Every Man in The Room Thinks He's The Smartest Man In The Room

Anyway, as I recall it they were talking about some sort of study where the general consensus was that nearly every man feels like they are smarter than everybody else, but interestingly they found that was not the case with women.

------------------------ Women may have learned to be better at hiding it. I've worked with Asian women who felt free to let their inherent dominance show. We got along fine because I patiently listened and agreed with them. That's why I wouldn't take the position of Production Manager, though I've done it informally as liaison with Engineering when no one else dared to. The smartest, (hottest) boldest and most dominant of the girls (Irish, not Asian) hunted me down and married me.

I knew damn well I wasn't smarter or as good at higher math than most of the engineers I worked for and learned from, so I tried to gain a broader practical education to complement their deep and often narrowly focused theoretical one. As I've often done here I didn't question the basis of their request without a good reason such as halving the complexity and difficulty by questioning an unjustified requirement. One such change was a simple geometric modification that eliminated a difficult computational problem, along the lines of replacing a worn leadscrew with a ball screw and DRO though not as obvious. That reduced the problem from what graphics processors are needed for to what a Z80 could handle.

For an example that I can more fully disclose I built a shielded test fixture to measure and display the decay rate of dielectric charge absorption of Teflon insulation for a Ph.D engineer who had previously designed an attoAmmeter, an electron counter. The fixture had a higher than expected noise level which I identified as from the building's newly installed 30KHz ultrasonic motion detectors, since I had talked to the installers, and he calculated in his head that it was vibrating the shielding panels by about one micron to induce the observed capacitive coupling. I then diagonally creased the panels on the shop's brake to stiffen them, which cured the problem. He knew what he wanted, I knew how to build it for him.

this case after a voltage change from a previous test we were seeing relay matrix insulation discharge a few picoAmps that decayed in 5-10mS, which was enough to interfere with high speed, high resistance testing on computer memory chips.

The knowledge of high speed, low level computerized measurement I gained on that job enabled me to jump into digital radio design at Mitre, where the expert radio engineers knew relatively little of computer hardware interfacing. A still-active retiree there taught me enough about superheterodyne radio to survive, as digitizing the IF frequency eliminated all the demodulation hardware. I still had to take night classes to keep up. We Mitre techs joked that our job was scrubbing the bottom of the Think Tank. I considered it like spending our days at a Country Club because we were the groundskeepers.

When the rain stops I'll be out fixing rust on the car instead of in composing these essays.

Anyway, as I recall it they were talking about some sort of study where the general consensus was that nearly every man feels like they are smarter than everybody else, but interestingly they found that was not the case with women.

----------------------------------

That raises the question of what "smart" really is, which came up sometimes at Mensa parties, less often than you might guess. We were all strong in some areas and weak in others, both men and women. The mathematicians weren't the quickest to figure the collective tip at group dinners and the writers not always the fastest with puns or snappy comebacks. I'd say the engineers and programmers were the most well-rounded which annoyed the liberal arts grads, possibly because we practiced analyzing and solving new problems while they had been taught only to regurgitate the paradigm of accepted knowledge they'd been fed. I got that from an article one of them wrote.

Boston and NYC Mensans were more inclined to try to impress others with their brilliance, a risky undertaking in that bunch. Colleges are often urban so their studies may suffer from sampling bias. I think the people who remain out here in flyover country are generally more self-reliant and secure, less neurotic and codependent, regardless of intelligence.

We agreed to interview a reporter once at a restaurant dinner gathering and watched her wander around with her notepad looking for her image of the smart people. Finally we called her out. She said the leader of our group reminded her of a Bulgarian weightlifter so she passed us by.

The group consensus was to omit Mensa from our resumes so we wouldn't be assumed arrogant.

No, I don't think so. Its whatever the person defining smart thinks makes them superior.

No, I don't think so. Its whatever the person defining smart thinks makes them superior. Bob La Londe

--------------------------

To me smartness a measure of how accurately one can analyze and understand a problem or situation, and solve or adapt to it, how close to reality their mental model is. Whether or not they need to feel superior to others is an emotional rather than intellectual dimension, orthogonal and perhaps inversely proportional to their actual abilities. I found Ph.Ds more likely to listen to my suggestions than production workers. Then they'd politely explain exactly why I was wrong and help me learn more.

In the intellectually challenging scholastic, scientific and engineering research environments I've mostly been in we were often acutely aware of our limitations from recent experience. That's why I wouldn't stand under a hoist I'd designed without testing it, buy instead of attempting to design switching power supplies and don't offer to weld aluminum.

When we neared graduation a professor told us not to believe that we were now real chemists, only that we had learned enough of the basics to understand the explanations when we took a job somewhere. It's like learning feeds and speeds and the controls doesn't make one a machinist, it only reduces their costly errors as they learn the rest.

I've been watching a detective show on PBS, the German "Luna & Sophie", where the viewer knows only as much as the female detectives do and sees them build up sometimes false guesses of who dun it, which change as the clues accumulate. Often several suspects might have the motive and opportunity. The killer finally confesses under pressure and guilt and then you see the crime committed. It's not too different from solving an engineering problem. I read high-tech accident reports which also lead through the puzzling clues before revealing the final conclusion.

'd taken that flight to Denver not long before.

I wrote: "Whether or not they need to feel superior to others is an emotional rather than intellectual dimension, orthogonal and perhaps inversely proportional to their actual abilities."

"According to this theory, some people react by working hard to master skills and complete achievements. [me]

However, people with very strong feelings of inferiority have a hard time convincing themselves that they have actually achieved enough. To compensate, Adler argues that these people play up their accomplishments and opinions to make themselves feel better."

American politics is a good fit to a pattern of superiority/inferiority complexes based on financial and social success or lack of it and the resulting envy and blame-shifting. It also fits a closely related analysis of mature self-reliance vs childish dependence, which socialism promises to continue after the parents end their support.

This method of assessing peoples' potential appears in several versions, in one the ambitious but stupid officer is a rabble rouser who should be taken out back and shot.

In college the radical leftist SDS somehow got the impression that I and my roommate might be useful fellow travellers, perhaps because I tend to listen patiently to everyone, less from sympathy than to collect sociological field data. Their leadership exactly matched the profile of ambitious and stupid, born losers with dreams of power, in complete denial of their incompetence.

They obviously had outside foreign influence because they closely followed the model of socialist political agitation I had learned from excellent teachers in high school history classes, yet the SDS knew nothing of its history such as the dispute between Marx and Bakunin.

I run the risk of branding myself as one of those who is lazy and just wants the one simple answer here, but I really think the original premise is still the best one. Every man in the room thinks he's the smartest man in the room. Defining smart is always going to be weighted by the bias of that "smartest man in the room."

People who want the one simplest answer boiled down often drive me bonkers.

I run the risk of branding myself as one of those who is lazy and just wants the one simple answer here, but I really think the original premise is still the best one. Every man in the room thinks he's the smartest man in the room. Defining smart is always going to be weighted by the bias of that "smartest man in the room." People who want the one simplest answer boiled down often drive me bonkers. Bob La Londe

---------------------------

Then you can be the General. I was only a Sergeant and don't want the burden of going further. I dropped out of ROTC.

In physics the concept of a point of reference is very important. If you walk down a subway car aisle are you moving at walking speed, the speed of the car, the rotation of Earth, its orbital velocity or galactic motion? What you perceive totally depends on what you are able to observe and what your goals are, whether reaching an empty seat or the next station or being on time for an appointment (Earth's rotation).

Each man in that room has his own point of reference to compare others to, all opinions of equal weight and probably all wrong from an unbiased external viewpoint. That's their mental model.