Even The Wolf likely can't clean up Harvey Weinstein's pending troubles

There are 'fawning think pieces' about Trump voters?

 

Almost daily.

 

I must've missed the fawning ones.

 

If they’re portrayed as stupid, backwards, and voting against their self interest, but not as racist, @RickStain and others view it as fawning.

 

I think we're twigging on the difference between "book smarts" and "street smarts," or intelligence and emotional intelligence.

I wouldn't dispute that Trump is street smart. He knows how to manipulate people, he knows how power works, he knows how to get what he wants. I think he's conniving in a way that is indicative of a real understanding of human need, particularly among desperate people. I think he's very good at spotting weakness in others and exploiting that weakness. As much as I don't like it, that's a skill.

I don't think he's book smart. I think he's semi-literate at best, incurious, and generally dumb.

Steve Jobs, your other example, I would say possessed the opposite kind of brain. Book smart—legitimately intelligent—but not emotionally intelligent. I think Jobs had an understanding about what people might want, but I don't think he understood what people—the human beings around him—might need, and he felt no compulsion to meet those needs. (In a way, like Trump's shamelessness, that's a kind of superpower, although one of limited virtue.)

The person I would want to be president would be both book smart and street smart. Someone who is well read and cares about the world and knows how systems operate, but who also knows how people work. With Trump, we only have the latter. Obama might have been too heavily weighted to the former to be truly successful.

Bill Clinton is the best recent example, I believe, of a president who possessed both qualities. Rhodes scholar who also owned every room he was in. Even people who hate him, if they're being honest, have to admit that he's both intelligent in the traditional sense of the word and charismatic. I've been in rooms with him, big rooms, and it was like the entire floor titled toward him. He was like a moon. I've rarely seen anything like it.

That's a rare combination, but I would argue that the president of the United States should probably be a rare kind of person.

 

I agree with almost all of this.

The point made in the piece linked by DW, though, was that humility was a hallmark of really smart people. There's a moral component to their intelligence.

"The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits."

To which I say: Not really. Maybe, maybe not, but humility is not linked to intelligence. They're separate qualities.

Clinton, brilliant, didn't know his limits on a variety of fronts and found reasons to lie in spectacular, public ways instead of just telling the truth.

My critique isn't with what you think - we're in agreement - but the shoddy, mediocre thinking of the original piece, which just finds cause to call Trump stupid and juxtaposes these fictional, simultaneously smart/I-know-my-limits folks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who knew no limits. And then throws in a European tennis player (Roger Federer) and a great actor (Meryl Streep). (A more interesting piece would reference Barry Bonds and Kevin Spacey. But that would erode the unrelated-to-book-smart intelligent people = goodness argument.)

 

Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia

 

Ah, gotcha. I didn't read the piece—I just saw the quote and your post about it. Of course, I agree that there are humble geniuses and arrogant ones. But I think smart people (book-smart people), generally speaking, know that they don't know things. I believe most of them have that very particular strain of humility, at least deep down. Like, I imagine that even Steve Jobs, as arrogant as he was, would have confessed that he didn't know much about botany or ocean currents or whatever. He employed a lot of smart people, too. He trusted Jony Ive, for instance. Jobs had his demands, but he was willing to listen to people he trusted about how best to meet them. I think that's something else that smart people are willing to do more than dumb people. Smart people will listen to good ideas from someone else. They might steal them, they might claim them as their own—because I agree with you that intelligence does not equal virtue, just as idiocy does not equal sin—but they will listen to them and even seek them out. Dumb people think they know everything and can't see when someone might know better than them. Of course there are humble dumb people, but dumb people who think they are smart are the most dangerous creatures alive. They're the reason we've come to live in this perfectly Trumpian age of anti-expertise, which, pursuant to our previous discussion of windmills, is one of mine.

 

It's backwards reasoning. Nobody wants to admit that a deeply stupid man won the Presidency, because of what that would say about the country and the people living in it, including us.

 

I don't think that's true. I think plenty of people think Trump is bone-dumb in many ways and that it says horrible things about America that he became its president.

 

There's an entire political party that thrives on saying horrible things about America and Americans.

 

Take it to the Politics Thread and have a Happy "Stop Being Obtuse, It's Beneath You" Day.