I think I may have written on this subject before, but either way, these thoughts will seem fresh to me.

One of the vexing questions which I ponder when I feel like chewing on a particularly tough nugget of ethics is the problem of stupidity and its effects.

And by its effects, I am not simply talking about the real world direct consequences of stupid decisions. Those are bad enough. Nor am I talking about stupidity in the simple and linear sense of imperfection of intelligence. Nobody has infinite intelligence, potential monotheistic omni-patriarchs aside, and therefore even the very brightest and wisest of us are always operating from finite intelligence, and hence, from the point of view of some entity with greater intellect, being “stupid”.

No, what I am specifically addressing in this article is the effect that these gaps in intellect have in terms of the reactions of the people involved and how said reactions create a serious challenge to our highly laudable desire to behave in a compassionate, patient, and enlightened way that maximizes the public good.

In a previous article, I have talked about this problem from the point of view of the person or persons on the lower end of the intelligence inequality, so I will not go over those points again here.

Instead, I wish to address the issue from the other side of the equation, the side with the higher level of intelligence, and specifically, the tension that arises between the desire to be a good human being and use one’s gifts, whatever they might be, to aid one’s fellow primates however one can, and the kinds of emotions that dealing with people with lower or simply different intellect can cause.

To launch this off, please read the following anecdote from a user at Clientcopia.com, a site devoted to the highly necessary catharsis of sharing one’s stories of particularly clueless clients and thus transforming pain into comedy.

The scene:

12 Senior Executives around a conference table, several of them techies.

Me, 24 year old n00b hired to handle hardware.

Situation: The server room gets too hot, cooling system inadequate.

I pass them 3 quotes I received from air conditioning companies to install a new chiller and to cut the vents to the roof and/or outside walls. Lowest quote is around $10,000.

Senior Vice President of Operations: Can’t we just get a portable air conditioner and put it in the room?

ME: Yes we can, but those units tend to be less efficient and then we still need vents to push the hot air out of the room.

Another Exec: Why do you have to do that?

ME: Air conditioners work by leeching heat out the air going through them and putting the heat outside the room. You can’t actually cool air where it is, you have to put the heat somewhere. Since the server room is near the center of the building, the heat we sent out of the room would make the offices hotter.

All Executives now trying to speak at once to tell me I am full of it. After 1 HOUR of trying to convince them, I lose it. I don’t care if I lose my job anymore.

ME: Look, there is physical law called conservation of energy. Energy is not destroyed only moved and transformed! Heat is energy! This is one of the fundamental principals of the universe! If you run a refrigerator, it takes energy out of the air inside and pushes it out the back! When it is running, the motor actually heats up to cause this to happen, so if you open a fridge to cool your house, the house will actually get HOTTER!!! COLD IS THE ABSENCE OF HEAT! HEAT IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF COLD!

It took a few days for the group to slowly realize I was actually telling the truth and then approve the expenditure. Of course, no one ever acknowledged that I was correct.

Depending on how much of your high school science you remember, you might either completely understand why the sharer of this anecdote reacted how he did, or have no idea what the big deal was, or as is most likely, fall somewhere in between.

Myself, I am fairly keen on science, and while I am far from any kind of engineer, I do grasp the principle of the conservation of energy, and that therefore you can’t destroy heat, you can only move it around. That is why your refrigerator has a radiator on the back. That’s to radiate all the heat that your fridge took out of the air inside it in order to make it cold inside.

But the scientific issue is not what I wish to address here. It’s the author’s reaction, which I understand completely and would likely share, but which I also find troubling, because it is precisely this sort of frustration, anger, and despair that I think impedes the optimal use of human intelligence for the betterment of all humanity.

Too many bright and knowledgable people, who could quite possibly do a lot to help others, instead are driven by such encounters into elitism, intellectual isolationism, sarcasm, disdain, technocratic thoughts, and many other similar forms of unproductive behaviour.

And I must stress here that I in no respect except myself from this phenomenon. In fact, it is my own anger and frustration that primarily drives me to turn this issue over in my mind.

I realize that none of us are saints or angels, capable of universal unassailable calm and patience at all times, and that frustration and anger at not being understood or not being respected as the person with superior knowledge in a particular instance is a perfectly normal and natural human response. When you have higher than average intelligence, a lifetime of being imperfectly understood by others is simply part of the deal.

But from the point of view of someone who sincerely wants the best possible outcomes from all us naked beach apes, and who therefore includes intelligence in that assessment of potentials, I can’t help but see these angry, frustrated reactions as a roadblock on the path to a greater humanity.

I have no clear and simple solutions to offer, but I have a few thoughts for my fellow intellectuals :

1. 
   Remember always that intelligence is situational. Sure, the writer of the anecdote was in the possession of the objective right information and the right sort of intellect to understand it in the situation he himself described, but management tends to favour social intelligence over abstract reasoning skills, and chances are, had the situation called for a subtle and nuanced understand of people and their motives, it would have been our anecdote teller’s turn to be the “stupid” one. In fact, I am sure managers often regale and/or soothe one another with tales of hilariously socially clueless things said and done by engineers. Remember : we are all the dummy some of the time. So when you are on top, remember to treat others as kindly and patiently as you would like yourself treated were the situations reversed.
   
2. 
   Also, remember that no matter how damn clever you think you are in your particular field(s) of expertise, it is vastly probable that there is someone out there who is better than you at it in all ways you yourself find meaningful. Modern society sometimes encourages us to think we are all kings of our own little scrap of turf, but the truth is, odds are, someone could come and take yours from you without a fight. So instead, let’s all be civilized and embrace thoughts of equality, okay?
   


3. 
   Finally, remember that even if you actually are top dog in your particular pound, you are still a highly finite human being who only has a tiny slice of all the potential skills, assets, talents, and abilities that human beings can have. You might well be the best plumber in the world, but you are still not a top chef, a brilliant scholar, a legendary vocalist, or any of the other countless potential niches that human beings can aspire to fill. There will always be vastly more that you do not know and cannot do than you can and do, and so we are all, in a very real and true sense, at the mercy of and dependent upon thousands of others doing what they do well in order to be lucky enough to be around to do what we do well.
   

I think if we keep these precepts of necessary and objectively true humility in mind, we will stand a chance of remembering just how badly we all need one another in moments when we feel the arrogance and disdain of our particular specialties rising and need to ground ourselves in the sobering perspective of reality, and just help out however we can.