About ten years ago, at a social gathering, I witnessed two guys do a back and forth spouting of random “facts” for the purpose, I think, of showing they were smart.  I thought it was funny because most of their “facts” were in the category of things that sounded true but were in fact not true.  

For the record, no religion on earth has the majority of people on earth as believers.  NASA says you really cannot see the Great Wall of China from space. More people speak Spanish than English as a native language. Studies do not show vitamin C is effective in preventing colds.  

I started a post about the “two guys in the living room” story.  My idea was knowing a bunch of “facts” is no longer indicative of being “smart” because facts are so easily found using our devices.  I spent many frustrating hours trying and failing to write that post. It seemed so straight forward but it was not. What stopped me was defining what it means to be smart.  

What does it mean to say someone is smart or smarter?  I ended up writing on a different topic however, the question of what it means to be smart, was haunting me.  For much of my life, being smart was a part of my self-identity. Certainly, there is a long list of not smart things credited to me which makes being humble easy.   But I thought I was reasonably smart. It was time to research.

Turns out, being smart, as such, is not a real thing. Source after source explained what we know or don’t know is much more complicated than a simple label of being smart or dumb.  

Knowing stuff involves the process of learning. Nobody is born knowing how to knit or read or write or balance a bank account or plan a trip to the moon or much of anything.  Learning requires time, effort, experience, contemplation, and the like. Unless you take the time and expend the effort to actually learn we as individuals, will not know. 

Everyone learns stuff relevant to their own lives and interests.  We just do. It is part of being human. What we learn depends on our life experiences, training, focus, circumstances, expectations, and the like.  Some of us seem to have certain innate abilities which can make it easier to learn some types of things. However, even with such abilities knowing still requires learning which requires effort and time.

The young man who fixed my furnace knows more about furnaces and how to fix them than I do.  I am willing to bet he knows more than I do about many things. On the other hand, maybe I know more about some stuff than he does.  The people who study such stuff will tell you it is absurd to think of one person as smarter than another. We are all smart in our own way even though we may not be smart about the same things.     

Everyone’s life experience is different. Our perspectives are different.  The furnace repair person is looking at life from the perspective of a 23-year old just starting his career.  I, on the other hand, am looking at life from the perspective of a person who cares much more about the room being warm than how to replace a furnace controller. 

My high school grades were terrible.  Based on that evidence, I had no future in college. That said, from the time I was 10 or 12 years old I had been told several times by various people that I was smart.  A couple of those people had Ph.D.’s. Most people who knew me assumed I was going to college. 

I was accepted into college because my SAT test scores were good.  I do not remember my actual SAT score although I do remember my SAT score was not stratospheric, it was good enough to get me into the University of Minnesota.   

A person is not smart because they get a high score on tests like the SAT, IQ  or the Armed Forces Qualification Exam. Tests like these seem to basically measure the same thing because scores on one tend to be consistent with the others.  They are said to measure the ability to reason and to learn, however, there is a bunch of research that challenges exactly what is being measured. That said, the use of such tests is institutionally entrenched and likely will continue to be used for many years to come, no matter what they actually measure.  

There is a difference between what we know and our ability to learn. Learning takes effort.  Our relative ability to learn is more or less something we are born with. It may be easier for some to learn but everyone has an ability to learn.  That said, knowing more about a topic means only you know more about the topic. It does not make us smarter than other people.  

In today’s connected world, informaiton is relatively easy to find.  A person with a very high IQ can look up information on almost any topic but, so can most anyone else.  It might be easier for the person with a high IQ to understand because they can learn more efficiently but with effort, pretty much we all are capable of understanding most things.  

I wonder how often what I say is wrong or misguided. I am sticking with the belief that I am smart but I am coming around to the fact that most everyone else is smart also.  

 

The closer you look the more you see.

www.scaleandperception.com

Jon and I were the same age (15).  A couple of months before I was punched in the face, he and his family moved into the big fancy new house about two blocks from our house.  It was a one-punch fight. Being punched in the face hurts. I deserved it and apologized once I got back on my feet. 

Jon walked past me on the bus wearing a long, flamboyant scarf.  I stood up and pulled the scarf hard. He calmly turned around and punched me in the face.  It was then I realized I was way overmatched. He helped me up, and I apologized. From then on we were not friends but friendly.

Some teenage boys (me, then) can be territorial.  Whether the cause is hormones, or whatever, being punched in the face helped me learn my primal need to defend my territory was not so much needed in today’s world.  I was lucky guns were not involved.

Sometimes violence is narrowly avoided but the underlying issues still need to be addressed.  A couple of years after college, I was a busy Unemployment Claims Representative in the Minneapolis Unemployment office determining eligibility to collect unemployment benefits.

Jim (I do not remember his real name but he had a real name) looked every bit like the unkempt, homeless, 40-year-old, white man he was. Six months earlier he was let go from his job as a part-time dishwasher because his boss’s nephew wanted a summer job.

After reviewing statements from both he and the employer, I determined he was eligible for about  $20 a week for up to thirteen months. At first, he just stared at me for like 30 seconds. Then he reached out and in one motion swept everything (pictures, papers, a pencil holder, box of paper clips, a cup of water and the like) off my desk crashing onto the hard floor.  Then he screamed something like, “I do not want to be homeless anymore” at which time he pulled out a knife and pointed it very threateningly about a foot from my face. He was crying and his hand was shaking.   

We had drills about this sort of situation. A coworker called the police immediately.  My job was to be calm for the several minutes it would take the police to arrive. Deescalate.  Well, all I could think of was to ask why he was so upset with being granted Unemployment benefits.  

Before the police arrived he put the knife down, apologized and sat down defeated.  The gist was he had been homeless since spring and winter was coming fast. There was a shelter he was eligible for if he could show he was not eligible for other benefits. He had spent weeks going from agency to agency getting forms signed saying he was not eligible for benefits and thus eligible to live at the shelter.  

From Jim’s point of view, me signing the form saying he was eligible for even these paltry Unemployment benefits were condemning him to try to survive outside in a Minnesota winter without shelter.   The police escorted him away in handcuffs and that was the last I heard of him. I was never asked to testify or submit any statements. I do not know his fate.

Violence is never the answer but frustration and fear can motivate desperate people to do violent things.  Sometimes when I hear about violence on the news, I am reminded there is almost always more to the story than the act of violence itself.  

My older brother John completed basic training and was home on leave a couple of days after my high school graduation (June 1970).  We were standing in the backyard shooting the breeze when he looked around and lowered his voice making sure nobody else could hear. He then gave me the following advice. 

“When you kick somebody in the head.  Make sure you knock them out. If you do not knock them out, they will get up and likely kill you.”  He was not talking figuratively because I asked. He was very serious. He proceeded to demonstrate how to kick someone in the head and knock them out.  

I sometimes get frustrated but I never was frustrated enough to want to kick someone in the head. Yet, I think there is an underlying truth in my brother’s observation: When an action you take hurts someone, they will be highly motivated to hurt you back.  

Violence causes more problems than it solves. Violence is not acceptable, whether or not it would be effective in resolving an issue.  Yet there are issues that need to be resolved. Violence is usually not a rational response but in the heat of a tense situation, rational is hard to come by. 

My best friend, HP, in high school, was of Japanese descent. We were at a dance in the basement of Har Mar Mall. Some jerk and a couple of his friends threatened HP, saying they did not like foreigners dancing with the girls.  My older brother and a couple of his friends told me and HP to keep dancing. They would handle the problem. We kept dancing and violence happened to the people who harassed us. A non-violent method of resolving the issue would have been better.   

Violence is almost never justified. Violence almost never solves the issue which led up to the violence in the first place. Nevertheless, violence exists.  Condemning violence is easy. Understanding what led up to the violence and how to resolve the issues is very much, not easy.