SOME VERY SMART people can be stunningly stupid. This is an essential thing to understand whether you yourself are stupid or smart. Intelligence does not guarantee common sense or protection from brain-diminishing ideological forces.

For example, someone who is chairman of Harvard University’s physics department must be a pretty smart guy, brighter than, say, 98 percent of human beings. And, yet here in yesterday’s New York Times, we have Howard Georgi, a former chairman of the department, reflecting on why there are still not more women rushing to become physicists. He says:

“Women who concentrate in the field are happier now [after being given subsidized day care and the opportunity to take their nannies on field trips] … but there hasn’t been a dramatic change in the numbers coming in, and that’s a little frustrating and puzzling.”

I’m intrigued by Mr. Georgi’s use of the term “puzzling.” It seems physicists should be agile in the art of the puzzle. Now, let’s say a physicist such as Georgi was presented with overwhelming evidence from intelligence and psychology studies that women are weaker in higher logic and systematic thinking and stronger in empathetic thinking, which is rarely used in a physics laboratory. Then let’s say he observed for decades the low numbers of women who entered his field, the relatively unspectacular performance of the few women who did, and the interests and inclinations of the women he met in normal everyday encounters.

Okay. Stop and take a deep breath. Now think, Mr. Georgi, think. You can do it. This is a puzzle but you are a physicist, accustomed to cognitive leaps into the hidden laws of the universe. Try to proceed logically step by step. Solve this mind-bending riddle. 

Jim Weitzel writes:

I’m a physicist myself, and I’m here to assure you that I have not found my colleagues any nimbler at the solution of puzzles than anyone else in particular. We do tend to be pretty good mathematicians. Regrettably, though, we’re as prone to the fallacies of compartmentalization as anyone. The department chair in question probably engages a good critical-thinking ability when it’s time for him to, let’s say, peer-review a piece of work before its publication. Get him outside his “compartment,” though, and I’m sure he’s a fully-automatic slave to the usual Received Truths of Modern Liberalism, prominent among which is that a woman can be as good a man as any man, if the evil men will just get out of her way; and, conversely, that a man can be an excellent woman, if he just gets out of his own way. It will have escaped his notice that God made some of us convex and some concave, presumably because both convexity and concavity please Him and are necessary to His purposes. Still, I daresay he’s probably quite a decent physicist.

Laura writes:

That’s disillusioning, despite what I said above. I would think mastery in advanced physics would confer all-around brilliance. But the supersmart often become so swept up in their absorbing preoccupations they lose sight of the elephants in the room.

Todd A. writes:

“I would think mastery in advanced physics would confer all-around brilliance. But the supersmart often become so swept up i their absorbing preoccupations they lose sight of the elephants in the room.”

I don’t think they lose sight of them. I think they fear and thus ignore them. It’s not for the faint of heart to challenge that beast. 

This reminds me of a comment made to me when discussing the existence of God with a hyper-liberal nihilist. He emphatically exclaimed that God couldn’t exist as all of the world’s brilliant minds rejected him! I have met many brilliant and educated people who cannot process certain concepts in a progressive and sequential manner. As we have seen recently in the AGW debacle the hi-priests of the science religion have shown little deference to process and method in their specific work so why should we expect them to interject scrupulous methodology into their worldview? I’m not attempting to castigate all scientists in general or physicists in particular. 

I once had a conversation with a physicist about the huge holes in Darwinian evolution and how puzzling it was that virtually all of the elite scientists refused to accept that the data was weak at best. His response was that he was not educated in biology and thus had no opinion about Darwinian evolution! So I then asked him how exactly did he make any determinations about his own worldview? He proudly informed me that he subscribed to Theistic Evolution. Was he truly that “compartmentalized”? I have my doubts. What I don’t doubt was his reluctance to boldly investigate the matter as he most certainly could envision the consequences that would certainly arise if he were to ever take a systemic inventory of his worldview and then analyze it for coherence and consistency. 

In short, it’s just too dangerous. In his field and in his world he knows well the accepted and safe predispositions. Why challenge the prevailing assumptions of anything else? That’s my guess.

Laura writes:

That’s right. High intelligence is not the same thing as moral courage or independence of thought.

Fitzgerald writes:

In my experience, super-smart people in particular intellectual arenas tend to border on being idiot savants. The smarter they are, the stranger and more detatched from the world around them is what I’ve seen, and I do know a fair number of extremely intelligent people, almost all very odd. Most tend to be exceptionally gifted at a narrow set of specialized skills and downright stupid in many other more mundane aspects of life. As someone who excels at some very narrow and specific analytical tasks, sadly, I resemble this remark to a fair degree. I work very hard at having a more rounded perspective on the world, but am tragically inept at relatively mundane but quite necessary things. Being an intellectual is a curse and a blessing at the same time. I’m not like most people and as such I have little in common with “normal” people who are able to more successfully navigate the world we all inhabit. I often ponder what it would be like to be of a more average intellect, mind you I wouldn’t classify myself as super-smart but I’m quite above the average, but I’m not really willing to give it up either… so I soldier on and work at being more normal and less of a savant. It’s a struggle and it requires lots of mental and psychological gymnastics to meet people were they are and on their terms, something that’s not required of more normal people for the most part.

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