Anyone?

This is a gimme.

I have nothing but respect for true scholarship and actual intelligence, but what we’ve been churning out of our universities and putting in charge of everything exhibits neither quality. I grew up in an educated family; my grandmother was a Phi Beta Kappa back when that meant something beyond politically correct BS. What I’ve seen since entering adulthood myself is that the standards have fallen so low as to be nearly unrecognizable as standards, across the board–Whether it’s academia, politics, or whatever else you care to examine. The latest deal with the anointed thinking that Bloomberg’s half-billion could have given every American a million dollars is completely in consonance with what the “intellectual yet idiot” class has wrought wherever their reverse Midas touch has alighted. How the hell do you graduate from high school, let alone college, and then get a job with a major media outlet, and then demonstrate such total inability to do basic math? And, what’s worse? NOBODY HAS BEEN FIRED.

The rest of us just keep nodding along with the fools, thinking that because they did so well on their tests, and passed through all the gates on the cursus honorum, they must be smart…

We’re actually doomed, I’m afraid. The Marching Morons aren’t going to come in from underneath, but from the top, in a silent conquest nobody notices or calls out.

All I point out is that the Emperor ain’t wearing any clothes. You and your IQ test-worshipping ilk have been running things for the last century and a half. Take a look around–Do you like the world that’s brought us?

The funny thing is, I do really well on these tests, myself. As in, “94th percentile” well, and “qualify for MENSA” well. The difference is that I know this crapfest from the inside, and I know what I’m looking at. Tests don’t reflect real-world performance, not when the tests themselves are used to select and advance people. The whole thing has turned into a self-licking ice cream cone, and the majority of us are too blind or invested into the system to look at it and go “Wait a minute…”.

So, go on with your bad self. You’re so smart, it hurts–Just like the actual results the anointed ones have produced in running the world around us. It’s like the massive numbers of MBA-induced bankruptcies that have occurred, as soon as someone introduces that contagion to a successful company. What drove GM into the state it’s in? The bean-counters, all of whom did really, really well on the tests.

Gonna be fun to watch the whole thing implode, when it inevitably does. And people like you will be wandering around in the wreckage going “What happened? What went wrong…? The tests said these guys were the best and brightest…”.

Intelligence is as intelligence does. If your results are shit, then what you based your decisions on were shit, as well. Look around you–Is this country better-run by these people who “did well on the test”? Or, did you and everyone else really fuck up by buying into the entire proposition that those tests were truly meaningful?

The amazing thing is how blind most of you are to the sheer circularity of it all, and how little attention you pay to the actual results of the things you defend. Only an “intellectual yet idiot” could come with half the bullshit you people come up with, and then try to put into effect, oblivious to the actual outcomes. It’s like you have no real idea of how the world works–And, don’t care to find out, particularly if it doesn’t align with your linear paper-based progressions. Better to teach to the test, than to actually impart knowledge or scholarship… That’s the ticket; if everyone lives in the dream world, then nobody can contradict us.

Kirk, keep it up. I need a good laugh from time to time.

I’ve worked under Phd’s and some have a talent for management and rest do not. Most of them have allegedly high IQ’s and a doctorate level of education by are beneath mediocrity when it comes to management or anything resembling common sense.

All the criticisms of IQ test are correct but no knows any other way to grade peoples capabilities for the same cost.

Uh huh.

Allow me to introduce you to the power structure of San Francisco:

Boudin was born in New York City to Jewish parents.[1] His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members.[2]

When Boudin was 14 months old, his parents were arrested for murder in their role as getaway car drivers in the Brink’s robbery of 1981 in Rockland County, New York.[1][3] His mother was sentenced to 20 years to life[4] and his father to 75 years to life for the felony murders of two police officers and a security guard.[5] After his parents were incarcerated, Boudin was raised in Chicago by adoptive parents Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who, like his parents, had been members of the Weather Underground.[6] Boudin did not learn to read until age 9, a phenomenon common to children of incarcerated parents.[7] Kathy Boudin was released under parole supervision in 2003.[3][8]

Boudin descends from a long left-wing lineage. His great-great-uncle, Louis B. Boudin,[9] was a Marxist theoretician and author of a two-volume history of the Supreme Court’s influence on American government, and his grandfather Leonard Boudin was an attorney who represented controversial clients such as Fidel Castro and Paul Robeson.[10] Boudin is also related to Michael Boudin,[9] a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Isidor Feinstein Stone, an independent journalist.[9][11]

Boudin entered St Antony’s College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship in 2003.[2] At Oxford, he earned two master’s degrees, one in forced migration and the other in public policy in Latin America. He earned his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2011[12] and began work for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office as a post-doctoral fellow in 2012.[3]

Let me assure you that none of these people are descended from Englishmen.

1. No one actually cares about either of those things.

2. People are evaluated almost entirely on their social status, i.e., the brands they’ve received from their previous owners employers. If your forehead isn’t stamped with trendy “brands”, no one will return your calls.

3. The remaining criterion is a flex space occupied by your sex appeal.

4. “Candidate” is in the same league as “influencer”, “thought leader”, and “human capital”.

But that’s just the 4HL, isn’t it?

Rarely in the history of human discourse has someone managed to so completely miss the mark in terms of understanding what someone else is saying.

My point isn’t that certain jobs are only suited for the lower intellect, but that the “intellectual” are shitty at everything they turn their hands to, most particularly those tasks that more plebeian types somehow manage to pull off with aplomb.

I question the intellectual not because they’re only fit for the rarefied atmosphere of their self-appointed ivory-tower taskings, but because they can’t even manage to stack wood unsupervised. It’s not that they’re too good for basic tasks, it is that they can’t manage them, precisely the same as they can’t manage much else in life. If you can’t stack wood so it won’t fall over, odds are pretty good that you can’t reason your way out of a paper bag, either.

The entire point of what I am trying to get across here is that we’ve gone down a decision-branch with all this crap that’s closing off around us, and all the sequels to the original idea of taking a poorly-conceived “intelligence test” and applying the results to general society have produced results that can only be described (charitably…) as “disastrous”. The people that these tests are winnowing out for selection and advancement are not actually smart–They’re exhibiting what amounts to an autism-spectrum disorder that prevents them from grasping their own limitations and recognizing their own failures.

They’re not actually all that smart. The IQ tests have selected for a brittle and narrowly defined idea of what actually constitutes intelligence in a human being, and the system has taken that out to its illogical extreme–Which is why everything we put into the hands of this mob of technocratic autists has produced failure on a scale unimaginable to anyone before our own era. I’d love to see the results of bringing some 19th Century city fathers of San Francisco forward to see what their descendants have wrought for their city–I imagine there’d be some changes made, were we to allow those men and women to go back to their own time, enlightened.

Mr. Andrews seems to think it self-evident that he’s one of the “intelligent enlightened”. I’d like to suggest he might want to re-appraise his own position in things, and perhaps seek out psychiatric help in order to find where along the autism spectrum he actually is, because from just those two paragraphs, I’m pretty sure he’s one of the people I’d characterize as “intellectual yet idiot”.

Second paragraph there is particularly telling. Man knows nothing of the military, yet preens himself while denigrating it, as though he would never deign to soil himself at those tasks, completely oblivious to the reality of it all. And, if he did serve, he did so in a state of utter disconnection, never trying to understand the nature of the institution he was engaged in. Which is typical of the “intellectual yet idiot”, who may have heard of Chesterton’s Fence, but who never actually internalize the meaning of that essay.