Is it good to be smart?

I used to consider myself a smart person. Not in the sense of genius or some special intellectual abilities. Slightly above average, but no more. And I have always been proud of this, and it was precisely this that made my competitive advantage.

This wisdom manifested itself not in knowing much about many things, but in being able to link disparate data to each other and it is fairly easy to collect and shuffle various intelligent constructions. Also nothing special - I have repeatedly met people who are deeper, more intelligent, versatile and educated.

Being smart is quite convenient - it is really a tangible advantage in our society. As well as physical strength allows you to perform work that is inaccessible to the weak, and intellectual power allows you to do what is not available to a person who does not have mental flexibility. Statistically, there are much more strong than smart ones, so the latter in our market society usually win in the competition for “food”.

There are, however, its obvious disadvantages. Corrosive tediousness and emotional dryness peculiar to intellectuals open one door, but at the same time close others. What is good at work is not particularly convenient in everyday life and in the sphere of human relations. But in general, no clever man will ever give up his mind, because it is in him that he sees the concentration of his own essence, and therefore the advantages in being smart, he sees more than minuses.

But, it turns out, what a curious thing with this very mind ...

Imagine a "puzzle" - that set of parts, from which, with due diligence, you can assemble a whole picture. Now imagine that from the whole set we have only two parts - those that stand in the corners diagonally to each other. And we face the question - what exactly is depicted in the picture?

If the picture is broken into some ten details, then it is likely that we will be able to guess its content ... well, or at least put forward a reasonable assumption. For example, one may have something similar to the sky with a red tint, and the other - something similar to dark water. Then we can hypothesize that the picture shows a sunset against the sea and, perhaps, a boat or a ship to fill the space.

And what will happen if the picture is cut not into ten parts, but into twenty? It will be more difficult to understand its content. And if a hundred parts? And if the details at our disposal more, but they are not angular? The further, the harder it is to guess or even just guess what is depicted there, right?

So, the ability to complete the entire picture from fragmentary scattered data is precisely determined by flexibility and mental dexterity. It is this ability to detect subtle relationships and build a reasonable assumption out of them that allows an intelligent person to do things that seem magical to a person with mediocre intelligence. Remember "Sherlock" - he is all about it.

And all this is good as long as the mind is used to solve practical everyday tasks — to come up with a good business strategy, repair a complex mechanism, calculate the consequences of a choice, launch a rocket into space, and so on. But pay attention to what is happening here.

Having in our hands ten pieces of a puzzle out of a thousand, we can assume something about the picture. A foolish man will put forward any one crazy idea. A man of average intellectual abilities will put forward two or three reasonable. Clever - put forward ten reasonable ideas and put them in order of probability. Ingenious - will be able to generate new ideas, until you get bored. And the question is, who among them is more likely to give the correct answer?

Stupid pokes a finger in the sky. The middle one will probably be closer to the answer, but will not give an exact answer. A clever one of his ten assumptions will surely hit the target, but he will also not be able to determine which of the options is correct and whether he is among them at all. The genius will accurately call the correct answer in a series of his endless assumptions, but he will also not be able to reliably determine which of them.

And what happens? Stupid or ingenious - in relation to this task with the puzzle it is absolutely no difference! Moreover, the genius has a serious problem, because his imagination can be much richer than the fantasy of the author of the picture. It would never occur to him to draw a caterpillar crawling out of a black hole, devouring the universe. But the genius can suggest and not that! And, then, he has to choose the correct answer from a larger number of hypotheses, and the statistical probability of correct guessing decreases.

If you had to take any tests, such as those in the driver's license exams, you could discover this phenomenon when you asked a question that was far more complex and deeper than the one that the test maker had in mind. Familiar? The test can be filled not only by stupidity or ignorance, but also by excessive cleverness. Woe from Wit.

That's what this is about. The ability of a strong mind to fill voids and build multiple guesses is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows you to quickly navigate in various issues and life situations, on the other - leads to erroneous answers in situations where any fool would literally stumble.

What is all this for ...

Our usual picture of the world — the material world, a detached individual existence, free expression of will and all that stuff — is a product of the mind in the very same sense in which we considered attempts to reconstruct an image from its individual details.

For example, pay attention to your hand. Suppose right. Put it on the table in front of you, close your eyes and listen to the sensations. What do you see? What do you feel there? Do you have the feeling of a whole hand — its entire surface, its entire volume, all its muscles, tendons, vascular bones, nerves? Obviously not.

If you don’t let your mind slip your lime tree here, you’ll have to admit that your hand perception is very fragmentary and limited. You probably feel the place where the arm touches the table. Perhaps you feel the coolness or warmth of air from the back of your hand. Maybe you feel the touch of clothes. But note here that from these really existing sensations it is IMPOSSIBLE to conclude that there is a whole hand! The rest of its volume and content are recreated by the mind from memory or from some general theoretical calculations.

You do not have a solid hand experience, but you have a solid unshakable faith, which you take as a real hand. This is how the rest of the world around is created - from partial experience, which, if you look at it honestly, cannot be expressed in words at all. Take a closer look - you do not feel any table with your hand! - You feel vague sensations, and only the mind tells you that this is a “table” that “you” touch with “hand”. Three contrived unprovable concepts in such a simple observation of vague sensations.

The mind fills the gaps in experience, and the mind of an intelligent person does it faster and more efficiently. And it is precisely this that must first be discovered, in order for at least some chance to appear, to break free from its shackles. It is necessary to see very clearly how the mind fills the voids - starting from fragmentary partial information about the surrounding reality, it recreates a stable understanding of the world of things and the place of its carrier in it.

But unlike the game situation with a puzzle, the picture of reality created by the mind is not recognized by us as a SUPPOSITION. Instead, we take it at face value, as if our assumption is a direct statement of direct experience.

In fact, the usual picture of the world is built in much worse circumstances than if we had a puzzle of a thousand details, and only ten of them were in our hands. In fact, we have, perhaps, a whole million details ... but this makes absolutely no difference, because reality consists of an infinite number of them. And no matter how hard you make the most beautiful and reasonable assumptions about the structure of the universe, the available experimental information will never be enough to get at least a millimeter closer to the answer. The probability of the correct answer from a mathematical point of view tends to zero.

And nevertheless, we are all absolutely convinced that our ideas about life and what lies at its core are more or less true. We call the observed patterns laws and live with them. We interpret the coincidence of expectations with real development of events in favor of our rightness in understanding the universe, we simply ignore mistakes and discrepancies.

It is possible to crack this stable system of views, but for this you need to recognize how the mind works, how cleverly and quickly it fills the voids in the perception of the world and builds far-reaching conclusions, starting from information that is not enough.

Finding this mind game is not so difficult ... unless you are a very smart person. Because every intellectual, firstly, is very strong in quickly filling up the gaps in his reasoning with other reasoning, and, secondly, he is psychologically very dependent on faith in the strength of his mind and the truth of his constructions. In this regard, to be a clever man and believe your mind is a great folly. But with a great desire, this is also fixable.