically everyone would recognize you as intelligent.
A lot of what you're talking about is you want people to give you respect without doing things that are worthy of respect, and humans just aren't logical creatures. They're never gonna put you up on a pedestal over everyone else they know unless you have a very clear and demonstratable accomplishment that proves it beyond a shadow of doubt.
And even then, sometimes you get very smart people that speak out of their field of expertise and they get caught slippin, so you could point a finger there, but hey we all make mistakes, and like mara said its about hteir ability to take on information in other cateogires and learn it if they will it so
People filed him into a post office to clerk. Then elected Hitler president of a country. He eventually became famous, but for much of his life he was unknown, underappreciated, and paid less that than whoever could punch the hardest.
And you're naming the most famous scientist in history. Now name the 20th most famous scientist in history. How about the 50th famous rapper? We know that one. It's Akon right? The super genius who sang "She thick yo" or "bitches aint nothin". As my formula predicts, Akon was rewarded far more than Einstein ever was.
Akon has a net worth of 60 million dollars.
For what he contributed to the world, Einstein should have been one of the wealthiest people ever to have lived. Yet, at the time of his death in 1955, his net worth amassed to a total of $65,000.
So as I was saying, we shoved the smartest person alive into a broom closet, and just made it rain for Hitler, who, if you read the histories, such as "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" you'll note that he was mainly elected to be the richest person in Germany, because he shouted the loudest. They really didn't have PA systems back then, at least not good ones, and his speeches actually got heard by more people, because he was screaming all the time, and his voice carried in the long table beer halls factory workers in Germany went to after work.
I mean, this example of the brain surgeon is classic people think. The title has the word brain in it so they must be smart. Basically, surgery is surgery. There are more complex surgeries, sure, but stitching thread in a tight space, or recognizing a swollen parietal lobe is not on the same level of difficulty as landing a rocket on the moon. You do have to be very good at surgery to become a brain surgeon, but it's really about the life and death stakes inherent in those surgeries, and the surgeons level of responsibility in those situations, rather than the actual intellectual difficulty of the job itself. People don't understand that, and they take the higher pay scale as evidence that we're talking about a job that takes massive intellect. I don't think any stupid people become brain surgeons, but keep in mind that your perception of a horse doctor and a human brain surgeon are probably very distorted. One gets paid 40x what the other one does, so maybe they're super smart. Most of them are, I'm just examining the logic that makes that an ASSUMPTION. Let's look at the actual surgeries brain surgeons perform, not the name, not the pay, the actual work.
So let's say the patient suffers from a brain aneurism. That's something brain surgeons sometimes handle. The process involves feeding a catheter with a rounded tip into an artery, typically in the groin, and slowly feeding it through the tube until It can reach the aneurism.
But that sounds easy right, pushing a wire through a tube. You'll also need several hundred thousand dollars worth of gear, to be able to see where the wire is in the vein. You'll need experience in understanding the visual cues you see on that monitor. But I'm still not hearing about any thought processes even half as complex as winning a game of Civ, which takes thousands of correct decisions balancing hundreds of simultaneous factors. I'm pretty sure the machine just beeps if the catheter presses too hard against an arterial wall.
Maybe it's not so simple, and this aneurism can't be solved with a coiling procedure. Time to get into a real surgery, a craniectomy. In this surgery, which is the one you see in tv and movies, a small area of the skull is perforated, cut and then removed. You have to be really careful, but action for action, it takes no more actual brain power that carefully cutting out any other type of square. They have specialized tools that make the procedure safe, but extreme focus and a steady hand are absolutely required. Still not hearing about those differential equations that local professors have to do all the time for lower middle class wages.
Now it's time to actually go into the brain and do one of several things, We can drain fluid with a hose, now guided by a robot arm in many cases, with the key factor being an extremely expensive monitoring system that allows them to see exactly where the tube goes. Vacuum up excess fluid, allow swelling to go down, and then replace bone flap later. There are some that require sewing, and the really hard one is tumor removal, which is quite a task, and anyone who does it has my respect.
Do you understand my point though? Everyone said brain surgeons were really smart, and I'm sure they are, but if you actually quit relying on heuristics, and boil this down to actual measurable things, I think we give insane amounts of credit for relatively small endeavors on a regular basis. None of this is meant to say brain surgeons don't need to learn and comprehend virtually everything about a complex field to be effective, but when I'm watching someone vacuum water out of a hole they drilled, no, I'm not blown away by how far beyond me they are. I do understand the background, study, and everything needed to be in that position in the first place. The 4 years pre med, the 4 years at med, the 1 year internship, and the 7 years residency. Like I said earlier, intelligence is a consideration for that job, and stupid people won't make it, but the main consideration is your track record of absolute reliability, so that you can be put into a situation where mistakes cost lives. That's why brain surgeons get paid so much.
What about real estate. Let's compare apples to apples. We have two real estate moguls. One takes a single dollar bill, doubles it, doubles that, and through a long chain of genius moves, amasses enough money to buy a skyscraper. Once he's there, he's holding all the cards, and can just basically turn the knob until the meter says profitable. The other accomplishes the exact same thing, but he doesn't need any brains. Dad gave him the money, he bought the skyscraper, and now money is gaining on autopilot.
So which one is the talented one? Which one is the genius? Obviously the younger one, who was able to accomplish the same feat in less time. If the guy who doubled his money each year in a down market was smart, he'd have crossed the finish line first. See the problem with Heuristics? Now let's add in some intentional deception. While guy number two is carefully mapping out his next purchase, guy number one is using the rent from his skyscraper to buy signs with his name on them, and hang them on other skyscrapers for a fee. Now he looks twice as big to the public, and he's actually loosing money on that fake sign, but he'll get it back, because all of us will be fooled, and you'll hand it to him as tribute for his greatness, evidenced by his hard work acquiring not one but two skyscrapers. Now in our perception, the person with the least amount of actual real estate prowess, appears to have twice as much success, by which we measure intellect, as a genuine real estate prodigy who came from noting and worked hard and smart.
Are brain surgeons all geniuses? Maybe, but I can tell you this much, you don't find many brain surgeons from families without the money to send a kid through 16 years of medical training. Was every person who wasn't born without a spare million simply not smart enough to make it? So again, we sorted who could even have the chance to appear intelligent to us, by income, which is just really stupid. Try that in the NBA, just only let rich kids apply, and soon the game will normalize to that input feed, and you'll all be calling 4 foot tall Jaden a basketball genius and telling little Kareem Abdul Jabar that he needs to get serious about his future and learn to wait tables, a job fitting for his talents.
Lastly, my points weren't about me. I'm just talking about the role misperceptions of intelligence based on stereotypes play in our society.
Success isn't a good measure of intelligence. It's a measure, and sometimes it's correct, maybe even most of the time, but it's a flawed system for assigning credibility for the above reasons.
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