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

[marmota.livejournal.com]

make the same mistake twice or even three times

I'm not sure any time after the first is a mistake; it's just verification. I'm also not sure what it says about me that I'd probably get other people to pull the lever again in order to figure out what had happened when I pulled it ("Hey, check this out..."), but I rather suspect that would acquire a crowd of zotted people eager to learn the result themselves, so at least I'd be in good company.

I tend to think of arrogance as a trait of the over-educated, generally cured or displaced by worldly experience. Such as pulling a lot of levers. Fits in pretty well with your INT/WIS analogy.

I suspect that knowing that it takes at least three data points to plot a trend, combined with the curiosity to seek out that data, is exactly the sort of basic and critical "critical thinking" combination that things like M-B should be looking for, but aren't.