Stupid smart people

[andysocial]

Some people are referred to as being "so smart they never stop thinking so they're hard to follow." That's not smart, that's stupid. If you are expected to impart information to another, you must be smart enough to deal with your audience.

There's a guy yapping about FTP'ing files and ATM LANs and such, when he really doesn't need to show off how much he knows by spouting acronyms to a non-technical audience.

One of my bosses was mentioned as being too smart a while back. The catalyst was his penchant for changing his mind on major philosophical approaches for documents or test programs. The truly intelligent don't need to show off their knowledge, and they are capable of forming an opinion or decision before telling it to others. If you can't get your thoughts in order, you're not intelligent, you're scatterbrained. One need not be smart to confuse others. To enlighten others without seeming effort is a good hallmark of intelligence, though, in my opinion.

Comments

i don't know about that...

[goninzo.livejournal.com]

Some people who are truely genius level intelligence have a very tough time associating with people. a good example of that is Alan Turing. He wasn't the best at communicating his ideas and his ideas took several decades to have the full impact they were meant to have.

There is also an inverse relationship between intelligence and common sense. Just look at the stupid things that smart people do. Or look at how adept someone can be technically but cannot seem to get their social life in order.

It's the ability to narrow our focus down to a laser like point that makes geeks effective. However, this point rarely hits human interactions because human interactions are interruptions in your work.

Course, some people are just assholes and have poor ways of showing it as well, so YMMV. `8r

Re: i don't know about that...

[andysocial]

The guys I'm talking about are just clueless.

I'm in Mensa, I know about smart people. There are those few transcendent geniuses who are incapable of being normal (border between genius and madness and all that), but there aren't that many of them. My office is infested with people that want to be considered that way.

And, I'd rather not talk about personal life vs. technical proficiency this week, thank you very much. :-)

I know kinda what you are talking about!

[justgoto.livejournal.com]

I used to go into radio shack to show some of my programs I had made on my Tandy 64k to one of the salesmen in there, he seemed to like them. There was this geeky dude that looked just like the ones in, Return of the Geeks; you know the type! Well he would ramble on about algorithms (?) and stuff I never heard of. Since I just take some code and play around with it to see what it does I never knew any of what he was talking about. He was smart though!

Actually this was one of the programs I made on the tandy you could make the dog play the guitar, zoom in and out and sing using the joystick.