You're Probably Not as Smart as You Think You Are
Of ignorance and hubris, humility and spelunking
In my opinion, and based on my observation of people for three score and four years, most people think they are more intelligent than they really are. There are certainly exceptions, where people consider themselves rather dim when they are actually quite bright — whether that opinion stems from nature (their own diffident personality) or nurture (people having told them, either directly or indirectly, that they are rather dense).
Let’s focus, though, on the more common feeling people have of possessing superior intelligence, and whence it originates:
An ignorant person (not necessarily unintelligent, but simply ignorant) often thinks they know a lot because they are unaware of all the things they don’t know. They sometimes react to something new to them either with surprise (they thought they already knew everything worth knowing) or disbelief (how can it be that you know something they don’t? It must be false or fictional).
This can be compared to someone exploring a cave. They find a chamber, and using a torch (or a flashlight — which, to a British person, is the same thing), they explore it. Now they think they know everything about the cave and are an expert on all its nooks and crannies.
They do not realize that there is another, larger, chamber, that branches off from the chamber they (supposedly thoroughly) examined.
A more intelligent and/or curious person discovers the other, larger, chamber, branching off from the first one, and realizes that they don’t really know much about the cave as of yet. They may take the time and expend the energy to explore that part of the cave, too, and discover yet another chamber. And so on.
That person (who continues to discover that there’s more he doesn’t know yet) has more knowledge than the “know-it-all,” and in fact enough knowledge to realize that he definitely doesn’t know it all, and probably never will.
So it is that ignorance itself can, somewhat paradoxically, cause people to think highly of the scope of their knowledge and the quality of their own intelligence. Those who are more intelligent (or more knowledgeable, at least), are usually not so hubristic.
Robert Frost, a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, aptly exposed this type of thinking (overestimating one’s own knowledge, although it may be quite limited) in his poem Two Tramps in Mud Time. The stanza I’m referring to is this:
Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool
Elvis Presley also sneeringly sang the following about those who did not have the know-how to snare a hare:
You ain't nothin' but a hound dog
. . .
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit
And you ain't no friend of mine
Don’t we all know people like that? It’s not just loggers and rabbit-snatchers; it’s a common malady displayed by specialists in all sorts of fields, both blue collar and professionals of all stripes. They are experts in their field, but may know next to nothing about almost everything else — however, because they are not interested in the rest of the vast array of knowledge the world contains, they ignore or downplay the importance of the information they lack. Thus, they reason that they possess the most important knowledge, and what you know, if anything, is of little or no consequence.
So then, to avoid being delusional about your own intelligence, be humble, and keep exploring.
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