Why "Smart" People Are "Stupid"

[drwex]

Today's xkcd (http://xkcd.com/c242.html) is funny, but it also illustrates a truism: smart people are more likely than less-smart (in the IQ sense) to make the same mistake twice or even three times.

It's a combination of curiousity asking questions that normal people really don't care about (is that a random thing? is it repeatable?) with the arrogance of the smart (that couldn't possibly happen to me... again).

Contextually, this is part of the discussion about why conventional (IQ-like) measures of intelligence are outmoded or just flat-out wrong. It's part of the science of why intelligence and emotion are really inseparable (and thus why Meyers-Briggs is a load of horsepuckey) and makes me want to get back into reading that body of literature.

Comments

[rdhdsnippet.livejournal.com]

"our schools (to pick one non-random example) are still using scientifically invalid metrics to do things like assign kids to groups, or rank them, or privilege them in various ways."

This worries me a lot, actually, and I don't know what to do to avoid it.

[drwex]

Nor do I, honestly :(

Now that we're going to move K to public school it's a more urgent issue for me than before.