“Dave, you are blessed with a hardworking and intelligent life partner. Great to read your story. I am also blessed with a wonderful wife who has stayed with me in all my failings and dumb moves in life.”
Amen! We are heading into 57 years of marriage. She is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. That has been passed on to our adult children and grand kids. She started working a teenager doing all types of jobs to save money to help her parents put her through nursing school.
We both have different mental and physical skill sets and lot of good overlap. That has meant that between the two of we do great problem solving and followup to handle problems or opportunities.
That means when one of us is uncomfortable with something new or someone new in our life. We often listen to the other saying, “I have problems with this or this person!” The end result is we back away from endorsing the issue or person. That has save us a lot of misery, time and money.
You and I are both fortunate to have good women in our life.
Thanks for the heads up re Nassim Taleb. I have a few younger relatives and some our age, where I’m introducing them to the Intellectual Yet Idiot reality. It is amazing when their brains click with the reality of the IYI concept.
Thanks again and have a great weekend.
Regarding Intellectual Yet Idiot, you may be interested in reading a vanity I wrote during the 2016 campaign entitled:
H. L. Mencken Predicted Donald Trump, the Enlightened Rabble-Rouser
Here's the fun part of this essay written in 1922.
Now, I Don't Deny that People can Learn Things... The great masses of men can take in certain sorts of knowledge, at least within narrow limits:
- Fully 80 percent of the inhabitants of the United States, within our own time, have absorbed a number of solid facts, before unknown to them for example, that beer is easy to make in the kitchen, that wood alcohol has various unpleasant physiological effects, and that it is dangerous to crank a Ford.
- Probably half as many have taken in information of a somewhat wider and more philosophical kind for example, that the guarantees in the Bill of Rights are merely rhetorical, that saving the world for democracy costs a great deal of money, that feeding a human infant on fried liver will not make it flourish, and every old woman who mumbles as she shuffles along is not a witch.
- Go back a thousand years, and you will be able to show even greater accretions of knowledge, much of it sound.
- The average member of the American Legion, though the professors may report him a moron, knows more, I am convinced, than the average legionary of Caesar's Gallic army, and what he knows is better organized.
- The average American farmer, though he voted for Bryan, is more intelligent than the peasant of Charlemagne's time.
- Even the average American Congressman, at least in matters that do not concern the business of lawmaking, probably has more useful information in him than the average member of a Tenth Century Witenagemot.
The Progress of Enlightenment Doesn't Reach the Great Masses of People
- Enlightenment is a matter which concerns exclusively a small minority of men. The size of that minority is always grossly overestimated.
- Because a man is a Ph.D. and licensed to teach Latin grammar it is assumed that he is generally intelligent that he shares, to some extent at least, in the stupendous miscellaneous knowledge of a Virchow or Huxley. The assumption is often false. He may be, in fact, practically an imbecile, and not infrequently he actually is.
- I do not here argue, of course, that the intelligence of a man is to be determined by subjected him to an examination like that recently proposed by Thomas A. Edison. Edison himself, indeed, though he could pass his own examination, must be thick-witted at bottom, for when he goes on a holiday he chooses such men as Harding and Henry Ford as his companions.
- But what I do argue is that no man can be said to share fully in the progress of human knowledge who is ignorant of any of its basic facts for example, the facts that ghosts do not actually haunt graveyards, that printing money cannot make a nation rich, and that men cannot be made virtuous by law.
The Human Race is actually split into Two Distinct Species...
- The one species is characterized by an incurable thirst for knowledge, and an extraordinary capacity for recognizing and taking in facts and evidences.
- The other is just as brilliantly marked by a chronic appetite for whatever is most palpably false and a chronic distrust for whatever is palpably true.
- To the second species being the overwhelming majority of individuals under democracy, including all the favorite politicians, philosophers, theologians, star-gazers, and diviners. These half-wits now run the world.