On the Unimportance of Smart

November 15, 2004 at 11:41 pm (business, enlightenment, psychology)

An acquaintance of mine prides herself on being smart and having accomplished things in life because of being smart. But, to me, it’s obvious from listening to her words that her intelligence — her raw IQ — barely threatens to eclipse the average. That may sound brutal, but such a perception is exactly the point of this entry. So where do her accomplishments come from, if not her surpassing intelligence? Mainly, she just has gumption — the spark of passionate desire, the dedicated hardheadedness, and the sheer ballsiness to pursue her goals. But she rarely credits anything resembling such qualities; she prefers to credit her smarts which I believe just aren’t anything to write home about.

From casual observation, I’d say this is true for a lot of people, too. Among the “smart kids” I knew from high school and college, very few of them truly seemed to possess exceptional intelligence. What was chalked up as raw Brain by teachers, parents, and the individuals themselves actually seemed to me a glorious, diverse palette of other virtues that went strangely unrecognized, or rather misrecognized as simple cognitive ability.

Collectively, we seem to revere intelligence extremely highly — higher, I’d argue, than any other virtue that has application outside the confines of our private lives.

This has certainly been my own judgement over long periods of my life. What could be more valuable than being innately smart, I thought at one time, since it is the one virtue that can give birth to all others? At other times in my life, being a smart kid was the only aspect of myself I didn’t altogether hate; I valued intelligence because, I thought, it was all I had to cling to in this world, all I had of worth.

But of course not all virtue can be born of raw reason. Our postmodern science fiction is replete with stories of passionless, superintelligent computers receiving their most powerful enlightenment through a proverbial Android’s Holy Grail: the smallest drop of human emotion. And early Romantic works like Frankenstein also express that side of our culture that believes in the danger of embracing our rational intelligence too zealously, neglecting our other faculties. Clearly there has existed a thread of our culture that has recognized over-valuing of intelligence ever since the Enlightenment vaulted intelligence to the primacy of our values.

But the Enlightenment, I’d argue, in addition to being an historical term not without a twinge of irony, never really ended. We’re still living it. We pour gobs of money and manpower into an educational system that produces the occasional poet and ridiculed philosophy major, but mostly recognized academics like lawyers, scientists, journalists, and doctors. And as a result, our doctors have ensured that we’re living longer than ever before.

But aren’t most of those long lives still lived in quiet desperation?

A conversation with another friend yesterday partially prompted this post. “There are many more important things to have,” I told my friend, “than smarts.” “Like what?” she asked me. I fumbled a couple of trite-but-true poetic virtues, but then a big one struck me: humility. Humility is the central ingredient to Taoist values. It’s also the key to Christian repentance, forgiveness, and compassion. And it’s also that virtue that encourages us to recognize our lack of understanding of the universe — that virtue without which even the most brilliant scientist might be prone to embracing a fallacious hypothesis. Humility is the virtue that, nowadays, I would find far easier to argue as the one virtue from which all others are born.

But we certainly don’t teach humility in schools. Nor do we teach compassion, or peacemaking, or selflessness, or awareness. I believe we don’t teach them in schools because, to varying degrees, virtue always implies a value judgement, and we’re collectively offended by any value judgements in public or government-sponsored arenas like schools. The only value judgement our schools tacitly teach kids is the value of being smart above all else; anything else is outside schools’ purview.

But more to the point, are other virtues really in demand? Ask yourself when you last looked at someone, deeply awed, and said, “Wow, that person is so humble.” See? No one cares about humble.

No one cares about “humble” because “humble” doesn’t get you stuff. Humble won’t let you rise to the top of a corporation, or let you patent a new hybrid fuel engine, or let you release a multi-platinum album. “Humble” does not lead to power, fame, or glory of any kind. People don’t talk about the humble, because there’s probably not much to talk about; they’re quiet people whose actions have largely invisible consequences. The humble seem powerless. They say that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but I say the opposite: absolute power is wrought by absolute corruption. But if power and corruption are mutually exclusive with humility, then what could humility possibly get you?

Humility lets you sleep at night.

Christ so famously said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” I’ve always been somewhat puzzled by this, since the meek have no desire to possess the earth in the first place — that’s what makes them the meek. But the greater message of the Beatitudes — that the humble underdogs are more receptive to God’s saving grace than any others — is something I recognize as absolute Truth. And though I make the point in the context of Christianity for the sake of high-profile recognition, the virtue and its rewards span all faiths — even a lack of it.

What finally got me thinking about all this enough to write about it was a walk to the mailbox yesterday evening. Inside I found my new Mensa membership card. I had renewed my old membership over the web during a bad night a couple weeks ago. I had been depressed, stewing, and a little drunk. I had felt like I couldn’t do anything right, but at least I was smart, damn it. I even had a test that said so. A quick renewal fee charged to my credit card, and five to ten business days later, and I had a card that said so, too. Beer and brains was all it took to give me worth to the world.

And, in truth, intelligence does have worth. But intelligence can accomplish little good as a virtue respected solely for its own sake, without the greater context of humility, compassion, and whatever other virtues you care to recognize.

More importantly, intelligence has no bearing on our worth as human beings. Intelligence recognizes worth in only that which has reason to be. Ultimately, no matter one’s faith or lack thereof, the only answer to “why are we here?” is the fulfillment of our great ministry to one another. That ministry could be of God’s love or of secular humanist love, or any of the other shades of color that come from the great box of faith and philosophy crayons (heh). Without our great ministry we are utterly reasonless. Intelligence cannot give our lives worth; only our other virtues can do that.

That’s why, when I consider a person’s intelligence to be not among her outstanding virtues, I don’t see that as brutal. That person happens to be a wonderful, well-rounded human being. I can learn much just by quietly paying attention to her, and I’m already a better person just for having known her. Her life enriches my own. But these are not opinions formed through relentless logic, nor should they be.

No matter how intelligent a human being is, he can never find worth in his own life or in those around him through the means of reason. No matter how smart he is, he must lay down the craving for intellect and embrace his humility before he can end his life’s quiet desperation. No matter how sweet the fruit of knowledge tastes, he must forsake his appetite for it before he can walk back into Eden.

Leave a Comment

Hedonism Emporium

November 13, 2004 at 11:45 pm (christianity, movies, pixar, smoking, tal, tao)

I saw the Incredibles last night with some friends. The movie was amazing. It’s definitely my new favorite Pixar movie, and probably one of my top ten favorite movies of all time. It helped a lot that Sarah Vowell lent her voice to the movie (as the daughter, Violet); I’ve had something of a celebrity crush on her ever since I started listening to This American Life a few years ago and saw her on Conan. Then we ended up at the Mudlounge and had fondue. Can’t beat that. Even with a stick.

I slept in late this morning (late for me, anyway). I had a chilled morning going on my weekly errand for dried fruit (I’m known as “The Pineapple Guy” at Spring Valley).

The other day I had also bought a pack of cigarettes from the International Wine Center (which, though I’ve never mentioned it here, is one of my favorite places in the world, and which I’ve nicknamed “Hedonism Emporium”). Then today I browsed pipes at Just For Him, but ended up not buying anything… just yet.

To my recollection, this is the first time I’ve smoked in almost two years. I’ve never been a heavy smoker; in fact, I’ve scarcely ever inhaled the smoke into my lungs (which isn’t a good idea with either pipe smoke or clove smoke, anyway). For me smoking is about the oral/manual fixation and the sensuous hobby of it. In other words, it’s just a really nice, tasty, warm, comforting thing to do, especially while sitting out on the balcony and just looking at the leaves of the trees. It’s a hedonistic experience, but not in a greedy way. It’s just a matter of enjoying the pleasures of the senses in a very chilled-out way.

Which is quite like Taoism. (Heh.) One of the reasons Buddhism would never work for me is because it rejects the physical world, the flesh. That’s also one of the reasons Christianity doesn’t really stick with me — it also tends to preach living not for what you can see and touch in the here and now, but living for the abstract perfection beyond the veil of death. Taoism, according to my understanding, doesn’t bother discriminating between spiritual and physical realms; they’re both part of the One Tao. And Taoism responds to questions of the afterlife with, “well, whatever,” and instead places emphasis on the heaven that any of us can tap from thin air, like condensing water vapor in the desert. That’s the kind of heaven that works in a practical, real, attainable sense. Like Philip Pullman’s Republic of Heaven.

Leave a Comment

Going Overboard with Supposed Ease-of-Use

November 12, 2004 at 11:47 pm (design, mac, ui, windows)

I’m probably either preaching to the choir or the completely uninterested here, but over the years I’ve often made comments to the effect that Microsoft’s products are bad. Among what I consider to be numerous flaws, I find their interface design to be completely boneheaded, as it has been since Windows was born.

The screen shot at the right is something I ran across on a coding web site while searching for C# information. I had no idea Visual Studio .NET had a “Method Wizard.” But such a thing is a perfect example of Microsoft’s bass-ackwards approach to creating an intuitive user experience. For those of you who don’t code, a Method Wizard is completely superfluous. If you can’t write the skeleton of a method yourself (which is all the Wizard does), you shouldn’t be coding in the first place. You should be reading a book on coding, or taking a class.

To draw a comparison to a more accessible notion, imagine Microsoft Word had a Sentence Wizard. First it would ask you “What kind of sentence is this?” and you would click a button for, let’s say, Declarative or Interrogative. At that point, the Wizard would go ahead and put a period or question mark at the end of your prototype sentence. Then it have you fill in a blank for the subject and verb of the sentence. Then it would ask you “Would you like to use any conjunctions to add other subjects or verbs to the sentence?” After filling in a dozen more blanks, you would click a “Finish” button, and the Sentence Wizard would insert your sentence into the Word document, at which point you could manually input Creative Flair (for which there would also be an optional Wizard).

The Method Wizard is just as absurd as my hypothetical Sentence Wizard. But programming is a more esoteric art than English composition, and Microsoft dictates what’s “normal” in the computer world. So when Microsoft adds completely boneheaded tools to their products, calling them “features,” few question them.

In computer-user interfaces, less is more. The more unobtrustive and transparent a new feature is, the better it is, generally. I’m tempted to draw a comparison to politics (i.e. small, out-of-your-face Federal government is inherently better) but, hey, that’s politics. Instead, a good computer interface is like a good employee. A good employee should know what the Big Picture of his job is and get it done with minimal guidance. A good employee is not good because he coddles his supervisor; he is good because he can anticipate his supervisor’s needs and then fulfill them without even need to be told to do so. Supervisors never have to micro-manage a good employee, and conversely not having to micro-manage makes the supervisor a better one.

Microsoft exhibits an interface design philosophy of “if less is more, then think how much more more would be!”. More buttons, more Wizards, more hand-holding, more bloat. Microsoft’s products are analogous to an employee who doesn’t bother to step back and think about the Big Picture, so he brings every little tiny decision to the attention of his supervisor. But the extra attention is all condescension, because he doesn’t actually think his supervisor knows anything about how to do his own job. So the employee presents every question in terms of multiple choice. The buzz-term “thinking outside the box” only exists because such employees boxed themselves in in the first place.

Incidentally, Microsoft is only the juggernaut that sets the bar in the industry with consistent stupidity. But sadly the vast majority of computer interfaces are designed with minimal forethought, producing piss-poor results. Gnome is the only Linux product that even shows evidence of thinking about these issues (though one could argue that its efforts fall short in execution); every single other aspect of every single distribution of Linux I’ve ever seen has completely missed this key principle, all the way from the Windows-mimicking, “even Grandma can use it” window managers to the kernel recompilation process. Even the Mac OS, the lone bastion of halfway good user interface design, took some boneheaded turns with OS X which only show signs of getting worse.

To Microsoft: next time you get the idea to write a Wizard, don’t. We’ve already left the nest, and we know how to fly. You’re supposed to be the turbo jet engines strapped to our wings, not an overprotective mama bird constantly reminding us how to flap. Boy, that was a dumb analogy.

Leave a Comment

Graven Images

September 13, 2004 at 11:50 pm (god)

I just ran across an interesting point made in a mailing list I’m on: God’s commandment was against graven images of Him.

The mundane reading is that Judaism, as an early form of monotheism, wanted to further separate itself from the various flavors of pagan religion by emphasizing the worship of a spirit only instead of a thing.

But the interesting alternative is that since the OT was so insistent in prepending that word “graven,” that in a metaphorical sense God was inviting us to conceive all kinds of images of Him, but never to carve them in stone in a proverbial sense (perhaps in addition to a literal sense). God is fluid, and infinite insofar as the universe is infinite. Stand a few inches to the left and God will appear slightly different. God can be seen in many lights, imagined through many eyes. But the one thing we must never do is take one of those myriad images and ascribe it permanently as God’s unchanging face.

Leave a Comment

Treatise on Gaming

August 29, 2004 at 11:56 pm (gaming, psychology, smoking)
Tags: , ,

Most of us know one of those guys (rarely girls) who is obsessed with video games. Maybe he’s smart and talented and could be excelling at school or work or otherwise broadening his horizons, yet he chooses to do little else with his free time than sit in front of a glowing box, pushing buttons, and watching the pretty lights. Some of us were that guy (…he said, sheepishly raising his hand).

Having been steeped in that video game obsessiveness for long periods of my life, and looking at the phenomenon from the outside nowadays, I truly believe it to be a psychological addiction, just like gambling or nymphomania.

But what’s the mechanism of that addiction? Gamblers are hooked by the thrill of risk, and nymphomaniacs by hedonistic ecstasy. What about gamers? Gaming has elements of passive entertainment, like TV or movies: pretty images for the eye and electronic symphonies for the ear, but if those things were the “hook” of the addiction, then film and television would be the addiction of choice, because, though the margin narrows over time, they still easily outstrip the world of gaming in those respects of eye and ear candy. Similarly, gaming often has elements of storytelling, but if that were the “hook,” then gamers would put down their controllers in favor of books, for even the most intriguing Final Fantasy can’t touch the satisfying complexity or depth of the world of literature.

I believe the key to gaming addiction lies in its artificial sense of participatory accomplishment. This is, I believe, an entirely separate phenomenon from the sense of accomplishment involved in sports. Sports, for one thing, do often require a finely honed sense of teamwork. But more relevantly, the goals of sports are entirely arbitrary and abstract: take this object and place it over here; increment a meaningless number so that it’s higher than our enemies’ number. It requires a certain degree of self- as well as collective motivation to sustain involvement in something so transparently contrived: you have to really dedicate yourself to being excellent at sports.

But gaming is, by and large, a solitary affair. And gaming, through the means of sound, imagery, and storytelling, clothes its arbitrary goals with concrete, emotional meaning. Think about how games like Doom 3 can appeal directly to the R-complex of our brains: through its immersiveness, it’s scaring the crap out of thousands of twitchy mammals who possess an evolutionary history of being prey more often than predator. So it really means something when you finally give that boss monster its death blow with the BFG — that is, you get the hormonal rush because you were sucked into the world of the game and felt the giddy, primal thrill of survival by the skin of your teeth. While Doom 3 represents only one exceptional example of a particular genre of gaming, I think it serves as a perfect example of an important trait it shares with all successful video games, even the cerebral, strategic Civilization III: while excelling at sports requires a sense of dedication and a cultivation of a psychological and emotional link to their arbitrary goals, gaming cuts through all that and appeals directly to the primal psychology and emotional links of the gamer. And so it’s through these direct links to our psyche, like jacking into the Matrix, that video games deliver their sense of accomplishment.

I think everyone has a basic need for a sense of accomplishment in their lives, just like their need for security or love or any other pleasure. But normally it requires a great deal of dedication and hard work in order to satisfy these needs, just like it requires dedication and hard work to be successful in athletics and sports.

Gaming is like a recreational drug in that it delivers a packet of primal joy directly to the brain with minimal dedication or discipline. Just like Ecstasy is “joy in a pill” or marijuana is “tranquility in a breath,” computer and video games are “success on a disc.” And just like drugs reinforce behaviors of instant gratification in exchange for potential long-term negative consequences, so does gaming.

Since I think most gamers would concur that, on average, games have gotten slowly easier over the years (how many of you beat Contra without the up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-a-b-select-start cheat?) while delivering more of the “candy,” one could even argue that gamemakers, consciously or not, are creating more and more accessible “gateway games.” With our minds so enthralled, might we be rapidly approaching a potential for overt manipulation? Or are we already there?

Of course, gaming, like drugs, is not an entirely destructive world. Despite my earlier disclaimers, a lot of truly stunning artwork, music, immersively escapist fantasy, and compelling storytelling is produced solely for the sake of a game. I have to confess how much I’m looking forward to Myst 4 for exactly those reasons. And sometimes gamers even do something good with their often elitist community. I’m confident such things also come from the world of illegal drugs. But that doesn’t make investment in either a healthy pursuit; that simply shows them to be overwhelmingly self-destructive instead of completely so.

Some of you may be thinking I’ve gone off on some Lieberman-esque rant against the evils of video games, but that’s not really the case here. I don’t think games should be censored or barred from sale to anyone. But then, I think the same goes for drugs.

Because in the case of both drugs and gaming, I’m simply arguing that personal responsibility and consciousness of self-development should take overwhelming precedence. I spent years addicted to video games, living off their artificial sense of occupation and accomplishment. I’m embarrassed to say that, at the time, I considered beating a certain game my most noteworthy accomplishment of a particular semester in college. And I’ve also been connected with the world of illegal drugs, though to a much lesser degree. I was never steeped in an addiction to marijuana, which I’m sure is at least as common as addiction to gaming, but if circumstances had turned out slightly different, I very well could be struggling with a weed habit right now. I stay away from it entirely now, because the relief and tranquility I get from doing things that are actually constructive far outweighs the price or even the reward of weed’s instant gratification. And while I still play a video or computer game once in a while nowadays, I rarely find myself playing for longer than half an hour at a time, or more often than once every week or two. Again, the rewards just aren’t rewarding to me anymore, and the price is simply absurd when weighed against the benefits of doing something that’s actually constructive.

But there was a time when my depression, my inability to face the world, or my inability to face the responsibilities I’d accepted would prompt me to buy a new game, and to play it obsessively. I used gaming to defer the onset of overwhelming emotional force held barely in check, just outside the borders of my conscious thought. I used it to escape my problems. I used it as a psychological crutch. And that’s where the problem lies, and that’s why I’m writing this. Far too many people, like myself, have or continue to use gaming or drugs as a crutch, while believing the illusion that things are getting better. But things aren’t getting better as long as the habit persists, as long as the crutch exists. There is no cushion from the Issues in one’s life. Sooner or later we have to “hit bottom,” and suddenly face all of the emotional responsibility we’ve deferred, as if we’ve defaulted on a student loan. Far better to do the responsible thing, and address the Issues as they come up.

So let the gaming world perpetuate itself, I say, and let the world of illegal drugs be able to perpetuate iself without the hyperinflation and fear the Law instills. But let us all partake of each world sparingly, if at all, and only in the greater context of sure-footed self-evolution.

[UPDATE 9/3/04: Interestingly the BBC just posted this article on some of the psychology of gaming. They come at it from a business/marketing angle instead of my addiction angle, but the subject matter is stilly closely related and very interesting.]

Leave a Comment

Talk Smart

July 16, 2004 at 12:10 am (mac, psychology, windows, writing)

An article entitled, “Are Mac Users Smarter Than PC Users?”

Oooooh, them’s fightin’ words.

I found myself nodding, smiling, and even uttering, “Right On!” while reading it, but not for the reasons you might think.

True, I still prefer the Mac above any other platform out there right now, but I’ve left my zeal behind. The argument over which operating system is “best” is, to me, like arguing over which car is “best”: everyone has different needs and preferences, and isn’t it by now painfully obvious to anyone with a brain that SUV’s are an unjustifiable waste of money and fossil fuels for all but the most adventurous outdoorsman? Ultimately, the operating system debate nowadays just leaves me as disgusted with the American deities of Consumerism and Fashion as does the car debate. Though you still might choose or be coerced into using it for one reason or another, if you have a brain, you can tell Windows sucks, and that Microsoft is out to screw you as roughly and coldly as possible.

No, the reason I like this article so much is because the author uses written communication skills as a benchmark for intelligence. I don’t claim to be in the upper echelons of the communication skills continuum, because — Lord knows — I’ve failed to make myself understood on even the most basic level to many people over the years, and continuing to this day. But I’d still argue that one cannot claim to be an exceptionally intelligent person without being an exceptional communicator in the vast majority of cases and contexts. If one is unable or simply uninterested in using language with finely honed correctness and with expressive subtlety, then one’s intelligence is either largely* moot because it’s impotent to affect anyone else, or that intelligence is simply non-existant. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding of intelligence is language. (Best metaphor ever.)

</arrogant soap box>

*Okay, granted, someone could be a hermit unable to communicate but who invents a quantum computer all alone. That’s pretty undisputable intelligence. But that’s why I qualified that sentence with “largely” instead of “entirely”.

Leave a Comment

Ainulindalë

June 23, 2004 at 12:11 am (cosmology, music, tolkien)

Courtesy of the BBC News Service:

Mark Whittle of the University of Virginia has analysed the so-called background radiation that was born 400,000 years after the Big Bang. 

Ripples in the radiation are like sound waves bouncing through the cosmos.

Over the first million years the music of the cosmos changed from a bright major chord to a sombre minor one.

“It really is a very obvious thing to do,” Professor Whittle told BBC News Online, “I was a little surprised that someone had not done it before.”

He took the latest data about the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which comes from an era just after the Big Bang.

They show ripples in the CMB which are subtle variations in the density of matter which can, in one sense, be thought of as sound waves.

These cosmic sound waves are 30,000 light-years wide and are 55 octaves below what humans can hear.

But when they are shifted to regions of the audible spectrum, the cry from the birth of the cosmos can be heard.

Courtesy of J.R.R. Tolkien:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad.
[...]
But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatar said to them: ‘Behold your Music!’ And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; arid they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but it was not of it. And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew. And when the Ainur had gazed for a while and were silent, Ilúvatar said again: ‘Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy.’
[...]
‘Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be! And I will send forth into the Void the Flame Imperishable, and it shall be at the heart of the World, and the World shall Be.’ 

Leave a Comment

Newer entries »