{"id":75072,"date":"2026-08-07T01:00:01","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T05:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75072"},"modified":"2026-08-06T09:51:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T13:51:06","slug":"qotd-a-provisional-taxonomy-of-stupid-smart-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/08\/07\/qotd-a-provisional-taxonomy-of-stupid-smart-guys\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The low IQ<\/strong>: I know some of y’all don’t like [Julian] Jaynes [author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind<\/em>], but one of the big reasons I<\/em> like Jaynes is that he really brings home just how much of our behavior is unconscious. Including quite complex behavior, including stuff that we have to believe is the product of deep thought \u2014 he cites the “three B’s” his physicist friend told him about. Those are Bed, Bathroom, and Bus, which is where big important ideas seem to just come to them unbidden. You may not agree with where Jaynes goes with that, but we all have experienced something similar.<\/p>\n

If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not<\/em> mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity<\/em> of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching<\/em> someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving \u2014 your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms \u2014 if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.<\/p>\n

The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.<\/p>\n

The Dunning-Krugerrand<\/strong>. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all<\/em> do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.<\/p>\n

The Artiste<\/strong>. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.<\/p>\n

This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people \u2014 video people, at least \u2014 think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first<\/em>, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content \u2014 “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” \u2014 drops away.<\/p>\n

Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction<\/a>“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate<\/em> narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.<\/p>\n

Medicalization<\/strong>. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really<\/em> spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice \u2014 because they don’t need<\/em> to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.<\/p>\n

Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-07-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The low IQ: I know some of y’all don’t like [Julian] Jaynes [author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind], but one of the big reasons I like Jaynes is that he really brings home just how much of our behavior is unconscious. Including quite complex behavior, including stuff that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,28,41,13],"tags":[31,1065,139,1462],"class_list":["post-75072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-army","tag-dunningkrugereffect","tag-psychology","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jwQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75072"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104114,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75072\/revisions\/104114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}