Nobody Voted for Piggy to be Chief...

So how come HE wasn't commander of the Enterprise?

I read an article recently from someone who claims to often give advice to the unusually intelligent. The advice, as I recall, was, “you can either be smart, or effective. If you want to be effective, explain your ideas to your colleagues to bring them along with you.”

Amazing to think that the unusually smart could not figure this one out for themselves.

Of course, they can. It is a common fantasy—perhaps an inevitable fantasy—that the unusually intelligent somehow need our help to figure things out. Terribly flattering to us, after all, if true.

But the author is quite right to see that the unusually intelligent tend to be loners, not the ones most comfortable working in a group. It seems quite rare that the person in charge of an organization is anything like the smartest person in that organization.

Let’s try to figure out the real reason this is so.

First, the author apparently assumes that the unusually intelligent think in the same way the less intelligent do, so it is simply a matter of walking through their logical steps for the slower minds among us. Why would this be so? I suspect Aristotle had something when he observed that the ability to use metaphors well was the mark of genius. Quite probably, the unusually intelligent are thinking in terms of metaphor, analogy, pattern recognition—think analog instead of binary—and do not themselves plod step by step, from premise to conclusion, even if fast steps. This would explain why, when there is more than about 15 points spread between IQs, the person with the lower IQ is generally unable to judge the intelligence of the person with the higher one. They are just incomprehensible. If so, this makes it excruciatingly difficult, in fact, for them to explain their thinking to someone significantly less intelligent, because they have to do it in a way quite foreign to their own. It is like asking them to invent the same thing twice using completely different methods. Exhausting, to say the least.

He spoke in parables.

Asking them to carefully explain everything to those around them, then, may be like asking them to run a three-legged race with a paraplegic.

But there’s more to it than even that. As the persistent notion that we can give useful advice to the unusually intelligent perhaps suggests, most of us are not terribly sanguine about the existence, let alone close proximity, of someone smarter than we are. We tend to all have a certain amount of ego invested in the secret suspicion that we are the smartest person in the world. When, therefore, someone else who is not in some official capacity takes the time to patiently explain something to us that we did not understand, we are not usually grateful for the help. Instead, we almost always take offense. He is, after all, blatantly acting as though he is smarter than we are. Who the hell does he think he is? We’ll show him! We’ll deliberately resist doing whatever he suggests. And we’ll get ours back at him the minute his back is turned.

So there is a huge incentive for any unusually intelligent person to avoid groups and group work of any kind. It is madness for him to volunteer for any such thing. Doing so is not just trying to run a three-legged race with a paraplegic, but with a paraplegic who is furious with you and getting angrier every moment.

Hence, the genuinely unusually intelligent are not going to rise to the top of any organization. They are, indeed, almost certainly going to be “introverts,” certainly loners. It is not that the highly intelligent dislike other people, and it is not that they are socially inept. Why would they be? They are simply practicing self-preservation.

And, not incidentally, the surest way to destroy their education and alienate them from any possible contribution to society is the current mania in the educational establishment for “group work.”

Nor, I suspect, is this a simple blunder among educators. It is at least partly deliberate. They too have their resentments of those more intelligent than they.