As a kid, at some age I realized that when people tell me “you are smart”, it means that I said something they agree with. They certainly didn’t reward a clever argument again their ideas. (Another source of praise was when I won some mathematical competition, because that was socially neutral; a pure signal of skills, evaluated by some external expert.)
I’ve actually had people call me smart for arguing against them quite often. It’s a kind of defense mechanism - ‘you’re only winning the argument because you’re smart, not because you’re right’.
‘you’re only winning the argument because you’re smart, not because you’re right’
I’m pretty sure I’d often end up losing arguments with very smart and debate-happy socialists, libertarians, postmodernists, neoreactionaries, anarchoprimitivists or jesuits if I got into them, but I don’t think that means I should end up agreeing with the world-views of all of them.
Although I think that has more to do with time investment than raw intelligence.
Still I think it’s often overlooked that in a world where you know people are a) biased b)dishonest and c) generally more intelligent than you, doing your own thinking becomes a pretty poor strategy.
I’ve had this happen too and what’s funny is that my apparent “smartness” was simply due to a familiarity with strong counter arguments to their position, and nothing to do with intelligence.
I had the same experience, but ‘being smart’ is an inherent feature of you, not a product of your work put in, so I felt insecure about possibly doing dumb things and damaging the perception of me as smart (which probably contributed to my adult issues with asking for help and fear of failure).
There’s a reward for doing easy thinking tasks, or for attempting ones known to be so difficult that success is not expected. However there’s no reward for trying anything that’s just far enough beyond your ability to be a good learning experience.
I was rewarded for being smart when I was a kid, which may not be the same thing as thinking.
I’ve known people who liked thinking and grew up in anti-intellectual environments—they were very happy to get out.
I think you’ve got a partial truth there.
As a kid, at some age I realized that when people tell me “you are smart”, it means that I said something they agree with. They certainly didn’t reward a clever argument again their ideas. (Another source of praise was when I won some mathematical competition, because that was socially neutral; a pure signal of skills, evaluated by some external expert.)
I’ve actually had people call me smart for arguing against them quite often. It’s a kind of defense mechanism - ‘you’re only winning the argument because you’re smart, not because you’re right’.
I’m pretty sure I’d often end up losing arguments with very smart and debate-happy socialists, libertarians, postmodernists, neoreactionaries, anarchoprimitivists or jesuits if I got into them, but I don’t think that means I should end up agreeing with the world-views of all of them.
Very true.
Although I think that has more to do with time investment than raw intelligence. Still I think it’s often overlooked that in a world where you know people are a) biased b)dishonest and c) generally more intelligent than you, doing your own thinking becomes a pretty poor strategy.
I’ve had this happen too and what’s funny is that my apparent “smartness” was simply due to a familiarity with strong counter arguments to their position, and nothing to do with intelligence.
It probably meant “you said something smart that they agreed with.”
It’s quite common to get that kind of a compliment even if you say something relatively stupid they agree with.
I think your substituting your evaluation of smart for theirs. They thought it was smart, even if you didn’t.
Under such interpretation, yes, it’s likely it was often something they considered smart and I considered merely… socially expected of me to say.
I had the same experience, but ‘being smart’ is an inherent feature of you, not a product of your work put in, so I felt insecure about possibly doing dumb things and damaging the perception of me as smart (which probably contributed to my adult issues with asking for help and fear of failure).
There’s a reward for doing easy thinking tasks, or for attempting ones known to be so difficult that success is not expected. However there’s no reward for trying anything that’s just far enough beyond your ability to be a good learning experience.
Sure there is: the satisfaction of pulling it off.
Sadly, one cannot eat satisfaction.