I find it fascinating who some people are willing to find credible. Dr. Phil is a notorious example. A really intelligent person can lose all their credibility in a number of ways. Bad intuition, bad social habits, or it is just that they are too damn smart to be normal.
By my standard, if someone is normal they can’t be very intelligent, because if you have normal, there is always something above normal.
I say this because I see people get denied of any credibility because they can’t speak English. I’ve seen an opinion get snubbed because someone did not know that Britney Spears got married in Vegas. Try not knowing about the current news you find in People magazine. People won’t give you a second chance, much less find anything you say interesting.
Are you smart but have no credibility? Tell us how below.
Well, I am college-educated and have an encyclopedic knowlege about various topics, constantly wowing my coworkers with mundane factoids, but since my GPA in school was only a 2.5 I am not eligible for various graduate/credential programs so in that regard I guess I would consider myself a smart person with little credibility.
Perhaps I’m not really addressing the question posed by the OP, but the title immediately brought to mind two brainiac-like individuals, well known within my discipline (geophysics), both of whom have experienced serious flak-bites by virtue of their apparent zeal to oversell.
I have personal experience with both, and one is much worse than the other. What remains when one has experienced personal dealings with both, and contrasted such to their media-borne personas, is that, while I have no doubt both of these guys have made real contributions to our scientific understanding of our endeavors, they both blow it out of proportion enough that they generally (one more so than the other) have acquired unignorable tails of derision.
They didn’t have to. What they brought to the party was more than plenty good enough.
But, they had to oversell it - blow it all out of proportion. Maybe that works for a media cutie, but in a technical world, it catches up to you.
Well, one could…theoretically of course… during a demo of weather sensor software that one has written, have a brain cramp when asked “Could you explain the user display?” The best reply is not, “Well, it shows stuff.” Actually, this doesn’t make you lose credibility, but it does cause ripples of laughter that will not die down until your face is no longer red and you make an intelligent remark about the intended uses of the display.
I belong to an organization that is sort of a beginner’s study group about the European medieval period. Most people I know who have lost credibility have done so by claiming to know everything about everything. And while they do know a lot about their chosen subject (for example, French jewelry in 1500-1600) they are unwilling to admit they don’t have an equal body of knowledge of something else (maybe manuscript decoration for the same time period). This is a common pattern, in my experience. Smart people unwilling to ever say I Don’t Know.
Another common pattern, and the one on which talk show hosts like Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura lose all credibility with me is that they make too hasty snap judgments about what is the problem with and the solution for their callers. It often seems such talk show hosts see only one problem in all their callers. They don’t see the vast variability in the human experience.
Of course, here on the SDMB, spelling mistakes, lack of clear sentence construction, and (og forbid) any use of leet speak will cost you both credibility and readers. So will not answering the actual question of the OP, but I’m obviously not worried about that. :smack:
Sometimes it’s not the smart person’s fault. My older sister is into some weird combination of New Age Healing and Fundamentalist Christianity (don’t ask me how they are compatible). Since I don’t ascribe to her beliefs, she calls me “unenlighteded” and her children feel free to disrespect me.
“Smart” is a lot like athletic ability in that some folks are born with more potential than others. Some of those people let it atrophe and assume a life of “average” mental prowess while others recognize their gift and nurture it on into brilliance. Similarly folks with an average alotment of brains can “work out” and achieve some semblance of mental pumpitude, or they can develop into real mush balls. Dummies are pretty much gonna stay that way. Real, honest to God SMART people who develop their minds to their potential are the equivalent of super athletes–VERY good at what they do, but often disastrously incompetent somewhere else (Kobe Bryant is forcing his way into the back of my mind). Examples of Smart but not Credible people are hard to come up with–because they never get thought of.
“Credible” on the other hand, is a completely unrelated skill which taps into other peoples’ emotional state. It has nothing at all to do with conscious mnemonic ability and everything to do with knowing, either through conscious effort or instinct, what will please the mind of the audience. Those who seek and hold credibility don’t need to KNOW anything, people just like believeing them because it makes them feel good to do so. I’ve never heard of Dr. Phil being credited with making any earth-shatteringly brilliant breakthroughs on affairs of the heart of personal betterment so I wouldn’t call him truly brilliant, but he’s got some good leads on the info in his particular field of expertise. So He’s credible, but not really all that Smart.
Sometimes a person is blessed with strong, nurtured smarts AND the ability to please minds. These are the people who are called “Genius” by their peers and by the public at large. Adolph Hitler, Ted Bundy, Winston Churchill, Cecil Adams…
I consider myself pretty smart, but I don’t really value intelligence as much as I do other qualities. I don’t present myself as particularly bright, and it never fails to catch people off guard when they realize I’m thinking cricles around them–but only for fun, the way a Black Lab puppy will run around your ankles as fast as he can because he’s excited to be with you. At that point one of two things happens. Either they feel they need to bust their mental ass to keep up with me to be worthy of my time (my wife has this problem…along with a few other issues), or they start expecting me to want to be intelligent with them :rolleyes:. Kinda like when you see a 7 foot tall guy you have to ask him if he likes to play basketball. In both cases my reaction is to act dumb, on purpose, which then makes people think I’m being condecending or lazy, depending on what they wanted me to be.
There are some extremely tense students who freak out you make a minor math mistake while lecturing.
I understand that it’s frustrating when you’re trying to follow someone doing a problem, and they suddenly realize they made a mistake, and you have to go back and figure out how that changes the result–and of course it’s especially maddening when you’re just learning the subject for the first time and you can barely follow what’s going on anyway. I’ve been there, seriously! There were professors I wanted to strangle.
Because of this, I work out all my problems ahead of time, double check them, and then follow my notes very carefully. Occassionally I’ll misread from my notes, or drop a sign, or make some other minor mistake. I think my all-time record for mistakes was three in one lecture, and that was a very bad day. I have (so far, knock on wood!) caught the mistakes quickly. Yet, any time I have to make even the most minor correction, from the groans and growls and snotty, sour looks you’d think I was the stupidest person on earth and had no business being in front of a classroom.
For better or for worse, I’m not alone. Two of my colleagues really got slammed on evals, with “makes mistakes on the board” given as a reason for low ratings on “The instructor has an adequate understanding of the material.” Infuriating. Understanding physics is not about never making a mistake in algebra! It’s comprehending physical concepts! If they didn’t come out of the course understanding that, especially considering the emphasis our department make on conceptual learning, then really, there’s not much hope for them.
I can only recall having had one professor who never made any mistakes durring lecture, and he was the worst teacher I’ve ever had the displeasure of taking a class from. He didn’t care a damn about his students, just went through the motions of his perfect lectures. Extremely smart guy. I didn’t learn a damn thing from him.
Hmm. Interesting contrast to teaching elementary school. When I’m teaching a lesson, after going over the basic concept, say subracting down and not up, I’ll intentionally make the very error I just cautioned my students to avoid, so that they can catch it and correct me. It’s a wonderful teaching tool at this level (it works for grammar, spelling, and science, too).
In direct response to the OP: I think there are some very smart people who lose credibility because they have specialized knowledge but not the skill to translate that knowledge into terms that the average person can understand.
Dr. Phil is the opposite. He’s obviously a very smart man, but he intentionall plays down the intellectual angle so as to appeal to a larger demographic. This, of course, loses him the audience that expects such matters to be discussed in a different manner.
So, I guess I’m saying that lack of communication skills, or the inability to connect with a particular audience loses one credibility with that audience.
I’ve known a lot of people I considered smart until they mentioned religion.
Once they say they believe in ghosts and regulary speak to a dead granny and are sure she hears, well…
Or they will say the world will end a certain way and some people will float up…
Or that if they spend 10% of their income on their church that they feel closer to god…
Then they don’t seem very smart any more.
