Smart Guys/Gals - People who try way too hard to look smart

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A truly intelligent person can find value and enjoyment in all of the people they meet, as well as anything that the world has to offer.
 
PsychoNerd054 said:
How about all of those people that talk about how much they love Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Rick and Morty and an onslaught of other sci-fi pop culture just to look intelligent, because "Der her nerds are so intelligent I do what dey do."
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All of those things are fucking gay. Except Star Trek. Star Trek kicks ass. Except for Enterprise. And Voyager, and the new one, and the original series, and... Never mind. DS9 is pretty cool though.
 
Zvantastika said:
Not everyone is set to be smart and you can't force it, even if you read a thousand books you might still be average. That reminds me of one of my stories:
This girl came to me and told me how sad she felt because she wasn't good at mental stuff and how she was failing at some things. I told her basically what I just said, that being smart isn't for everyone but that everyone is good at something, I asked her what she liked to do and she said she liked to draw, she showed me some of her stuff and I almost fall down because it was really fucking good art. I advised her to seriously consider an art career and she did. Years later I decided to check on her because something I was doing reminded me of her, apparently she has received a coulpe of awards and she's now working in some serious art stuff in her country.
Point is, you don't get to be special just by wishing and half assing it, you have to find what you like to do and what you're good at and work hard on it, the rest will come by itself.
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I'd argue that artistic skill is itself a kind of intelligence. Booksmarts aren't the only kind of smart.

I wish I had the useful smarts.
 
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Why do so many of these people talk like fucking aliens who have only a vague knowledge of Earth? They throw terms like "Carbon based life forms," "this primitive anthropoid species," or even just "humans" (as in, "humans confuse me") around.

Your inability to relate to your fellow human beings and speaking like you aren't one doesn't make you look smart or advanced. It makes you look severely autistic and/or sociopathic.
 
Growing up I read a lot and as a result my vocabulary was pretty high-end. The downside was that I ended up using a lot of words that didn't *quite* mean what I thought they meant, but their meaning was 'adjacent' to what I was trying to convey. It takes practice to find nuance in the English language like it does any other and to know when to switch out your vocabulary for something more common.

I used to be a misanthrope like these "Smart People (TM)" but then I turned 14 and got the fuck over myself. Anyone who still feels this way after high school is a grade-A fuckass.
 
Cosmos said:
It makes you look severely autistic and/or sociopathic.
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I think we found the reason they talk like that. It's :autism:
SeaPancake said:
I used to be a misanthrope like these "Smart People (TM)" but then I turned 14 and got the fuck over myself. Anyone who still feels this way after high school is a grade-A fuckass.
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Exactly. These idiots act like edgy 12-year-olds who think they're deep. I'd really like to see what kind of things these people would write. They'd probably just come up with some extremely predictable melodramatic crap with some whiny self insert.
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
There's something comforting in the knowledge that the ability to be an asshole knows no ideological boundaries.
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For these kinda fags (ir)religion and ideology are only a vehicle. Its not about actually having those views, how those actually work, and how they came to them. Its about how rare the belief is and how much of a rebel it makes them appear. For that lets them call others SHEEPLE while they are even more ignorant on issues. Also the rarer the view or ideology, the less people will know how to dismantle it. Because lets be honest who the fuck even knows what NatMaoism actually is.

I am seeing people who are now trying to be super smart "woke/redpilled" as of late with the hyper political situation of the American-sphere of the internet. Some of these people I know factually could not tell you where Crimea was on the map in 2014. Now they like to think they know all.
 
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Pop-Tart said:
For these kinda fags (ir)religion and ideology are only secondary. Its not about actually having those views, how those actually work, and how they came to them. Its about how rare the belief and and how much of a rebel it makes them appear, while also letting them call others SHEEPLE while they are even more ignorant on the issues.

I am seeing people who are now trying to be super smart "woke/redpilled" as of late with the hyper political situation of the American-sphere of the internet. Some of these people I know factually could not tell you where Crimea was on the map in 2014. Now they like to think they know all.
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I still don’t know where Crimea is. It’s making it tough to find my kidnapped family.
 
DrJonesHat said:
it shows an issue with people with high IQs: if you start thinking you're better than people with lower intelligence, it's not a far leap to decide that the rules of lesser mortals don't apply to you.
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See: the granddaddies of smart guys, Leopold and Loeb.
 
The thing is, if you think you're smart, you're probably wrong according to the Dunning-Kruger Effect - hell this whole thread should be a citation on that wiki page. Basically, low-ability people suffer from a false sense of superiority because they're unable to recognise their own ineptitude. They simply lack the skill to evaluate themselves and realise that they're incompetent.

Or to put this in terms of Schrodinger's cat memes that smart people like them can understand, they exist in a state of simultaneous competence and incompetence because they're incapable of perceiving which is the case. So they just assume they're competent cuz they like cats or whatever.
 
Ctrl+Alt+Rt said:
The thing is, if you think you're smart, you're probably wrong according to the Dunning-Kruger Effect - hell this whole thread should be a citation on that wiki page. Basically, low-ability people suffer from a false sense of superiority because they're unable to recognise their own ineptitude. They simply lack the skill to evaluate themselves and realise that they're incompetent.

Or to put this in terms of Schrodinger's cat memes that smart people like them can understand, they exist in a state of simultaneous competence and incompetence because they're incapable of perceiving which is the case. So they just assume they're competent cuz they like cats or whatever.
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You can't hear it, but I am seriously clapping at this post. It couldn't have been put better. I am not joking, this is one of the smartest things I have ever read.
 
SeaPancake said:
Growing up I read a lot and as a result my vocabulary was pretty high-end. The downside was that I ended up using a lot of words that didn't *quite* mean what I thought they meant, but their meaning was 'adjacent' to what I was trying to convey. It takes practice to find nuance in the English language like it does any other and to know when to switch out your vocabulary for something more common.

I used to be a misanthrope like these "Smart People (TM)" but then I turned 14 and got the fuck over myself. Anyone who still feels this way after high school is a grade-A fuckass.
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:powerlevel:

I came across a box of old school stuff when I was helping my dad clean house some years ago, and was confronted by an essay I wrote in middle school. The opening sentence was something along the lines of, "'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' expounds a manifold and widely diverse variety of themes and literary concepts." I probably should have kept it.
 
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PurpleSquirrel said:
Your militant-secularist fedora-tipping types, who label themselves "atheists" mainly because they can't conceive of the existence of an Entity smarter and more virtuous than they are.
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Aristophanes said:
Ah, the "I am very smart" crowd, the bane of both academics and industry experts alike. I have this urge to rant all of a sudden, but I'll keep it brief to make sure it doesn't get too autistic or A-loggy.

These are generally the worst kind of people to meet as an academic, given their arrogance and need to reee from the rooftops about how smart they are - and that they somehow know the answer to everything.

They sperg as if they're the leading authority on the subject, and that they are far more knowledgeable on it people who have literally spent months, years or even decades in studying it, and therefore take any sort of criticism as a personal insult.

Such arrogance often leads them to make sweeping generalisations about the subject in question, which I guess is more of a problem in my area of study, which is history. As I know all too well, history is discipline which has a lot of nuance involved to it, and as such making sweeping generalisations i.e. "all medieval people believed the earth was flat" will get you nowhere.
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Cracker Jack said:
I fucking love (and hate) this thread. Thank you @Cosmos for including that fucker Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s the new Richard Dawkins; very adept in his field, but making a total ass of himself in other areas. I used to listen to Star Talk back in the day, and in the past, he would bring in guests to talk about topics outside of astrophysics. These days his sense of self-importance is so massively inflated, that I think he genuinely sees himself as the spokesperson of all of Science.

I’ve read most of Dawkins’ books, due to my field of study. Some of the footnotes in the 30th anniversary version of The Selfish Gene are just… exceptional. I’ll see if I can dig them up somewhere, but like, at one point he goes on for two pages about how some guy, 20 years ago, was totally wrong and he was totally right. Then, in another, he writes several paragraphs about the pronunciation of ‘alga’ and ‘algae’ and how everybody is totally saying it wrong! I’m reading this and I’m so baffled at the fact that a living, breathing editor went through the script and thought that this was relevant in any way.

Also, here, have Dawkins himself losing a debate to a creationist. If I recall correctly, that wasn’t the first/last time.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6JJoPZp5pB0
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Fucking Dawkins was one of the first people I thought of when I started reading this thread (and on a lesser scale, the late Christopher Hitchens, although he’s dead now so he doesn’t factor as much anymore).

It seems like no matter what he talks about, he can’t just talk about it in a reasonable manner, he usually ends up braying and foaming at the mouth about how “REEEEEEEEEEligion” causes every one of society’s ills, from people not returning library books to genocide.:neckbeard:
I’ve talked to some pretty dedicated atheists here and there and the consensus on Dawkins has pretty much been that anything with any validity that he might be saying gets lost in all the sperging about how much more intelligent and enlightened he is than REEEEEligious people.
Also, agree 100% on the NdGT/Dawkins comparison, both are smug assholes whose grandstanding and ego stroking makes them seem to be overcompensating for something. (That seems to be a Smart Guy trait in general though.)
 
"I care more about a person's mind than their looks unlike the rest of you shallow plebes but a guy still has to be attractive for me to even talk to him."
 
MistressCaridad said:
Fucking Dawkins was one of the first people I thought of when I started reading this thread (and on a lesser scale, the late Christopher Hitchens, although he’s dead now so he doesn’t factor as much anymore).
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Hitchens at least did it with style. Dawkins has this sort of tweedy, dignified old-world English academic thing going on that is totally incompatible with spending hour after hour calling people names on Twitter.
 
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