Smart People

Very smart people often express frustration to me about interacting with less intelligent people, and vice versa. Even though they are very smart, one thing they have never figured out is how to communicate successfully with people who are less smart. I think I’ve isolated one of the reasons for this.

One of the primary aspects of intelligence is recognizing specifically what you don’t know about something. For example, somebody says, “John wants to shoot your sister.” A pretty stupid person just takes that at face value, questions nothing. A somewhat smart person might think, “Huh? Why?” A smarter person might think, “Why are you telling me this? What’s your motive? Is this true? Shoot how? Are we talking about the same John? When does he want to do it? Is this urgent? Did something happen? It seems like there’s some story behind this.” And so forth. Many people will actually have all of those questions basically at once, instantaneously. It will be “obvious” to the smart person that they don’t know these things. The less intelligent person will be vaguely aware that they are missing data. The stupid person will have absolutely no idea that they are missing anything.

So when a very smart person and a less intelligent person talk to each other, the smart person often totally overlooks this. They simply get frustrated with the less-intelligent person. They are confused. “Surely this person knows they don’t know, so why are they behaving this way? They must be trying to do the wrong thing, or something?” And the less intelligent person is totally baffled. “Why is this smart person being such a jerk to me? I’ve told them the truth and they can’t seem to see it.”

So what you get is smart people just being critical about “stupid people,” without any effective solution or ability to communicate, and less intelligent people being frustrated about geeks or “the intellectuals” or nerds or whatever—feeling like they are being talked down to, disrespected, and generally invalidated.