The Revenge of the Nerds

The Wilson Quarterly ^ | April 2005 | Steven Lagerfeld

[flixxx]

Interesting read if you have the time...nice discussion about intelligence and how it seems to have trumped work ethic in our national culture.

[Clemenza]

Thomas Edison once brushed off the accolades heaped upon him with the observation that “genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,”

"Writing is 1% inspiration and 99% Masteurbation" --- Joe Orton

[Clemenza]

I remember visiting some liberal friends at MIT when The Bell Curve came out. It was fascinating hearing members of the "cognitive elite" vehemently denouncing a book that praised them in purely emotional terms.

[isthisnickcool]

Gee, I wish I was smart enough to understand this......

[muawiyah]

The "work ethic" is a product of intelligence. It didn't disappear.

You may not have noticed it but relatively inexperienced, but otherwise exceedingly intelligent Freepers bagged one of America's most experienced and hardworking TV reporters ~ Dan Rather!

Freepers have "taken out" other highly experienced, hardworking, even macho types in a variety of fields.

[SteveMcKing]

I'm no genius, but I can tell you that getting a moron to agree with your complicated view is almost impossible. You need to dumb it down in ways that blunt your entire point.

Makes me wonder how we get treated by our own superiors... I'd rather concede their smarts and then allow them to say any pretentious, insulting thing they want to me- if they would just give a straight and honest answer!

[Wonder Warthog]

"Interesting read if you have the time...nice discussion about intelligence and how it seems to have trumped work ethic in our national culture."

Balderdash. It has ALWAYS required both intelligence and damned hard work to get to the top. It helps to have a bit of luck along the way, too.

[woofie]

Is it my imagination or has GW Bush morphed from "dumb" to"evil genius" now that the smart people got beat?

[flixxx]

The point I was making (and that was made in the article) is that intelligence has now become more important than hard work...I agree that it takes both to succeed, but you don't see anyone really talking about how much time someone puts into his business or career...it is about how smart she/he is...at least in my opinion.

[flixxx]

I think it can work both ways...one can be a very hard worker and develop the intellectual skills needed to succees in his career...the Freepers who took down Dan Rather were smart...no denying it. My point with posting this is that our culture now seems to worship intelligence more than work ethic.

[flixxx]

I actually had the Liberal's view/Dem's view of our President in mind when I read this editorial...and don't you just know that they hate him so because the view him as 'dumb' yet he continues to succeed in most all his endeavors

[HowardDeanScream08]

Intelligence didn't necessarily trump work ethic. You may be looking at it from the wrong angle. Work ethic is plentiful. It's just that intelligence isn't being encouraged, or in some instances tolerated, by the liberal elitists (a.k.a. liberal Baby Boomers... a.k.a Communists/Marxists/Socialists/Progressives) who made their way to the top starting in the late 60s and are still plowing the road today. It's *their* intelligence they covet, and they don't want to share. There've been several books and papers on the topic I can remember going back to the late 80s, and the newspapers, the tv people and politicans derided it all as fantasy and conspiracy theory.

But it's true. The so-called elites want to keep everyone *else* as dumb or preoccupied with drivel as they can. That way they can stay in charge. The no worse poison for tyrants that an informed public.

[shrinkermd]

For what it is worth, President Nixon contributed more to this country than either of his two predecessors. Neither Johnson nor Kennedy accomplished much except to look more intelligent than they were.

I clearly remember the RATS claiming great intellectual and cultural attributes to JFK because of "Why England Slept." Actually, JFK's father paid Arthur Krock $100,000 (big money then) to write the book from fragmented, illiterate notes.

Contrast that to NIxon going to Russia and China and many other accomplishments. People hate him, despise him and denigrate him because he tried to protect the principals from justice in a burglary Nixon never planned or authorized. That will be the verdict of history.

[GSlob]

"...how [intelligence] seems to have trumped work ethic in our national culture."
Well, once there was an interesting illustrative case of one Karl Friedrich Gauss as a schoolboy: his math teacher told the pupils to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. And while his fellow pupils of pedestrian intellects were busily demonstrating their excellent German work ethic and adding 1 to 2 to 3 and so on, boy Gauss derived a simple combinatorial formula and arrived to the correct solution within a minute.
So yes, if one has a towering level of intelligence, one could get away with a lot. The trouble is with those who are merely bright, or even moderately talented (these are many) undeservedly claiming the privileges of geniuses (who by definition are very few).

[Tired of Taxes]

Once a leftist in another country told me that the U.S. should require all presidential candidates to pass a test in areas like science, etc.

They don't understand that Americans vote for the "good guy" - the "cowboy in the white hat," so to speak - and that it's not IQ but honesty, integrity (and of course lower taxes) that we expect from our representatives.

After all, as the article said, Nazi leaders were highly intelligent, and look where that led their country.

[WideGlide]

“We agree emphatically. . . ,” Herrnstein and Murray write in The Bell Curve, “that the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves.”

I am the great Cornholio!

[speedy]

Great to see him again. Looks like he needs some TP for his bunghole.

[snarks_when_bored]

The founders of this nation were intellectuals; some of them were among the best educated and most intelligent men alive in the world at the time. It's best not to forget that.

As for John Kennedy, he pushed the United States whole-hog into the war in Vietnam. Would Nixon have done the same? We'll never know, but it's by no means clear that he would have. He might have had the foresight that Kennedy (who was often more interested in receiving BJ's from eager secretaries kneeling under his desk than thinking about the consequences of policy decisions) failed to show.

[Valin]

Once a leftist in another country told me that the U.S. should require all presidential candidates to pass a test in areas like science, etc

A reply
Thank you so much for your suggestion. It will be given all the consideration that it deserves.