March 8, 2010
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“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”
The real problem with pride is that we are not nearly so great as we think we are. Of course, it is perfectly well to accept the exact right amount of praise and credit that is due to one’s accomplishments. Normally, however, we are quite wrong about how much credit we deserve. We simple balloons are apt to make gargantuan planets of our achievements.
Take the example of a person who is really smart. To be smart usually means to have ‘figured things out’ so that you have a lot of right opinions and know how to think about things the right way. Sometimes it seems incredible how much someone knows and how right they seem all the time. But the truth is that they are a part of the nexus of the wider human community, on whom they depend for everything—including their judgments about things. Many times forming a right opinion consists in agreeing with someone else, who had to be the one to say it. It is startling how easily we turn this into a fact which is so marvelous about us, as though we figured it out all by ourselves.
Think about how odd it is that we feel more intelligent than people who lived a thousand years ago becuase we now know not to bleed and purge, and that there are electrons, and so on. But what did I have to do with figuring out any of that? And if I didn’t have anything to do with it, why should I feel so much smarter than those lowly medieval doctors who simply were going off of the best people had come up with?
There are so many times it seems like credit is supposed to be put upon us for having judged something else to be of value. What movies, authors, sports teams, and bands a person likes can become a grand fact about them, even though they didn’t make any of it. They just like it. That seems to me to be pretty odd.
Then again, a lot of things seem pretty odd to me.
Comments (8)
Ha! Awesome!
So true.
“We simple balloons are apt to make gargantuan planets of our achievements.”
Love it. LOVE it.
And it is kinda weird how we do that. When you think about it from your perspective here, it destroys the whole hierarchy we’ve created around intelligence. What really matters in the end is what you do with what you know. What matters is how you allow yourself to be molded. We’re all being molded, whether we like that idea or not, and it’s only a matter of what shape you’ve subscribed to.
Good thoughts, as usual!
~V
And once again a very self-revelatory post. Brilliant.
There’s some sort of saying about “Standing on the shoulders of giants” when it comes to thinking up stuffs. This reminded me of that.
I think you are touching on two important (but subtle) ideas: (1) expertise has a very limited scope, and (2) there is a difference between “knowledge” and “wisdom.”
1. I can’t tell if you are in favor of forming opinions by “agreeing with someone else” or against it. In general, though, we have no option: We cannot become experts in *everything* and so we rely on Physicists to inform our opinions about Physics, and Economists to inform our opinions about Economics, and so on.
The problem comes when we rely on TV/Radio Hosts to inform our opinions about Everything–rather than just about Hosting TV/Radio Shows.
To be *really* smart means you are able to (a) determine whether or not you are capable of forming an expert opinion, and to (b) know who to agree with when you are beyond your expertise. In this sense, I’m inclined to say: Yes, one valid avenue for judging someone’s character is knowing who they rely on to form their opinions.
2. I’m having a tough time putting my thoughts into words here. Suffice it to say that the ability to learn is worthy of credit even if what you are learning is already common knowledge to some.
@jim_the_american -
Good additional thoughts. Your (1) is definitely true, though I’m not exactly sure what (2) is or how it is supposed to relate.
It is true that there is value in determining who to agree with. At the same time, I think the praise merited from using lots of other people’s judgments to arrive at the truth is quite limited. If a person came up with all the right judgments themself, then that would be quite deserving of praise. I’m not saying it’s valueless to agree with others, just that we usually overshoot how meritorious we are after we have relied on so many others to arrive at our destination.
@StrokeofThought -
1. We can’t develop “right” judgments on our own, insofar as the “right” judgment is an informed one. The best we can do is be very well informed about a few narrow subjects (like atomic physics, for example). For everything else, we need to determine whose judgment to trust.
2. You made a comment about being “more intelligent” than people who lived 1000 years ago, and the distinction between (a) the discovery of a concept, and (b) the understanding of an already-discovered concept. For instance, being proud of understanding what electrons are and why they are important is different from taking credit for their discovery.
While (a) probably requires a combination of genius, technology, and “cultural readiness,” (b) is not without merit. True understanding is worthy of praise, whether or not the learner discovered the concept on his/her own.