I hope this is an isolated experience for someone in my age group (30) but I’ve noticed something over the years… The complete wrecks, **idiots **and party animal type ‘C’ students/otherwise complete dumpster fires I’ve known through the years became Doctors, Accountants, Teachers/Instructors, Legal experts etc. Those who are by far more intelligent (street smarts as well as in school) became Mechanics, Cops, Sheriff’s Deputies (Jails), Tradesmen and friggin janitors.
Some of the idiots were not raised financially privileged and some of the smart ones actually were…
Is there some new trend I’m not aware of or did I miss something?
What do you all think of this? Any thoughts? It scares the crap out of me that some of these people got into professional careers…
Before the thread completely deteriorates to accountant jokes…
anomalous1, I think you’ll have to define “idiots and wrecks” a little better (Party animals I understand). To get the jobs you describe them getting, you do have to be a reasonably good student, in several cases that you cite they have to study for many years, so obviously they have something on the ball.
You also need to define when you observed these characteristics. High School or first two years of college? Hell, damn near any of us were knuckleheads at this time, at least now and then. But people have been known to grow up (excepting most of the Straight Dope posters :p;) ) and do a fairly good job of adulting in their later years.
I think Telemark probably has it, confirmation bias with perhaps a side of a couple of personal experiences = actual facts.
I think you need to add some more muscle to your opinion.
It is possible to be a complete and total idiot, yet still have a successful professional carreer.
There are plenty of stories on this forum* describing, for example, engineers who are young-earth creationists, or lawyers who believe Obama is a Muslim, etc.
*(mostly Dopers complaining about facebook posts from their relatives )
There are at least a couple of reasons that people in professions which should require high intelligence can come across in certain situations as being a little crazy and people in professions that don’t pay that well and don’t give the people in them any real power in the world are often very smart people who you would have thought would be doing something else.
The first is that smart people often believe in strange conspiracy theories even though you’d think that they’re smart enough to be able to see the holes in them. The problem is that they are also smart enough to come up with desperate ways to prop up their conspiracy theories. They don’t want to have to really investigate if their theories are ridiculous. They want to keep believing the same thing by whatever method it takes. I suspect that it’s also true that they’ve learned to separate their professional and personal lives enough that they can act crazy on the weekend and then shut that down for the work week and get their jobs done:
The second is that we don’t live a society that’s really egalitarian. If you grow up in a social strata where very few people move into a higher-level social strata where you have a job making considerably more money and having considerably more power, you’ll find that it’s made hard for you, no matter how smart you are and how hard you work, to move into such a job. And it’s made hard for you both by those in your own strata and those in a strata above you. There are all sorts of barriers set up by those in higher stratas to make it hard for you to succeed no matter how hard you work and how smart you are. You also don’t get that much encouragement from people in your own strata, who sometimes think you’re a snob and a traitor for wanting to make it into a high strata:
Don’t most white-collar professional careers like physician, lawyer or accountant require above average grades to even enter the required academic degree? That acts as a floor on the amount of impulse-control, intelligence and diligence. Not a perfect floor but pretty good.
OP is analogous to noticing some out of shape soldiers, some athletic civilians and concluding that civilians tend to be more physically fit than soldiers.
Are smart people more, equally or less likely than dumb people to believe in strange conspiracy theories? Smart people may be better at coming up with bullshit arguments but dumb people are less demanding of the bullshit arguments they’ll accept.
There’s also sample size. The OP’s knowledge of the behavior of “Doctors, Accountants, Teachers/Instructors, Legal experts etc.” may be based on four people.
Agree with confirmation bias, with one minor caveat: It’s possible to fake one’s way through certain types of education, but not others. For instance, I do not for one minute believe Donald Trump did all of his own work for that Wharton business degree he has. But no person training to be a mechanic told to fix a car can get someone else to do it for him. It’s the same for any manual labor job: cheating is virtually impossible. It’s surprising, but bullshitting can take one pretty far in some pretty rarefied fields. Not saying it’s a given, just that it’s surprisingly easy at odd times to get away with things because one looks and sounds right. Con men exploit this tendency routinely.
Ben Carson is perhaps the greatest neurologist who ever lived. And after seeing him speak or attempt to learn anything not associated with that, I learned something. Not sure what, but something.
You notice the examples that are outside of the norm for whatever their job is simply because they fall outside your expectations. The majority in the middle of the bell curve don’t rise to the level of awareness.
Maybe there was more to those wrecks, idiots, and party animals than was obvious. Of the kids at my school who I still keep track of, there are no great surprises about where they ended up.
:p;) ) and do a fairly good job of adulting in their later years.
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