(At this point I should point out that I like your hypothesis, I just think it is not necessarily single-cause)
Satoshi Kanazawa’s charmingly simple theory that general intelligence tends to suppress and displace most of your instincts. This means being smart pretty much automatically means being bad at a lot of things. The way I interpret it is that attention is a finite resource and you either pay attention to your analytical engine or your instincts or share it, but you cannot give full 100% attention to both. So if the analytical engine demands your attention the insticts shut up/down.
I have observed intelligent people being bad at the following instinctive things (not all of them, not in all of these):
social skills
motoric skills, hand-eye coordination like basketball
3D geometry i.e. toolmanship, fixing the plumbing or the lawn mower at home, being a handyman
This may be a case of ignoring people who are bad in both intellectual and physical things. Those people are just not salient, the same way as people think smart people are ugly and beautiful people are dumb. It may simply be that the ugly and dumb people go unnoticed. This is Berkson’s paradox: Even if A and B are independent, they are dependent conditioned on (A or B).
It may simply be that the ugly and dumb people go unnoticed.
Absolutely. The stereotype of the smart geek/nerd comes from the fact that when people are ugly/socially awkward/weird, other people get positively surprised that they are smart and really notice that. It is like, they would pretty much “written them off” as low-status unimportant people to be ignored, and thus they get surprised that they actually have useful virtues, and should not be so easily ignored because while how they say things is not popular, what they say is often true and insightful.
While the dumb nerd/geek just gets ignored forever.
Why these things? They largely involve plenty of “analytical engine” skill. I think I’m a pretty good singer, I was varsity basketball, had good enough balance and coordination to climb V6 before injuries, won the district-wide art show in high school three years in a row, fix all my own plumbing and fixed my lawn mower engine. My wife literally rebuilt her car’s circuit board, which is maybe more up the typical geek alley, but if you can do that, or build a gaming platform from parts, you can rebuild a lawn mower engine. You got me on social skills, but I don’t think that’s universal for smart people so much as universal for people who use most of their socializing resources on the Internet. General intelligence doesn’t have to mean “super focused on one thing.” You might have to give 100% attention if you ever want to be Kobe Bryant or something, but you can be really good at a lot of things without being among the top two or three in the world at any of them.
Anecdata, but just as reference to get away from bragging, the guy who got the second highest SAT score at my high school is now a pro rugby player. My best friend from college, who scored pretty close to us, just won an Emmy for writing comedy television.
I’ve observed lots of people being bad at those things, intelligent or not. I’m at least average at all of them. Granted, I have face blindness, but that has, thus far, been entirely insignificant, and I didn’t even notice until I encountered the term researching something else—and that is likely to be related to the fact that I didn’t start wearing glasses until -far- too late in my childhood, and so have insufficiently trained my brain to recognize faces in the first place. I’ve gotten gradually better at recognizing faces as I’ve expanded my social circle.
This kind of theory is appealing because it seems “fair”. I’m attractive, intelligent, tall, charismatic, good at everything (except welding) I have ever tried. My observation is this: There is no fairness, at all.
Alternative hypothesis 2
(At this point I should point out that I like your hypothesis, I just think it is not necessarily single-cause)
Satoshi Kanazawa’s charmingly simple theory that general intelligence tends to suppress and displace most of your instincts. This means being smart pretty much automatically means being bad at a lot of things. The way I interpret it is that attention is a finite resource and you either pay attention to your analytical engine or your instincts or share it, but you cannot give full 100% attention to both. So if the analytical engine demands your attention the insticts shut up/down.
I have observed intelligent people being bad at the following instinctive things (not all of them, not in all of these):
social skills
motoric skills, hand-eye coordination like basketball
3D geometry i.e. toolmanship, fixing the plumbing or the lawn mower at home, being a handyman
drawing
music, singing
balance
rythm, dancing
This may be a case of ignoring people who are bad in both intellectual and physical things. Those people are just not salient, the same way as people think smart people are ugly and beautiful people are dumb. It may simply be that the ugly and dumb people go unnoticed. This is Berkson’s paradox: Even if A and B are independent, they are dependent conditioned on (A or B).
Absolutely. The stereotype of the smart geek/nerd comes from the fact that when people are ugly/socially awkward/weird, other people get positively surprised that they are smart and really notice that. It is like, they would pretty much “written them off” as low-status unimportant people to be ignored, and thus they get surprised that they actually have useful virtues, and should not be so easily ignored because while how they say things is not popular, what they say is often true and insightful.
While the dumb nerd/geek just gets ignored forever.
There are smart people with bad social skills and there are dumb people with bad social skills.
Intelligence helps http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/9807/625
It also helps with all the other things you listed.
Why these things? They largely involve plenty of “analytical engine” skill. I think I’m a pretty good singer, I was varsity basketball, had good enough balance and coordination to climb V6 before injuries, won the district-wide art show in high school three years in a row, fix all my own plumbing and fixed my lawn mower engine. My wife literally rebuilt her car’s circuit board, which is maybe more up the typical geek alley, but if you can do that, or build a gaming platform from parts, you can rebuild a lawn mower engine. You got me on social skills, but I don’t think that’s universal for smart people so much as universal for people who use most of their socializing resources on the Internet. General intelligence doesn’t have to mean “super focused on one thing.” You might have to give 100% attention if you ever want to be Kobe Bryant or something, but you can be really good at a lot of things without being among the top two or three in the world at any of them.
Anecdata, but just as reference to get away from bragging, the guy who got the second highest SAT score at my high school is now a pro rugby player. My best friend from college, who scored pretty close to us, just won an Emmy for writing comedy television.
I’ve observed lots of people being bad at those things, intelligent or not. I’m at least average at all of them. Granted, I have face blindness, but that has, thus far, been entirely insignificant, and I didn’t even notice until I encountered the term researching something else—and that is likely to be related to the fact that I didn’t start wearing glasses until -far- too late in my childhood, and so have insufficiently trained my brain to recognize faces in the first place. I’ve gotten gradually better at recognizing faces as I’ve expanded my social circle.
This kind of theory is appealing because it seems “fair”. I’m attractive, intelligent, tall, charismatic, good at everything (except welding) I have ever tried. My observation is this: There is no fairness, at all.