Hell if I know.

This night’s bloggenation began as my pondering the famous Forrest Gump quote, “Stupid is as stupid does”, a statement that used to really confuse me for some reason. The obvious corollary is that smart is as smart does, and om that level, I am pretty stupid.

These are clearly different levels of intelligence. The abstract reasoning type of intelligence us smarty pants types have, the kind that lets you do really well in school, is one kind of intelligence, and in many ways, it is the kind of intelligence most valued by the marketplace when applied to certain avenues like programming or finance.

But the sort of IQ that keeps you from doing stupid things that you know are stupid but keep doing them anyway is a totally different beast. It might more properly be called wisdom, but that’s a slippery eel to land, because a lot of people who and are considered wise because of all the wise things they have said were, in their lives, not all that wise at all.

It’s hard to evaluate how good someone is or was at making life decisions. We tend to judge that based on results. If someone has a life we deem both desirable and worthy, we tend to assume that person must have made the right life choices.

But that’s not necessarily true. Luck is always a factor, as is overall track record. Someone might have made good decisions when they made the ones that led to, say, a successful and prosperous career, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t make the same stupid mistakes the rest of us do when it comes to romance, sex, food, or interpersonal relationships.

Case in point : On a good day and in the right circumstances, I can seem quite wise. And I won’t lie…. that’s pretty awesome. But I know that my talent is not true wisdom but simply a knack for saying things that sound wise to less thoughtful people but which are plain obvious to me.

I suppose that does make me wise on a certain level. It’s just hard for me to accept because I know what a cantering jackass I am.

Take today. Please. When I got home from school, it was 11 am or thereabouts, and I said to myself, “I must remember to eat at noon!”.

But then I got really into the game I’m playing, and then I was doing some reading for class tomorrow, and time went on, and the skinny of it is that I didn’t eat anything except an apple between 8 am and 6 pm.

And that is something I SHOULD NOT DO. I know this. It’s very dangerous for me to skip meals because it might trigger a blood sugar crash. When you are diabetic, blood sugar does not fluctuate normally. It’s far less stable than a healthy person’s blood sugar. So I can go from “a little low but fine” to “way too low, feels like I am dying, initiate emergency mode” in a shockingly small amount of time.

Thus, skipping meals because my appetite is low and I don’t feel like forcing myself to eat is very, very stupid. From all possible angles it can only be considered a stupid decision. And yet, it is one I always end up making sooner or later. The best that I can say for myself is that I make the same stupid mistakes slightly less often than before.

And it’s maddening. There’s no feeling quite like that deep pit that opens in your stomach when you realize you have done something very stupid, but it’s especially intense when you know damned well that you have done the exact same thing a hundred times before.

And each time, you told yourself “Well, at least I know not to do that again!”, and that worked… for a while. But eventually you forget, and boom, it happens again.

I suppose, though, to be fair, I should note that most of my decisions turn out okay. Although even that statement has hidden complexities because it’s hard to gauge how much we actually decide over the course of the day. In a lot of ways, we run on autopilot for most of our days, which is a good thing because fully engaged decision making uses up our mental energies at a frightening pace that we could never sustain for an entire hour, let alone a day.

Even during very mentally draining things, like for instance taking an exam, some of the functions that provide the answers are automated.

Some scientists now theorize that we have have two complimentary decision making pathways : the quick and dirty one that we use for everyday decisions, often mistakenly (but understandably) referred to as your “gut” (that’s just where we feel it happening) which is almost pure intuition, and the slow system, which is, in its pure form, what we usually mean when we talk about “reason”, which is conscious, rational, and makes decisions based on an analysis of the facts.

As you can easily (rationally) imagine, most of the time, it’s a blend. We rarely make decisions purely out of intuition or reason. That’s not the bit I am interested in.

What interests and concerns me is that we have no way of knowing how much room any given person has for the rational function. Us liberal intellectuals tend to assume that everyone is capable of the levels of reason that we are and that if they are not thinking like we are, it’s because they are either innocently ignorant or willfully disregarding their higher faculties out of spite.

We rail against ignorance and say “why don’t these people THINK!”.

Well maybe they can’t, at least, not in the sense that we mean in. Maybe the largest portion of humanity can’t make the sorts of rational, well thought out decisions that we can and have to rely far more on their “gut” because they don’t have anything else.

What then? Do we delcare them too stupid to help? Do we continue to try to turn them into us, despite a very high failure rate?

Or do we continue to fight for what is best for all, and adapt our methods to whatever works best?

After all, to do anything else would be stupid.

And stupid is….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.