I think some people come off as pissy and petty on message boards, reguardless of their intelligence level. I can’t speak specifically about this message board, but on another I participate on, I have met about 40 posters in real life. The ones that I thought were the most petty on the board, turned out to be very considerate, nice people in person. I had a hard time connecting them with their online behavior.
I also found some of the most outspoken online were in real life the most introverted, to the point of being painfully shy. Some who would go on and on about some perceived injustice when communicating online, had no desire to argue or continue the fight in real life. They were strangely mute on things that they were very vocal about online.
So from reading this message board, I don’t think it is fair to draw conclusions about intelligent= pissy, petty. But instead, people who appear petty and pissy on message boards can = people who are nothing like that in real life.
No Not really. An intelligent question seeking real useful information will almost always get sensible, helpful answers and one or two twerpy ones. It’s the “braind dead” posters who generate inane questions that get the S.A. answers.
i.e. there are numerous questions that generate endless debate with no possibility of resolution.
I think it is just this board. Each board seems to attract a certain kind of personality. It takes a certain kind of mindset and personality to choose to spend time on board X, Y, Z, and this board is no exception. I have seen boards with totally different personalities than this one. So this board attracts pissy people, but in my personal experience intellect isn’t correlated with personality.
There is also the fact that creativity and mental illness are linked. Maybe this board attracts creative people. And I am their king.
Just to be extra pissy, I think that people with high IQs often DO tend to be bigger arses IRL as well.
A while back somebody here linked to an interesting article on why geeks don’t have friends - it came down to social skills being as much work as any other pasttime. So when you take someone who’s spent their free time mastering chess/music/computers, whatever, that’s time they DIDN’T spend working on social skills. Ergo, they don’t have them.
And I think it can become a negative feedback loop - those intellectual pasttimes are easier for brainiacs, so they spend time there instead of forming friendships. So they resent and are intimidated by people with friends, but attribute it to their cognitive superiority & invest in it further, thus increasing their isolation.
That old saying, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then all you see are nails.
It is not being cocky, it is just a statistical fact. I think I have pretty good native intelligence but I also have this compulsion to read everything non-fiction that I can get my hands on. I spend several hours a day reading on all sorts of subjects. I have been doing that since I was little and I have heard that others on this board say that they do the same.
Given that, it would be pretty sad if I didn’t absorb more information than the great majority of other people. Most people don’t read, follow news stations in depth, or purposely seek out other sources of information much at all. If you are athlete that trains several hours a day at say, cycling, then it is probably a good assumption that you will be the best cyclist at most gatherings that you attend unless those gathering are cycling related. Of course there will be better cyclists in the world but you won’t usually just bump into them all the time.
I’m of two minds about the subject. I don’t think there’s any direct link between pissiness (Am I spelling that right?) and high intelligence, that is to say I don’t think high intelligence causes pissiness. I do agree with fessie that a good chunk of highly intelligent people spend so much time on their chosen fields that they never get around to developing social skills.
I think, however, that overall, the pissiness/intelligence ratio is nurture not nature. Plenty of brilliant people develop good social skills. Look at Richard Feynman. If you like people enough and you’re willing to give them a chance, you will probably wind up learning how to interact with them well, intellectual “barriers” be damned. On the other hand, as has already been pointed out, plenty of bile-spewing pissheads don’t have the intelligence God gave gravel. If you doubt that, just spend a few minutes on EZboard. Quite a few posters over there impress me with their ability to type without electrocuting themselves by drooling on the keyboard (OK, maybe that was kinda pissy.).
So in your mind “smartest” equates to “best informed” or “most well-read” rather than having the highest native intelligence? Just as, to follow your parallel, the best athlete is the best performing athlete, rather than the one with the best native ability? And that having lots of knowledge is an intellectual achievement that would parallel, say, winning the Tour de France?
That could make an interesting debate. What is the intellectual equivalent of a sports star? Does that question have a meaningful answer?
So that this post is not completely off the point, I will just agree with the many who suggest that intelligence and social skills do not necessarily have a good correlation, and that communicating strictly in writing with nuance and subtlety is a skill that is largely lost. For as few people read much nowadays, even fewer write much.
I don’t know what it means exactly. I do know that it doesn’t mean completely unread or very little native intellectual facility. I would also guess that the more well read you are and the more natively intelligent you are the better. People that are near the top of both of those things would be at the top of what most people call “smart”
I would say it is like being an athlete. Everyone has a range that they can work with and some are better endowed by nature than others. However, it takes hard work to put anyone at the top of their range capability.
This applies to most intellectual endeavors. People that are gifted at art or music for example still have to practice hard to master their craft.
FWIW, Dick Feynman could also be…well, kind of a dick at times, too. He presents himself as jovial and easygoing in his autobiographical books, and no doubt that he had a genuine passion for his research subjects and for understanding the natural world that he tried to convey to students and readers, but he also had a very cantankerous side–his screaming hallway arguments with Murray Gell-Mann at CalTech were legend. (He was also, according to an acquaintance who was 15 when she started working at CalTech as office help, known as something of a perv when it came to interacting with the secretaries, including said teenage girl, but that was not uncommon in that time and place–particuarly that place–and therefore nothing to be particularly ashamed of.) If you want to get a better sense of the man, try reading Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman, a select collection of his correspondence put together by his daughter. In it, he comes off as clever, amusing, jovial, cranky, irrascable, weary, irritated, and sad. His letters to his first wife, Arlene, as she was suffering from tuberculosis in a hospital in Albequrque, are particularly shocking–one is loving and concerned, another rushed and irritable, a third cajoling and critical, and so forth. In other words, he comes off as a real human being instead of the archtype of a funny scientist. In another, later letter to a crackpot theorist, he openly derides the man for being an idiot. And the string of letters resulting in his attempt to resign from the American Academy of Sciences shows a man who is irritated by even a modest request for an explanation.
Back to the OP, I think several things may be at work, here. First, it is easy online, with references at hand, to play the part of an authority; there’s nothing wrong with that if you can back it up, of course, but many people, when they are contradicted by objective fact or someone with superior experience, turn to ridicule, sharp language, or confusing doubletalk and obfuscating technical jargon in order to conceal their insecurity or cover up their mistake. Second, while the old saw is there are no dumb questions, it is often the case that a poster asks a question that seems obvious or was already explored and answered in a previous thread, and so the response may be something on the order of “We already talked about this, see Threads X, Y, and Z…”
A third problem is that some people, who we’ll not deign to name, feel it necessary to answer a simple query with an outrageously comprehensive amount of detail and reference bordering on an obsessive pathology. They throw out one piece of information after another, often with a wit so dry that it might as well be serving as a dehumidifier in the middle of the Sahara, the result of which can be offputting or seem egregious and unnecessary, as if said individual has something to prove. The individual in question may not actually be pissy, but the effect can sometimes be one of being subject to a lecture by a particularly full-of-himself professor which can be parsed as being “pissy”. Again, I won’t single anyone out, and as I’m personally somewhat short of Really Smart (I classify myself as Pretty Smart As Long As I Have My References Close At Hand) I’m clearly of insufficient stature to challenge such individuals, but there are a number of them around, Og lurve 'em.
And then there are the people who are just plain pissy 'cause, well, that’s what they think, in their confusion between irritating and intelligent, smart people are supposed to do. Fuck them just like the rest of the bastards in the world; life is too short to accomodate pissy people.
There’s one Doper that, when they respond to my posts, always does do with a tone of snarky self-righteousness. What would happen if they met me at a Dopefest?
Oh, I’ve read it. Between this book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Genius, The Pleasure of Figuring Things Out, etc., I’ve read pretty much everything by or about Feynman. You’re right in that he could be a major prick when he wanted to be. Then again, he could also be quite charming. He wasn’t just a perv; he was actually an excellent pick up artist. In short, he was brilliant and a people person, but I don’t think we would have gotten along. My point is that social skills are learned, and there’s nothing preventing a person with a high IQ in learning them.
To get back to the O.P., a question that should be asked in regard to pissiness is “Did the offended poster in question deserve to be pissed on?” I try to be as easygoing as I can on these boards, and I don’t post anything here that I wouldn’t say IRL, be it in a pub or any place else, but if a poster expresses a racist or otherwise extremist viewpoint, or if he’s just plain wrong and refuses to admit it, I don’t think intellectually tearing him a new one is out of line. Likewise, if a poster is obviously about to make a very bad decision IRL, going hard on him is perfectly justified, if only to at least get his or her attention. When it comes to pissiness, there are major shades of gray.
I don’t have an answer for that, but I do have the observation that pissy, petty people often have a compulsion to elevate themselves by exaggerating whatever intelligence they do possess. If you engage the right people, you’ll find that there are a lot of exceedingly bright people out there who just choose not to parade it over other people (or blow their own horns as loudly as other people do). We have a lot of each type on this board but the pissy ones tend to get noticed. This is why I have tremendous respect for people who are very intelligent, famous, and also nice.
Keep in mind that people tend to post on a message board when they disagree with, or are correcting, something in a previous post. Generic “me too” and “good point, I agree” posts get old pretty quickly. So you tend to get more disagreement and pissiness, and less nodding and affirmation, than in live conversation.
