Tuesday, November 14, 2006

The Pit is better if there are fewer smart people in there

How can I say such a thing? I didn't, Scott Adams did. And he's pretty smart. Read the whole thing, especially his finding that Mensa geniuses are losers. Here's an excerpt:

In prior posts I’ve mentioned how much I’d like to see political polls that are limited to the smart, well-informed people. I have to confess, I thought I was stating a universal truth along the lines of “it’s better to have good health than poor health.” It seemed to me that being smart and well-informed was almost the same thing as being wise. Who doesn’t want the benefit of wisdom to inform their choices?

I was surprised at how many of my readers rushed to support the high quality of decisions made by stupid, uninformed people who are guided by superstition.

Some people accused me of being an elitist trying to assign a higher value to my own smarty-pants decisions. That’s a perfectly reasonable assumption, and I would have made it myself if I were in your Birkenstocks. But the truth is that I want to know the opinions of people who are both smarter and more informed than me. Why would I limit the quality of my advice to people who don’t know any more than I do?

And yes, I agree that Carter was "smarter" than Reagan, in the academic sense. I do not think that Reagan would have flourished at the Naval Academy. But Adams and I seem to agree that Reagan was a whole lot more effective.

UPDATE: It looks like Adams and I have another thing in common: we both have bought some GOD.EXISTS, as Adams concludes with "Alternately, we can keep voting for the guy with the best hair while waiting for the Rapture. That might work too." Check out the latest rounds at Midas Oracle: Jason Ruspini chuckles, Chris Masse celebrates, and Alex Forshaw is maybe a little more testy than me.

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