Guile and wisdom are both synonyms for intelligence but very different qualities
Semmelweis could tell you a thing or two about that.
At the high school level, I believe it. My AP History/Economic in high school was fairly straightforward. But my daughter has an economics degree from Chicago. She is very, very good at math, but Econometrics nearly did her in.
I remember that in Samuelson’s book there was a long derivation with a footnote - that did it in one line for those who knew calculus.
My wife taught med school students when she was a grad student in bio. She was not impressed.
Medical students come from a wide variety of backgrounds - there is no reason a graduate student should find them particularly impressive. They have to memorize enormous amounts of stuff, before they really understand what is actually important to know, how to apply it in practice, and many more advanced skills. Some of the concepts are challenging, but most of them are less so. You still need to be quite intelligent to learn most of it and get through medical school - none of my classmates were dumb. Until you have spent thousands of hours applying this knowledge with patients, however, you really don’t know very much medicine at all.
I have known doctors who were dumb as doornails. One in particular was considered perhaps the top brain surgeon in Thailand, and he was a brilliant medical man, but that’s where his brilliancy ended. He had absolutely no social graces and generally offended people left and right without even realizing it. And no, he was not just pretending, he really was completely clueless.
I have known a few surgeons like this, but not many. But people expect too much of doctors - many have average social skills. Some are clueless. Some are clueless after they’ve worked twelve hours without a break or meal and they need food and rest. Maybe for the third day in a row. It’s easier to judge people when you don’t know all the facts.
There’s a funny Brian Regan comedy bit about how he dislikes his doctor because he comes into the room with all the buttons on his lab coat off by a row. He also complains about the only reason he can see for a long wait is if pooling blood starts flowing under the door.
It is funny. But maybe you were called to attend a crash operation or delivery or code and hurriedly changed out of scrubs to rush back to other duties. Maybe the doctor scheduled for the previous shift was assaulted by a patient forcing you to work a double shift. Maybe it’s your seventh long shift in seven days. Maybe you spent two hours with a complicated trauma case that could not be saved but you did everything anyway. And feel spent.
Maybe despite a million problems you manage to remain polite, conscientious and capable and don’t complain even though you are judged when a patient, at the end of a visit with his hand on the door, brings up a critical “by the way” issue on the way out you have to deal with, throwing you off schedule. I like Brian Regan. He is probably justified. Still amusing if he isn’t. He’s a great comedian. But things are sometimes much more complicated. Give doctors a break. Fewer people do than you might think.
Re doctors, I will tell two stories that point in the opposite direction.
My uncle had a PhD in biochemistry and taught and researched in a med school. Although he was much better trained for the research than the MDs, they always looked down on him. One horror story he told me was that when they carried out an experiment and got a result with, say, p = .1, they would report “there was no effect”, despite the probability that there was an effect was 10-1. It just wasn’t 20-1 like they were taught.
Flip side: We had a very good grad student in math whose father was a professor in a medical school. When the son got his PhD, the father said to me, “Now we have a real doctor in the family.”
Actually, it is not that hard, except for knowing tan(280), which even Feynman probably couldn’t do. Here’s why. To find the tangent of a number (in degrees, I assume), you need to know the remainder when divided by 360. Well 10^3=-80 mod 360 since 3\times 360 =1080. And since 10^4=10\times -80=-800=-80 mod 360, it follows similarly that 10^k=-80 mod 360 for all integer k\ge3. For k=100 or k= a google. Tan(-80) = -5.67…
It’s stuff like that which explains why my undergrad math minor went nowhere despite high hopes. I totally get it. Makes complete sense. It’s trivial in a way. But I can no more synthesize that from scratch than I can lift a car.
One of my freshman professors once said “The best math magician is the best mathematician.” Probably not original with him, but I found it profound. The ability to manipulate concepts like magicians handle a deck of cards, shuffling, counting, flipping, and reorganizing all to a goal is really the key.
That’s fine, if you’re looking for \tan({10^{100}\pi\over{180}}). For \tan(10^{100}), though, you’d need to know \pi to a hundred decimal places.
And I’m sure that Feynman would have been able to get tan(280º), to within his claimed 10% accuracy. That’s just -1/tan(10º), and 10º is small enough to use the Small Angle Approximation.
Agreed to both. After I posted I decided to see how close I could and settled on -6, because 10 degrees is about 1/6 of a radian.
This is an interesting distinction-- the ability to retain and regurgitate large quantities of information, vs the ability to synthesize and apply it. I can see how med school would require a lot of the former and maybe not effectively weed out everyone who was lacking in the latter.
Here’s my dumb med student story. When I was in college, I worked as a hostess in a restaurant where one of the managers was in med school. One of the hosts’ responsibilities was to check the restrooms every half hour, replace the toilet paper if need be, and summon the busser if there was any major cleanup needed. The toilet paper dispensers were the locking kind, and the key was kept at the host stand. Except when the dumb med student was managing–she would always take the key and lock it in the manager’s office. The first time we worked together, I went looking for the key, and the other host told me with a resigned sigh that this was just what dumb manager did. I got the impression he had given up on properly restocking the TP and just left extra rolls on top of the toilet tanks when she worked. I thought I would try explaining to her why the key should be left up front.
Hooooo boy. I might as well have been trying to explain calculus to a toddler, and I’m in the half that didn’t even take calculus. We went back and forth basically the whole night (punctuated by each of us stepping away to seat people or apporove void items) and at the end of the shift we were standing in the handicapped stall while she demonstrated to me that you didn’t need the key because you could just tear off the empty cardboard roll without removing the bar inside it. After I tore out half my hair to keep from screaming, I took a deep breath and asked her to please show me how to put the new roll on, and after she stared at it for a good long minute, she finally conceded and handed over the key.
To this day, I can’t even figure out why she thought the key needed safekeeping. We locked up the TP in the bathroom so customers wouldn’t steal it, but the key wasn’t anywhere they were likely to find it, and the employees already had unfettered access to the full, wrapped TP rolls in dry storage. To her slight credit, she never took the key again after that night, so I guess once a piece of information got through, she could retain it. But there were so many other baffling failures of reasoning on her part that I really think there was something wrong with her. One time the expediter told her to 86 the ice cream (i.e. go into the computer system and mark all items with ice cream as unavailable because we ran out), and she 86ed the ice cream sundae, but not the a la mode button for the other desserts. When I pointed this out to her, I got a blank stare. For a long time, lots of employees weren’t getting their name tags or Shoes For Crews orders. It turned out that, when people were placing their orders through her, she was just putting the form in her mailbox in the manager’s office and doing nothing else with it. She wasn’t forgetting; she genuinely thought that was all she needed to do to place the order. Again, once it was explained to her, she never messed it up again, and someone was probably supposed to explain it to her in the first place and didn’t. But she was like this robot, incapable of making even the tiniest leap of logic on her own, or ascertaining that there was a problem and asking for further instructions.
I really hope she hasn’t killed anyone.
It is a lot easier to learn general information than apply important parts of it to a complicated case which requires knowledge from many areas. To be fair, medical students do learn this skill over the course of their residencies and in the years beyond. It takes some time and work and repetition. The first step is to learn the information, which in itself can be difficult. It is not the final step and no one expects a medical student to have mastered everything a doctor ten years in practice knows - which is much more practical and extensive.
That reminds me of the old joke:
What do you call the person who graduated in last place at medical school?
Doctor.
Maybe because of my job (patent/IP law) I know I’m not smart, even though I am well educated. So education doesn’t correlate very well with smarts, I think. I am constantly humbled by people who are smarter than I am, but they need me because I know what they don’t know about working the legal system, so that’s the only reason I’m ‘lucky’ enough to mix with them.
I’m not even sure what ‘smart’ is, but part of it is being able to apply something you learned in one area to another completely unrelated area that no one ever thought of. Another is being able to look at a problem you’ve never seen before and very quickly see the solution. When I see people do those things I am humbled.
The mention of chess caught my attention. My wife and I play a LOT of chess. About a 8-10 games a week. I consider that a lot. If not chess then cribbage.
It makes me feel kinda weird when I get a phone call and the person asks watcha’ doin’. I tell them I’m playing chess. The often say oh, oh, I’ll let you get back to your game. Ummm, no, the game can wait, it’s not going anywhere. We also watch our share of Rom Coms and action movies.
For myself though, when I play chess, I really focus on the game. Every little problem in life takes a back seat. One of the reasons I like the game. Many games are that way.
Correlations are neither proven by example nor disproven by counterexample. Correlation is a statistic, and education correlates well with any measure of “smarts”.
Agreed.
It doesn’t.
Using words from other languages. You don’t have to use them correctly, you can even make them up, but for many the mere sprinkling of a few seemingly foreign words will be taken as a sign of intelligence.
Speaking with your hands, IOW gesticulating to emphasize and enhance your speech is taken as a sign of intelligence. If course some of the more common gestures tend to make a different impression, but simple things like using the hands along with descriptions of size seems to impress people…