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

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LtCucumber said:
Do people who are atheists and think they're better/smarter than everyone because they're atheists count?
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I usually divide "atheists" into two groups:
1) Sincere, educated nonbelievers, who have legitimate philosophical and ontological reasons for their opposition to the idea of a transcendent Deity; and
2) 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.
 
I passed my IQ test like a glitched out SNES speedrun: 101%

Seriously though, I used to be friends with a guy like this. I'm pretty sure he adopted his attitude from watching TotalBiscuit, and I always compared him in my mind to a Sargon of Akkad that doesn't stand for or against anything in particular. And the guy was genuinely intelligent, too. The problem comes with the downward spiral that you see with so many of these types of people.
He was above the average intelligence of pretty much everyone around us, and this was in high school so his egocentrism was probably running rampant. And, being honest, he didn't have anything except his intelligence. He wasn't attractive (fat), wasn't athletic (fat), wasn't popular (maybe 5 genuine friends throughout the entirety of high school). He might have gone maximum smart guy mode because he wanted to at least show off the qualities he actually had, but the problem was how it pushed people away.
Eventually, he became less of a source of intelligence for our group, providing insight on the things we didn't know or didn't care about, and instead became an authoritative, judgmental figure. If at any point anyone said something marginally stupid, he'd pounce on it like a tiger in order to show off his intellectual (and perceived moral) superiority. This was the main factor that probably wedged half of his group of friends away from him. Eventually he started dropping hobbies that everyone else shared and picked up more 'mature' hobbies, such as buying clothes for thousands of dollars (upper class family) or sitting in front of a fire pit and drinking wine.

The first time I told him to fuck off forever was when he had gotten drunk off of wine and was spamming my messenger with poetry and when I said I didn't understand and didn't care, he called me a philistine and started saying some stuff about how meaningful it all was. A year later, I'm friends with him again but his superiority complex is in full swing. I can't even describe it, but he was barely recognizable at that point. It was like he smelled blood in the water whenever anyone -- friends included -- showed some sign of weakness. He just became a nasty individual and, with his hobbies boiled down to overpriced clothing and overpriced cafes, I just didn't want to be around him any more.

What we can get out of this is something we already know: Some people, especially on the internet, have a superiority complex. They always want to find someone worse than they are, and let's be honest. There are a lot of dumbasses on the internet that make for easy targets. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself with this assumption, but I think these so-called Smart Guys are doing it because they have no desirable traits, or at least none that they can see in themselves, so they emphasize their perceived intelligence in the hopes that people will respect them for it.
Sad or not, they're still obnoxious as hell.
 
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. Plus you can't point them to texts/resources on the subject, as they'll refuse to read them outright as they "don't need to read them" or "know better".

The worst aspect of these people however is that they turn learning as an activity into a competition as opposed to something that can be used to improve yourself, or for pleasure - and in doing so take the fun out of it. You can't have a casual conversation with these people as they're constantly trying to compete with you.

All in all, it's this attitude that makes so many of the cows here cows. We've got Autphag, Lucas Werner, Marjan, Brad Watson to name a few; and what these people have in common is that they put their "smartness" as the defining aspect of their identities. And when you strip away this "smartness" they're nothing but arrogant, boring people who are not interesting at all.
 
The clearest definition of a Smart guy, I think, is someone who has already decided they know everything worth knowing and there isn't anything else anyone can teach them.

So I stand by my post from 10 pages ago, they really overlap a lot with SJWs.
 
AnOminous said:
I'll never get over the fact that he cucked the dude who made that voice box for him and stole his wife.

He can't even move and he's still a stone cold pimp.
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If he gets #metoo-ed just because he's banged every nurse and graduate student he's ever been near I will do everything I can to turn the allegations into a badge of honor for him. :semperfidelis:
 
Neil is enjoyable to listen to when he talks about things he is good at. He has such a strong genuine fascination for space, and can make for some nice background noise. He is full on retarded about anything else, though, especially history. His tweet on columbus day is legendary:
ChiETUDWUAAIdvG.jpg
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
The clearest definition of a Smart guy, I think, is someone who has already decided they know everything worth knowing and there isn't anything else anyone can teach them.

So I stand by my post from 10 pages ago, they really overlap a lot with SJWs.
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Exactly. There's also a lot of overlap with incels/MGTOWs, and to a small extent the conspiritard circles.
 
Somsnosa said:
Neil is enjoyable to listen to when he talks about things he is good at. He has such a strong genuine fascination for space, and can make for some nice background noise. He is full on exceptional about anything else, though, especially history. His tweet on columbus day is legendary:
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ChiETUDWUAAIdvG.jpg


Lol, I'm surprised this didn't get him metoo'd for promoting colonialism.
 
Ummm actually these people are not lolcows and I'm right because I took a totally-legit IQ test and it said I had a 160 IQ.

Please read my anarcho-nationalist-syndicalist-libertarian blog and educate yourself.
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
ChiETUDWUAAIdvG.jpg


Lol, I'm surprised this didn't get him metoo'd for promoting colonialism.
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The smartass seems to forget that the Spain of the time was somewhat of an unified country. Italy wasn't: it was divided in several counties, kingdoms and ducates. That's why Columbus went to Spain to get funds for his expeditions to Indies: it was much more stable and richer.
Also, geographical positions. Spain is much more "forwarded" towards the Americas than Africa. Unified Italy started his colonial adventures much later, a bit like Germany ( in late 19th Century) and towards North Africa and Eastern Europe. Nowadays, if you go in places like Libya, Ethiopia, Lebanon and Albania, you can hear a lot of people speaking Italian.
 
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.
 
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