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4/8/08
Dear 1585,
When I
first read your essays,
I was glad that I finally
found a website that agreed with the liberal and conservative
viewpoints I
have. I used to
refuse to call myself a
liberal because I did not want to be associated with the UREGs.
However, I wonder, who exactly
do you define as stupid? Even
though I have the same test scores and
grades as my stupid peers I still got called stuff like
“retard” and “insane”
because of my social inadequacies and speech impediments (I did not
speak until
I was five). People
literally thought I
was retarded and this annoying girl I knew in middle school kept asking
me
these random math questions like what’s 3x3? Like I seriously wouldn't
know the answer! They
all thought my future was going to be in
a mental hospital.
I didn’t write about
my sob story for pity, but I’m just
wondering whether you consider people stupid due to their personality
or
because they have lower grades/test scores than an intellectual? It’s confusing how
I feel really intellectual
yet very stupid at the same time. My
IQ
is only 97 (no joke), yet I'm currently reading literature like Crime and Punishment and nonfiction like The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker. Sometimes
I feel too stupid for such intellectual pursuits, but I keep going
because
reading is my passion. I
hope I have
writing skills good enough to get a book published someday.
When I transferred schools, I
was considered one of the
smart kids because of my demeanor, being articulate (I outgrew the
speech
impediments), and how I would bring novels to school every day. Whenever there was free
time, I would just
take the book out of my blazer pocket (I went to a lame-ass Catholic
school
that made me stop believing in religion) and read. Therefore,
my teachers were impressed and I unintentionally
became one of their favorite students. When
I participated in class discussions, my
intellect shone through and everyone either loved it or loathed it. I baffled two of my stupid
ultra-conservative
theology teachers and both of them softly muttered, “I don't
know.” I
seemed to be the girl who knew everything
and was seriously told I should be on Jeopardy!.
Yet, I still believed I was an
idiot who only knew
everything she knew because she actually picked up a book, unlike most
people
her age who are busy partying, having sex with their boyfriends, and
doing
other normal teen stuff. Now
I know
that’s nonsense because of your “Just
Be
Yourself?” essay.
Thanks! Therefore,
I
didn’t work to the best of my
ability and ended up at a crappy state college. Hopefully,
I'll transfer to a better school
where my serious need for intellectual stimulation is appreciated.
Am I a nerd who never got over
being a nerd? I’m
probably only a nerd in the most literal
definition: A person who is focused on a particular interest to the
point they
sacrifice social interaction. I've
never
seen Star Wars, I have no real
interest
in video games, and I know no more about computers than anyone else. I’m probably a
literature nerd; that’s why I’m
so happy this website is sprinkled with literary references, even if I
haven’t read
some of the authors and poets you mentioned yet. Someone
even suggested I should be an English
professor, since I’m so enthusiastic about it. Calling myself a nerd seems
like a paradox
based on everything I said in the previous paragraphs, but in my
personal
observations, many nerds I’ve met had average intelligence
and just happened to
have really nerdy interests like computer programming and anime.
I have learned that I have to
participate in the game of
life; and as you said in The Other N-Word, not
participating is worse
than
failing. I wish I
read this article in
high school so I could learn to study being as beautiful and social as
the
popular girls who thought I was a joke. When
I went to my prom, I had no date, but people were shocked that I was
prettier
than they expected and I got more compliments than I ever had in my
entire
life. Everyone who
I thought laughed at me,
suddenly became friendly. Before
this, I
felt like an asexual freak that no guy was seriously interested in.
I’m sorry for writing
this very long e-mail and I may have
even veered off from the point I was trying to make, but I just felt
like I had
to express all of this to someone. It
is
as if objectively speaking I’m stupid, and subjectively
I’m highly intelligent. I
am probably
only mature, as many
adults have told me over the years. Maturity
has nothing to do with intelligence; I am probably only like this
because of
going through different experiences than my peers.
I don’t know how to
conclude this. I’m
not trying to tell you to become more P.C.
or to change your mind about the essays you wrote, because I do agree
with you. I just
feel
that the type of stupid
people you’re describing have called me stupid countless
times, and I find it
messed up. I don't
even consider “nerd”
or “geek” an insult. I
wish I was called
that instead of the retard and insane insults. At
least nerds have the positive of
contributing to society by being intelligent. If
you do find me stupid for whatever reason,
it’s okay, it won't hurt my feelings. I
don’t have much else to say. Thank
you
for reading this.
—A.B.
Dear A.B.:
Thanks for writing, and a
thousand times thanks for asking
this specific question. I
realize that
the essays are frequently, either for the sake of comedy or expedience,
a bit
too general about what we mean here by “smart” and
“stupid,” and your letter
gives me the opportunity to expand on this.
I’ll answer your last
question first by saying, no, of
course I don’t think you’re stupid.
Now,
many readers might be thinking that I’m going easy on you
because you’re a fan
of the site, but indeed, the fact that you are a fan of the site
is—along with
your eloquent and thoughtful letter—one of the main pieces of
evidence I have
that you are in fact smarter than average.
1585 essays are not easy reading, in terms either of
diction/structure
or of the complexity and harshness of their content, and to be sure,
most
people in our society (certainly the vast majority of people your age)
would
tend to react to them by saying either “I don’t get
it” (poor reading
comprehension) or “Duh! These people are
mean and obviously want to kill everybody!”
(inability to
read for content
instead of tone)—if they even bothered to read them at all,
which they almost
certainly wouldn’t. So,
if my answer is
influenced by the fact that you’re a fan, this is not because
I am susceptible
to flattery, but rather because the fact that you not only read but
also appear
to comprehend the site (as we do get the occasional letter from someone
who
reads the site but misunderstands what we say on it) is in fact
legitimate
evidence that you are smarter than average.
Now, your concern about your
intelligence seems to stem from
two things—learning disabilities and your score on I.Q.
tests—and neither of
these things is to be confused with overall
“smartness” in the grand sense,
just as neither the simple wearing of revealing clothes or the genetic
accident
of a pretty face is to be confused with overall
“sexiness.” There
are people with learning disabilities
or below-genius scores on I.Q. tests who are clearly
“smarter” than people who
score more highly, just as there are people with bodies too curvy or
faces too
inexact to be professional models who are clearly
“sexier” (i.e., who have
“it”) than some people who do find work as models
(I personally have noticed
that the contestants on America’s
Next
Top Model whom I find most attractive always seem to get
kicked off pretty
early).
Admitting this is not
“P.C.,” but merely an acknowledgement
of the plain fact that complex areas of human existence cannot always
be
measured with unfailing exactitude by some test.
We realize that I.Q. is a flawed concept, and
when we mention it in essays as an indicator of intelligence it is
usually in
humorous contexts or for the sake of brevity.
The reason we mention it at
all
is to demonstrate that we do believe there is such
a thing as being smart or stupid (which we do), and invoking
a
term like “I.Q.” as convenient shorthand is the
most efficacious way of doing
this. The reason it
is necessary to do
this, of course, is because, although I.Q. tests are legitimately
flawed, the
“I.Q. is a flawed concept” bandwagon was hijacked
in the ’90s by the P.C. crowd,
who, rather than attempting to come up with a more accurate determinant
of
“smart” and “stupid,” attempted
to do away with the concept of intelligence
altogether and replace it with laughable whitewashings like
“E.Q.” Someday
there will be a better test of how
smart someone really is, but it
doesn’t exist yet, and until it does, people who believe that
there is such a
thing as intelligence at all will be stuck of necessity with throwing
around
the term “I.Q.”
So, what’s the
problem with I.Q.? For
starters, I.Q. tests are heavily slanted
towards measuring skill at math (and math-like concepts), and as people
who
clearly live more on the verbal side of things, we realize that this is
a
problem. I myself
am no slouch at I.Q.
tests, but I have also met people who score better than I do, but than
whom I
am… well, clearly a lot smarter.
This is
because I.Q. measures abstract reasoning—you know, all those
“what shape comes
next?” questions—where thought is put into symbolic
form. The problem
with this is that there are lots
of people who are great at thinking when the thoughts are symbolized by
remote
values where nothing is at stake, but who suck when the thinking has to
be
applied to real life. And
by “real life”
I don’t mean some sour-grapes concept like “street
smarts,” but rather
reasoning about big ideas that have effects on human existence one way
or
another. In other
words, having a high
I.Q. means you are good at puzzles, and someone can be good at puzzles
but
still kind of a dumbass—or, at least, not as
“smart” as someone who might have
a lower I.Q.—if you talk to them for five minutes. This probably has a great
deal to do with
compartmentalization—it is, admittedly, a mystery how
Descartes or Thomas
Aquinas could have philosophized about religion as brilliantly as they
did and not at any point have
figured out that
there is, in fact, no God. I
suppose the
answer lies in some extinct zeitgeist
inaccessible to us today, just as we cannot fathom how Thomas Jefferson
could
have written so brilliantly about liberty and still kept slaves (though
there
were certainly atheists in Aquinas’s and
Descartes’s times, just as Jefferson
had contemporaries of far lesser ability who still managed to realize
that
slavery was utterly inexcusable).
Imagine if we were to go back
in time and administer I.Q.
tests to both Newton
and
Shakespeare. Almost
certainly, Newton’s
I.Q. would be off the chart, even though in some areas he was a
downright baby
(he reputedly died a virgin), whereas Shakespeare’s, while it
would probably
not be low, might well not register above the official
“genius” line of 140,
and would certainly, whatever the
score, not come anywhere close to
reflecting his inarguable immeasurable genius, which both engaged and
enriched
the entirety of human experience.
Indeed, it is the relationship
of I.Q. tests to the term genius
itself that exposes their biggest
flaw. The word is
rooted in the concept
of creation, as in genesis
or generation, and someone can be
good at puzzles and not necessarily
able to change the world in any kind of creative way—Newton
himself obviously did, but not everyone with a high I.Q. does. And I.Q. doesn’t
even necessarily indicate
that someone would be good at Jeopardy!,
which you also mentioned, since Jeopardy!
is about recall, not abstract reasoning (obviously, someone with a high
I.Q. is
not born possessing a ton of
information about, say, opera). Both
of
these are ways of being smart, but not the only two ways. It is something of an
“all lions are cats,
but not all cats are lions” situation—all people
with high I.Q.s may be said to
be smart, but not all smart people
have high I.Q.s.
But your concern was not about
nitpicking I.Q. at the
highest levels, but rather what a score in the lower levels does or
does not
mean. First of all,
technically, an I.Q.
of 97 is not stupid but nearly
exactly average (how many times
have
you taken the test, by the way?), and in any case, a score in that
range is not
inimical to genius. J.D.
Salinger was
reputed to have a low I.Q., but he is a genius because the fact that he
wrote The Catcher in the Rye proves
that he
was a genius. It is
not as complex a
book as, say, Ulysses or Moby-Dick, but it is arguably the most
culturally influential novel, in a broad and positive direction, of the
20th
Century, so the person who wrote it is by definition a genius. Yes, we believe that there
are such things as smart and stupid,
but those terms for us have more to do with Nietzsche’s
ideas of the übermensch
vs. the herd than they do with
scores on I.Q.
tests. We do not
align them solely with
influence on the world (for example, Hitler was
“influential,” but also
obviously a complete dumbass—he was wrong about everything,
and what’s more, Mein Kampf
is horribly written), but rather we
use that concept to temper the
imperfect results of short-answer tests.
As for the learning or
developmental disabilities, that
stuff is all over the place. Einstein
had what is called “language delay” as a child, and
apparently there are links between mathematical ability and
autistic tendiencies that we don't fully understand.
And
of course we all know the stories about
legitimately retarded people who
can
do crazy math in their heads, etc.
I
myself came to school on the infamous “short bus”
for a time in first grade,
but this is because I was a giant spaz, which has nothing to do with
intelligence one way or the other.
Most nearly, what we mean when
we lionize smartness is a
tendency towards intellectual and philosophical bravery. Show a dumb person a
“weird” movie like Fargo
or Being John Malkovich, and they
will actually get mad—personally
offended by the fact that such
movies exist. But
show them to a smart person and, while
they may prefer one movie to the other, the one they like less will not
make
them angry. Only a
stupid movie would
make them angry. And
though I.Q. strongly correlates
with these groups
(the average I.Q. of the people who
like the smart movies will be higher), it does not exactly
correlate (it is not the case that the I.Q. of every
person in the smart-movie-liking
group will be higher than that of every
person in the other one).
This dynamic is the artistic
distaff of the trend that has
been observed regarding religious people and moral dilemmas. Even though they are
supposedly more concerned with
moral fine points
than others are, studies have demonstrated that religious types react
with
offense to being presented with ethical paradoxes (e.g., the one about
the ten
kids on the train track and the one kid on the other track). This is because they have
become accustomed
to philosophical lethargy, to a point where they demand its continuance
from
the external world as a right. This
is
what stupid means, and it clearly
does not describe you.
In conclusion, my estimation is
that you are a smart person
who does poorly on I.Q. tests for some reason.
There are many indicators that you are smart, and
only one (the I.Q.
test score) that you are not, so the most logical explanation is that
I.Q.
tests do not accurately measure the way in which you are smart,
whatever that
may be. Consider an
analogy with
physical activity: many people are labeled “bad at
sports” as children, based
upon a sampling of only a few sports, but some of these grow up to
become
excellent at some other, less ubiquitous sport, or at some activity
that
clearly requires a great deal of physical coordination and
“athletic” prowess,
e.g., dance. There
are obviously such
things as being physically uncoordinated overall (bad at all sports),
or being
exceptionally physically prolific in general (will probably be pretty
good at
all sports and sport-like things with enough practice), but there is also clearly such a thing as being good
at some athletic activities but not others (e.g., an amazing dancer who
could
not hit a baseball to save his/her life).
Other people have probably said
things from time to time to
try and assuage your concerns about this matter, but I guess you
weren’t sure
whether you should believe them. But
since The 1585 has a spotless reputation for always endeavoring to say
the truest
thing possible and never bending it to spare anyone’s
feelings, maybe you will
be able to trust us. I’m
very glad to
have been able to write this for you, and for anyone else who may be
struggling
with the same issues.
Your Fellow Smart Person,
—Sexo Grammaticus
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