reader mail! first, i want to say that i don't get much email relating to the stuff i write. i encourage all of you to write; i think the reason people don't is that they're scared or afraid it will be misinterpreted. don't worry; i won't think you're stalking me, and i'll try not to get overexcited and stalk you, either.

phil writes:

I find your stuff thought provoking, so here are a couple of thoughts that your June 10 entry provoked in me. By the way, I wrote you a long letter a couple of years ago that was (I thought) packed with thought provoking ideas, but you never answered. No problem, but I was curious as to why.

even though i don't get much mail, i don't respond to much of the mail i do get. there are generally three reasons for this:

  1. i' ve already written what i would write in response in the original entry, and i don't have much else to say on the matter.
  2. i put it off until i'm in the right mood, and eventually forget about it.
  3. i think we have a fundamental difference of opinion and it's not worth it to argue.
i do appreciate all of the mail, though, and i do read it all and think about it all. much like i don't need mail to be satisfied that people are reading this and thinking about it, hopefully you don't need a response to be satisfied that i have read and thought about what you wrote, and this little note here will suffice. it's worth noting that the first two items in that list are way more common than the last one; i'm not sure the last one has ever occurred with respect to this, although it certainly has in e-mail conversations.

Anyway... You said:

"i'd just like to add that beautiful people do in fact have less incentive to educate themselves, but dumb people also have more incentive to be beautiful, since they aren't going to snag those elitists of us who require intelligence in our mate regardless; it's easier to change from ugly to pretty than it is from dumb to smart, to put it crudely."

First, I think the concept of "beautiful" is pretty much subjective, on an individual level. I guess there is always a "pop culture" concept of what and who is "beautiful", and that the "masses" are affected by that. But, I'm primarily concerned with the group of what I would call "thoughtful people". As a thoughtful person, I always had a passion for learning, and this passion was there long before I even thought about how "beautiful" I might consider myself to be (or what others might think about my looks). I think the love for learning is inborn, and totally independent of one's own perception of his/her looks.

i agree that the concept of beautiful is subjective, but i don't think this pop culture thing is as irrelevant as you seem to make it sound here. certainly all children have an instinct to curry favor in the group of people they're around; this is [a non-genetic reason] why children turn out like their parents, for instance. pretty much regardless of where you grow up, you're going to be surrounded by the masses, and thus have this opinion cast on you whether you like it or not. i think beautiful people, seeing that they are already in the good graces of people who are more powerful than them, relax more than less beautiful (and i mean entirely in the conventional sense; my personal tastes are at extreme odds with what i think conventional senses of attractiveness are) people do.

less conventionally beautiful people, on the other hand, look for alternative routes to favor. this curiosity that children are renowned for is thereby kept alive as they grow older, and i think curiosity is what a lot of people equate with intelligence. i guess more to the point, i think curiosity is, in most cases, the prime motivator behind learning.

this ties in somewhat with what i've been talking about with respect to marriage, too: that once you have something so important to you, curiosity becomes stunted somewhat because the potential gain of extra knowledge is somewhat mitigated, while the potential damage is increased. for instance, consider the cost/benefit analysis of finding an ideal mate; if you're already married to someone you think is your ideal mate, then finding another ideal mate is worth much less -- perhaps even negative -- than if you are bereft of one to begin with. if we postulate that (and this is a very questionable postulate, obviously) the curiosity exists for the unconscious purpose of currying favor, or of finding people who like you, the chain of logic is obvious.

now, i was talking to cindy about this yesterday, and, as one would hope (since she's effectively married, which seems so odd in writing), she disagrees. her main point is that once you have that stability, you have the unconditional approval, and thus the freedom to experiment with your personality without worrying that you will fuck everything up. i hadn't thought of this before, and i think it's a valid argument, but i'm not sure the effect is big enough to counteract what i'm talking about now, or to counteract the pruning of aspects of your personality that are no longer needed. more probably, the truth is flexible enough that a sufficiently caring person can make lemonade regardless of whether they're married or not. it certainly seems to work for cindy, in any case.

as for the love of learning, i don't think it's primarily genetic. it's possible that as long as you can remember you've had a passion for learning, but all that means is that you don't explicitly remember growing this passion. or perhaps that when you didn't have a passion for learning, you also didn't have a good memory -- i would expect those to be correlated. a lot of stuff happens to shape a kid in early childhood, when the brain is still pliable; i know i'm an outlier, but i don't remember much of significance before i was almost-13. i think this age is around eight for most people, when their continuous memory starts, but regardless of how early it is the stuff before it is extremely important. periods such as 0-1, 1-3, and 3-5 are extremely important in a child's development, and there is both neurological and higher-level evidence of this.

And, that love of learning (a very powerful force, I think) is not going to be affected by people positively responding to your looks. That is, one's incentive to learn (i.e. become educated in a meaningful sense) is not going to change because one also happens to be "beautiful".

i disagree with this. i think this is primarily again because of the analogy to marriage; i've seen it happen to a lot of people i know. i've seen people become less curious, less interested in having conversations, less multi-faceted, less interesting, because of peer approval. the popular-culture analogue here is the teenager who runs with the wrong crowd; your personality is constantly changing as you try to adapt to the situation around you. the only reason this becomes less pronounced as you get older is because you have more vested in your current lifestyle and personality (for instance, friends with expectations of you.) almost paradoxically, i think the ability to adapt is a sign of the type of intelligence that i mention here.

for a more concrete if less drastic example, when i'm happy i rarely stop and think of other things i could be doing with my life. i take up fewer new activities; i meet fewer people. i probably change less. i definitely write less email, not only because i'm spending my time doing other things but because i simply don't have much of interest to say about my life. this is the old buddhist saw about happiness being the absence of suffering yet again; when i am happy, there is nothing in particular to write about. the most interesting problems to think about are ones you haven't solved; when my life is going well, there is much less in the way of relevant problems to engage my mind, which certainly atrophies as a result.

do i think this is necessarily always going to be the case? no, but i think the overall tendencies do run like this.

I suppose it is true that many people who aren't all that particularly interested in learning do nonetheless become "educated" in the sense that they go through college (because they want a decent job, etc.). So, perhaps it is this sort of (intelligent, yet vacuous) person you have in mind in your statement above. Perhaps the "beautiful" ones of this sort are to some extent "positively reinforced" to feel less need for education.

i'm not sure precisely what you mean by "intelligent, yet vacuous," but i just wanted to add that i think you find beautiful people in college, for instance, for a much simpler reason: conventional beauty and going to college both correlate heavily with socioeconomic status. the college part i don't think i have to explain; the simple facts are that if you're better off, then you can afford to go to college, and that if you have a higher social class, then the trades available to you will likely require or encourage going to college. as for the beauty, this is a two-way causation: higher-class people can more afford to be beautiful (e.g. makeup, better diet, orthodonture) in the conventional sense, and the people who emerge as paragons of beauty come from the better-connected upper socioeconomic classes.

What exactly is a "dumb" person? There are so many different kinds of intelligence that I don't feel all that comfortable using the term . I've known many analytically intelligent people who were absolute morons when it came to what I call "psychological" intelligence (i.e. understanding themselves and others). So, would the word "dumb" apply to them? In some sense, yes, in another no.

i talk a lot about intelligence here, and i rarely if ever talk about what i mean by this, so i thought i would take this opportunity to clarify things. here are the two most important things to keep in mind when i talk about intelligence:

  1. i never mean SAT-type or book-learning intelligence; what i mean is closer to your psychological intelligence. the word probably closest to a synonym for what i mean is "versatility."
  2. i typically use the word to mean whatever i happen to want it to at the moment. i do, however, believe that true intelligence (see the first item in this list) encompasses all the uses of the word "intelligence" that i put out there.
i tend to focus on psychological intelligence: how good you are at understanding other people, and at understanding social situations. i do this for two reasons: first of all, in practice, i think it's the most important kind. and second of all, i think that humans are sufficiently complex that understanding other people requires understanding a whole bunch of other things, possibly everything else of relevance. there's also a subjective component here, of course: i enjoy talking about social situations and people more than just about anything, and so obviously when i'm (unconsciously) evaluating people i look for perceptiveness.

using versatility to mean intelligence, of course, is hardly unprecedented. in principle, this is what an iq test is supposed to do: it's supposed to be culturally independent, to confront you with novel situations and see if you can figure it out. in practice, it is impossible to design such a test, especially because everything you can put down on paper and easily communicate within the time frame in question, without using any social constructs, is almost by definition too simple and constrained to be a reasonable test of versatility.

Concerning the elitists who require intelligence in their mates. What sort of intelligence? How precisely would it be manifested (ability to speak 16 languages, to write music, to solve math problems, or what?). I've met people who can do each of those things whom I certainly would not want to have for a mate (or to be marooned on a desert island with). Because in spite of having this obvious "intelligence", there was something missing (the "psychological" intelligence, as well as compassion, which is another quality I think is critical, although not necessarily associated with any type of "intelligence"). This is of course a deep topic, and I lack time, so I'll just leave it at that.

well escaped!

i, likewise, will attempt to wriggle out of this in two ways. i'll do this first, and then get to some of the meat of the versatility question, which is kind of a wriggle in its own right.

the first escape is that this is entirely subjective, and therefore that i can't answer the question productively. i've obviously thought about this a lot myself, and i think i have a reasonable judgment as to whether people are qualified to be my mate. (this is a horribly gauche way to put it, but i think factually it's accurate.) the second is that the sort of intelligence i'm looking for is so complex (because i'm looking for a complex person) that it can't possibly be described with any reasonable number of words or even ideas. it's smart enough to outpace my speed of writing; it's a sort of meta-intelligence, which begets describable things faster than i can write them down.

this is unsatisfying for those of you who derive pleasure from my putting my foot in my mouth, so i'll make a stab at alienating another fraction of my audience.

each of the things you described, i think, is only part of the intelligence in question. let's try a list of ten things which i think characterize intelligent people... no, let's not. the problem with intelligent people is precisely that they come in so many shapes and sizes that it's impossible to enumerate them. there's a saying (with regards to fortunetelling) that ordinary people's lives are easy to predict; it's the extraordinary people who give you trouble. in the same vein, i think that unintelligent people generally fall into a small number -- i would say around 20 -- of types, from which you can reasonably predict their future behavior.

i don't write about unintelligent people much here, because the way in which i'm elitist is precisely that i discard these people quickly. (if you think i'm talking about you, i'm definitely not, because you would be looking at this web page if i were; i would have discarded you quickly.) they don't bother me; they just don't add to my life or have any impact on me. they fade into the background; they don't gain individuality in my mind. i don't need to spend much time thinking about them to figure that part of my life out; they don't appear unannounced in my cartesian theater, and i don't take reservations.

in case it wasn't obvious, by the way, i don't think that this is genetic or even particularly immutable. people can be stereotypes up to a certain age and then break free -- my guess is that this is usually due to environmental shifts. people can get subsumed into stereotypes as they grow older -- my guess is that this is usually due to lack of environmental shifts, which is another way of looking at marriage (since one's mate is a fairly constant part of one's environment.) but just because it's mutable doesn't mean that it isn't useful.

anyway, intelligence. when i picture an intelligent person, i picture someone who is good at everything, and who can rapidly acquire a reasonable level of skill at anything. something that i think is characteristic of intelligent people is that they give up quickly -- having a strong intuition means that you can pick up patterns and not waste your time on failed quests, and this is something that carries over to almost every phase of life. solving math problems. writing music. speaking languages -- well, maybe not so much. obviously this is somewhat self-serving, since i just talked about how i give up on most people almost immediately.

but in practice? i guess what i'm trying to say is that i don't think of intelligent people in terms of their characteristics. i think about the characteristics a lot, but for real people, which is undoubtedly all of you guys, i don't think about their characteristics when i'm interacting with them. for people who are in types, i feel that i'm interacting with the type, not the person, but for me intelligence is a necessary and perhaps sufficient condition for uniqueness. what i care about isn't intelligence but rather happiness -- though everything is tied together anyway, i suppose.

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