There’s a very interesting article up at Raw Story about Trump’s never ending insistence that he’s smart. So smart, super smart, bigly smart! It’s a low level annoyance, because it’s obviously not true, and as pointed out in the article, most people who are smart have no particular need to say so. That said, there are people who are, at least, technically smart, who seem to have a pathological need to parade that fact, and I’ve always found that to be nothing more than insecurity. When you’re a kid, it’s not fun being the egghead. Maybe that’s changed, I don’t know, but back in the day, you’d get ganged up on for being a smarty pants, so mostly you didn’t go around bragging or anything. Just tried to stay invisible in the corner, with your stack of books behind you. I don’t care about IQs, those are meaningless, and as for grades, well, those aren’t exactly a reliable indicator, either.
Smart is what you do with it. People who are curious, who read, and delight in a lifelong love of learning, that’s smart. People who are capable of thinking beyond all the tropes, clichés, stereotypes, and other bullshit, that’s smart. And so on. I love reading, I’ve had my nose in a book since always, and for me, people that read, I find them to be reassuring and comforting. And generally speaking, not only willing to think, but they love to think.
Trump doesn’t read. At all. That disturbed me no end when it first came out, and it still does. His compleat lack of a vocabulary disturbs the hell out of me too, I’ve often commented on the fact that he talks like a child. Bush Jr could barely string a sentence together, and he looks like a bloody rocket scientist next to Trump. “That’s the big stuff.” That’s what he says about major governmental decisions and policy. Anyone who is capable of thinking is left wondering “what does that mean?” Turns out, lately, what that means is “look what a big bully I am! Do what I say!” A stupid, unthinking, short-sighted bully, that’s our dictator. As the criticisms and doubt amp up, Big Bully Donny is going to get a whole lot worse. It’s barely been two weeks, and already…
Anyone who feels compelled to boast about how smart he is clearly suffers from a profound insecurity about his intelligence and accomplishments. In Trump’s case, he has good reason to have doubts.
Trump has the kind of street smarts (what he calls “gut instinct”) characteristic of con artists and hucksters, but his limited vocabulary, short attention span, ignorance of policy specifics, indifference to scientific evidence, and admitted aversion to reading raise questions about his intellectual abilities; his capacity to absorb and analyze information and ideas.
Many observers have noted that Trump has a difficult time expressing himself and speaking in complete sentences. A linguistic analysis by Politico found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. A study by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University compared last year’s Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in terms of their vocabulary and grammar. Trump scored at a fifth-grade level, the lowest of all the candidates.
Some might suspect this is not an intellectual shortcoming but instead Trump’s calculated way of communicating with a wide audience. But Tony Schwartz, who spent a great deal of time with the real estate developer while ghostwriting his book The Art of the Deal, noted that Trump has a very limited vocabulary.
Anyone who has ever bothered to skim what Trump supporters have to say, in letters, comments, tweets, what have you, there’s a noted similarity in smarts. And that’s frightening. You don’t need to be a bloody genius, but most people should at least want to be able to think, and to be able to parse things correctly, and have the means to communicate effectively.
The appeal to stupidity and ignorance is a dangerous one, and it has already proved to the be the match which set the fire.
The article is here.
Here’s a fine example of happy to be stupid and ignorant Americans:
“I feel that if a Muslim woman wants to move into this country, she needs to leave her towel home,” Bill explained. “Because the reason this country is here and safe today is because of Jesus Christ.”
It’s a hijab. Simple word, not at all hard to learn. It’s not a towel, it’s a head covering, much like those rags on your heads, oh, I mean hats. While you probably should always have your towel, that’s a universe thing, per Douglas Adams. That’s one of those book things.
He continued: “We were one nation under God. The Muslims are into Allah.
:Bangs head into wall: PLACEHOLDER. The word “god” is generic, it does not point to any particular god, that requires a name. It means ‘supreme being’. Allah means “god”, yep, ‘supreme being’. In point of fact, it happens to be the same fucking god, and I’m damn tired of pointing that out. Abrahamaic based religions: Judaism, Islam, Christianity. Same books, same god, different interpretations. And there was no “one nation under god” until genocidal assholes found their way to Turtle Island, and of course that sort of shit was reinforced during the cold war. For Chrissakes, learn something. If willfully stupid people are going to insist on being stupid, the least you could do is shut the fuck up. Try to read a book or something.
Oh, and what was our super genius president doing yesterday, as one crisis after another was unfolding? Having a private screening of Finding Dory.
CNN producer Kevin Liptak revealed on Sunday that the president’s family had chosen to screen Finding Dory, Pixar’s film about a cartoon fish who is torn apart from her family and placed in a public aquarium.
No words.
My (now, luckily, former) supervisor liked to constantly reassure me how he gets my back if the shit hits the fan for all those things I warned him about. I got lucky, because I have a reputation for honesty and competence, so when the shit indeed hit the fan as I predicted and he tried to let me hang out to dry for it, I got support from his supervisors and he got the sack.
What definitively also helped was that I never actually trusted his word and I kept direct contact with higher management in spite of his wishes not to do so, and I kept issuing my warnings in writing, contrary to his direct orders to inform him only verbally. All those years I was saying to my friends and coleagues that people who can be trusted do not bang their trustworthiness about all the time. And I was right.
When someone tries to constantly build confidence with words instead of deeds, it is a huge red flag (orange combover). When someone constantly brags about how competent, perfect, intelligent or virtually anything they are, I get very cautious and my null hypothesis is they are the exact opposite of what they say.
If Trump really were smart, he would know that intelligence alone is not enough. Information is needed for the intelligence to process it, it does not pop-up in a smart brain on its own accord. Even the smartest and most intelligent person on the planet is susceptible to gigo principle. Being smart does not mean you do not need information to reach correct conclusion -- it means only you have higher chance of correctly analyzing the information you get.
Charly:
Oh absolutely. Same here.
Yes, yes, yes.
So smart, super smart, bigly smart
Methinks yon arse hole doth protest too much.
Charly@#1:
When someone tries to constantly build confidence with words instead of deeds, it is a huge red flag (orange combover). When someone constantly brags about how competent, perfect, intelligent or virtually anything they are, I get very cautious and my null hypothesis is they are the exact opposite of what they say.
I know Caine quoted you for truth, but now I have, too. I’m a good follower like that.
No, seriously: you are so bang on the money.
What the Trump voter traitors tend to say when the subject of his intelligence is brought up (Scott Adams is yugely guilty of this) is, “Well, he’s a businessman who’s made billions of dollars, and I don’t see his critics making billions of dollars, so I’ll take that as evidence of his smartness.” It’s just a variant of the old anti-intellectualism: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
The number of bad assumptions that go into that attitude are staggering: the idea that money is the only thing worth striving for in the world; the idea that anyone would trade places with someone in Trump’s position if they only could; the idea that if a reward for an activity isn’t financial, then the activity isn’t worth doing; the troubling corollary that poor people must be stupid. From what I’ve seen of the world, yes, smart people often use their intellect to get rich (Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs). But plenty of people also obtain wealth by just being cunning enough to break rules and not get caught, or by being ruthless, or
by running cons. Our president seems to specialize in those methods primarily.
There are relevant links in the article.
brucegee1962@5, Hair furor trum-prat got a huge headstart from this father (as well as his racism), who also bailed him out of financial problems at least once. To to put it another way, he is the child of a billionaire, and hasn’t had to, and very possibly has not, earned his money at all. This makes the bogusity even stooooopider.
How did Trump make his first billion? He had two billion and lost one.
sez charly @1: “When someone constantly brags about how competent, perfect, intelligent or virtually anything they are… my null hypothesis is they are the exact opposite of what they say.”
This seems to be true of pretty much everything: The more you tell people how X-ish you are, the more likely it is that you are not, in fact, an exemplar of X. We’ve seen this in all the Pharyngula commenters with words like “rational” in their nym, and all the anti-woman organizations with words like “Family” in their name, and… well… the list does go on and bleeding on, doesn’t it?
“Show, not tell.”
That goes double for anyone who brags about having a Mensa membership. On the other hand, in my opinion, Mensa membership mean jack shit. Back in my taxi driving days I had a friend and fellow driver who was a Mensa member but was quick to point out he didn’t believe his IQ was actually that high — he just had a talent for test taking.
I must confess to having, on occasion, said the following words: “I am quite smart”
Generally they are followed by the words: “and occasionally I manage clever, and even, on rare occasions, marginally bright.”
(or the Swedish equivalent, you know)
But what gets me, where I get to the level of being unable to can is this damnable thing that his every speech puts in my brain-pan:
Donald Trump would lose a game of scrabble to me in sixth grade.
Not by scrabble-gaming, see, I didn’t even know the name of scrabble then, much less how to game that game.
(“Oh, but you’re all speaking like you think you’re bilingual and shit.”)
A thing I have on paper, given six years later. Thirteen year old me had fiction books in English and fucking Jack-in-the-Box on The Children’s Channel. And that vocabulary was years more advanced that Trump. Him making a speech sounds like a Swedish ESL book for ten-year-olds, but more stilted.
Is damaging to my teeth, is what it is.
Yes, yes, this!!
Applies to everything, from work situations right down to romantic relationships. See, I’m a sucker for smooth talkers, but even I learned that the more you talk, the less time you’re spending on actually doing. Now the kind of people described here by Charly put me on high alert, no matter how nice or polite they might appear.
The most read newspaper in the UK, The Sun, is written such that an eight-year old could read and understand it. This is not because it is written by eight-year olds, not because it is written by adults with the vocabulary of eight year olds, and not because it is written by adults for eight year olds. It is because it is written by clever adults for stupid adults.
I used to be of the opinion that Donald Trump was similar -- his exclusive use of simple vocabulary, his constant repetition, his apparent inarticulacy had to be, surely, a finely judged act to appeal to the legions of dumbos he was depending on for votes. However, if it is an act, it is the best, most consistent act I’ve ever seen or can even imagine. There’s no chink in it, no interview where he momentarily breaks character (as Stephen Colbert does sometimes) and lets on what he’s really thinking.
In companies I’ve worked for in the past I’ve often discussed management decisions with colleagues. The conclusion has regularly been expressed that management are either Machiavellian geniuses subtly and sadistically torturing the workforce with seemingly random actions designed to sabotage productivity and annoy people to the point they leave, or they are spectacularly incompetent dullards who could be productively replaced by a chimp with a dartboard. Furthermore, we felt that although the latter was probably true, we’d actually paradoxically prefer the former, because at least it would mean the world made some kind of sense.
I can’t believe nobody’s posted this yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyDk-UYuleY
It occurs to me hair furor trum-prat’s assertions he’s smart is rather similar to what the inept do, i.e., part of the Dunning–Kruger effect: Overrate their expertise.
(I’m sure I’m not the first person to have noticed this…)
@blf #15
I do not think that DK effect is enough of an explanation. The study has been conducted with normal people. And while indeed found that inept people think themselves being much more able than they actually are, it has also shown that they do not think themselves to be top. So while probably everybody is subject to DK effect to some degree and in some areas, most normal people are still able to recognize true expertise when they see it.
But Trumpet is not normal. He is not even capable of recognizing expertise in others. To him expertise means “agreeing with me”. And that is the problem.
Charly@16, “I do not think that DK effect is enough of an explanation.” I concur; notice that I not say that. Thanks for expanding on the point.