Also, this sort of thing is related to Richard Dawkins’ mentioning that it’s a very different experience talking to “bishops and archbishops” than, say, most of their lay co-religionists.
I have a huge problem with the idea that people aren’t hungry in this country. Maybe some are able to fill their bellies with nutritionally void foods like doughnuts, but they are harming themselves in the process.
As for Dr. Carson, doctors are smart people, but that doesn’t mean that they take the time to think things through. They are just as prone to gullibility as anyone, and they are probably more prone to arrogance and feeling like they are speakers of truth.
Nzinga, you may not have had much formal education, but I don’t ever read your posts and say, “There’s a woman who just isn’t interested in thinking things through. There’s a woman who just thinks she has all the answers.” That, to me, is a much higher accomplishment.
I saw him on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox talking about how if we only opened up the all the prohibited land for oil drilling here in the U.S., we’d have no problem completely removing any dependence we have on foreign nations for oil.
Sometimes intelligent people don’t express themselves well when speaking on the fly. A few poorly worded comments and some media spin can destroy anyone’s image. Even though I was never a Howard Dean supporter, I thought it was crazy how the media totally destroy his presidential campaign by making him look like a lunatic (by constantly replaying “the Dean scream”). The media can make ANYONE sound like a moron based on what they choose to focus on - you or I included.
That issue aside, as a doctor, I can confirm: Being a doctor makes you an expert on your specialty, but not an expert on life in general. A doctor isn’t necessarily any better informed about non-medical topics than anyone. In fact, one particular specialist may not necessarily have the best info about general medical topics. I often roll my eyes at people trusting Dr. Oz’s advice about quasi-medical topics, because a cardiothoracic surgeon isn’t necessarily the best expert on general medical topics even though they surely do know a lot about heart surgery.
I have no doubt that Dr. Carson is a very intelligent, hard working, and talented person. Neurosurgeons are some of the hardest-working and smartest of ALL doctors. The hours they work are insane and most of them have very little life outside work.
It’s quite possible that because Dr. Carson has spent so much time honing his skills in neurosurgery that he hasn’t had a lot of time to read about or debate other issues and he’s kind of speaking on the fly about this stuff.
I know that during residency I often went through phases where I literally did not have time to keep up with the news or watch popular TV shows so I felt isolated from the rest of the world (and no I am not a neurosurgeon).
Posting from my phone, so this post will be short, but ijust wanted to say I find all the responses interesting, and I take everyone’s points about the hunger thing.
Him being smart is, more or less a fact.
Marriage only being between a man and a woman is, more or less an opinion.
His reasoning for the latter is really not relevant.
The question is, does his belief in heterosexual only relations bother you so much that you’d disown all the rest you like about him?
The interesting underlying tone of your comments is that ‘Christians are smart, admittedly, I know some myself - however if they believe marriage is for straight people only well then..maybe I would reconsider my view of them.’
There are several tells for people who appear to be fairly intelligent, but are actually idiots. One of the tells is the abbreviation ‘Dr.’ in front of their name.
Yeah; I don’t know much about what it takes to be a neurosurgeon, but I can certainly believe that the kind of intelligence it takes to be a neurosurgeon doesn’t necessarily have much overlap with the kind it takes to critically examine logical arguments about social issues, or the kind it takes to talk without saying stuff that sounds stupid and offends people.
I think a lot of debates on policy–whether to permit gay marriage, restrict immigration, or mandate the teaching of evolution in schools–are conflicts of different moral and philosophical systems. I think that’s at the root of why people sometimes cling tenaciously to their views, even when presented with highly logical and well-constructed arguments from the opposing side. I also think that such differences of view have little to do with intelligence.
This TED video may be of interest.
Carson is also a creationist who has suggested that accepting evolution leads to immoral behavior. And Carson is not the only neurosurgeon who has made a big deal about believing in creationism.
Being a successful neurosurgeon requires considerable intelligence, but those smarts don’t necessarily translate to being intelligent about other fields.
I would be disappointed* if Dr. Carson did not get elected to office as a Republican, thus carrying on the great tradition of Republican physician legislators embarrassing themselves through public displays of ignorance (the most recent being Congressman Phil Gingrey’s defense of Todd Akin and his “legitimate rape” comments).
*well, not that disappointed.
**there is a 21-member Republican Doctor’s Caucus, which is kind of scary.
Who was it that said that smart people are also very good at rationalizing the beliefs they were imprinted with as children? I’ve found that to be quite accurate.
Otherwise intelligent people adhering to crazy politics isn’t without precedent just look at Bobby Fischer or Gore Vidal.
Intelligence is complicated, and so are the traits that make someone able to succeed or become prominent in the community or even world famous. Very smart people, capable of a multitude of things I could never be, and with an enormous list of impressive achievements, can believe, do, and say some really fucking stupid things. All day, every day.
My own gifts seem to mainly give me a strong, sensitive nose for bullshit. Doesn’t mean I’m smarter but in a lot of ways I am more level-headed and rational than a majority of people.
Believing in chemistry and calling it alchemy doesn’t make a man stupid. Believing without evidence that some goals of alchemy were achievable or had been achieved is stupid, but not merely being born in an age before humanity had amassed a sufficient understanding of the particulars of how chemistry did and did not work.
People today who believe in an interventionist deity do not suffer from this handicap. They are not Bronze Age villagers who have no understanding of electricity save as blasts of light and sound that can tear trees apart. They have the foundation to make a rational decision that there is no God, but have failed.
I know a number of really smart people who are Mormon, including an uncle who was a professor of engineering at a well-known university and a good friend from high school who went on the get his PhD from Standford and works as a research scientist. Yet guys have obvious blinders concerning Mormonism.
I also have a great friend who is Catholic and we regularly disagree on religion. He’s an inhouse counsel for a Fortune 100 company and has terrific critical thinking skills but some of the arguments he uses to defend religion are simply laughable.
Of course, I am an idiot in many ways myself. It’s just easier to see it in others, especially when they are arguing on points you disagree with.
Doctors and PhD’s are brilliant in very very narrow areas of expertise. Anything outside of those areas, and they often bring the crazy and/or the idiotic. This is ESPECIALLY true with medical doctors, in my experience, and I know a lot of them.
One of the smartest people in world disagrees with you about a political issue so therefore he must actually be an idiot? Maybe he is right and you are wrong. Maybe you are the idiot.
However, there are also smart people who think that gay “marriage” is a good idea. So maybe he is the idiot after all.
Most likely neither you nor Carson is an idiot. You just have different opinions. Issues are complicated, how can one person ever know what the real truth is. We are all just trying to do our best and most likely only getting anything partially right like the blind mean describing the elephant. Maybe gay “marriage” will be the greatest thing since the Doritos Loco taco, or maybe it will destroy marriage as we know it. Most likely it will have some good parts and some bad parts. It will be hard to know exactly what effects it will have once it is in place. It is impossible now to know what the effects will be since they are all in the future. This should give us some epistemological humilty.
When someone we admire disagrees with us it may be better to examine the basis of our own beliefs rather than to call that person an idiot. Even if we don’t change our beliefs it can be a good reminder that having different beliefs doesn’t mean you are a bad person and people with different opinions are not enemies.
I freely admit, I consider anyone who compares homosexuality with bestiality or pedophilia to be an idiot (at least in these matters).
I have no problem with people in science fields being religious. Science and religion are different fields of human endeavor and not necessarily incompatible. But letting faith-based arguments trump the scientific method and actual empirical evidence? That’s idiotic.
Who says the WBC are “rubes”?
In case you didn’t know it, Fred Phelps is a lawyer, as are most of his adult children. He’s NOT uneducated. He’s better educated than most SDMB regulars.