Can ignorance and intelligence coexist in the same person?

[roubaixtuesday]

Everybody has intelligence; we all have gaps in our knowledge so are also ignorant.

So, trivially, yes.

I also agree with Cudgel that "common sense" can also mean "prejudice".

But I think the original post isn't really about intelligence or ignorance. More arrogance, humility and self knowledge.

[al_yrpal]

You would.

Lesson on how to turn plain common sense into a political argument in one easy step



Al

[roubaixtuesday]

You would.

Lesson on how to turn plain common sense into a political argument in one easy step



Al

Thank you for demonstrating the point so well.

[jois]

There's an interview with a tory minister where he basically said that anyone struggling should go out and get a better paying job. He's obviously intelligent to get where he has but IMHO that comment makes him truly ignorant.

I know people who will never be able to get a better paying job. Unskilled and uneducated they are never going to get away from minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs. However this MP has obviously no experience beyond his privileged, middle class, white collar world. That's ignorance that came out with his stupid comments. Oh it's sensible to go out and get a better paying job but that's not advice that works for a great many people. He didn't know that nor did he know enough to keep his mouth shut when such thoughts came into his head.

What's your view on ignorance and intelligence and whether they can exist in the same person? Do you have examples either way?

Well it depends, certainly they all can't as there are not that many better paying jobs, but it's very likely any one of them could choose to do so, if they were prepared to sign up to night school to obtain qualifications/ skills.

[Cugel]

There's an interview with a tory minister where he basically said that anyone struggling should go out and get a better paying job. He's obviously intelligent to get where he has but IMHO that comment makes him truly ignorant.

I know people who will never be able to get a better paying job. Unskilled and uneducated they are never going to get away from minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs. However this MP has obviously no experience beyond his privileged, middle class, white collar world. That's ignorance that came out with his stupid comments. Oh it's sensible to go out and get a better paying job but that's not advice that works for a great many people. He didn't know that nor did he know enough to keep his mouth shut when such thoughts came into his head.

What's your view on ignorance and intelligence and whether they can exist in the same person? Do you have examples either way?

Well it depends, certainly they all can't as there are not that many better paying jobs, but it's very likely any one of them could choose to do so, if they were prepared to sign up to night school to obtain qualifications/ skills.

How many "ones" could obtain the better paying jobs by obtaining the better skills & quals? Will a certain group-size of such ones, all skill-qualled up, not soon reach a critical number at which all the better jobs suiting the skill-quals have been taken?

Also, who pays for the night school classes? Those who might benefit most are the least likely to have the money to pay (or the time, since they're working three hand-to-mouth-pay jobs just to survive).

**********
Mind, once upon a time - what seems now a long time ago - education up to any level one could reach was free to the recipient, as we taxpayers having better jobs (being former recipients of the free education) could afford the tax to pay for it. Not now.

Now one must tug mightily on one's own boot-straps so that poverty-gravity is defied (somehow) and one ascends to a higher pay grade ... or even just a job. This is slowly becoming impossible as many can no longer afford the boots and straps; or the food to gain enough energy to tug on them, never mind the night school fees.

But is your suggestion a-one o' them sly suggestions in disguise, along the lines of, "Everyone ought to be able to do what I would do/did"?

Cugel, lucky enough to be growing up when civilisation was still the fashion.

[Cugel]

You would.

Lesson on how to turn plain common sense into a political argument in one easy step

Al

Is there a fancy or elaborate common sense or is the stuff always plain/vanilla? I've certainly encountered folk emitting what they suggest (often very loudly) is "only common sense" that turns out to be very plain indeed - so plain that it's devoid of logic, reason or even meaning. On the other hand, other stuff offered as common-sensical is often very elaborate indeed - byzantine to the point of being completely indecipherable.

"Where have you encountered such folk and what examples of such meaningless non-reasoned emissions have they made", you may cry. "Or that byzantine stuff"? Well, one only need look about here ... but also there.

Cugel, common enough but not always sensible.

[jois]

There's an interview with a tory minister where he basically said that anyone struggling should go out and get a better paying job. He's obviously intelligent to get where he has but IMHO that comment makes him truly ignorant.

I know people who will never be able to get a better paying job. Unskilled and uneducated they are never going to get away from minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs. However this MP has obviously no experience beyond his privileged, middle class, white collar world. That's ignorance that came out with his stupid comments. Oh it's sensible to go out and get a better paying job but that's not advice that works for a great many people. He didn't know that nor did he know enough to keep his mouth shut when such thoughts came into his head.

What's your view on ignorance and intelligence and whether they can exist in the same person? Do you have examples either way?

Well it depends, certainly they all can't as there are not that many better paying jobs, but it's very likely any one of them could choose to do so, if they were prepared to sign up to night school to obtain qualifications/ skills.

How many "ones" could obtain the better paying jobs by obtaining the better skills & quals? Will a certain group-size of such ones, all skill-qualled up, not soon reach a critical number at which all the better jobs suiting the skill-quals have been taken?

Also, who pays for the night school classes? Those who might benefit most are the least likely to have the money to pay (or the time, since they're working three hand-to-mouth-pay jobs just to survive).

**********
Mind, once upon a time - what seems now a long time ago - education up to any level one could reach was free to the recipient, as we taxpayers having better jobs (being former recipients of the free education) could afford the tax to pay for it. Not now.

Now one must tug mightily on one's own boot-straps so that poverty-gravity is defied (somehow) and one ascends to a higher pay grade ... or even just a job. This is slowly becoming impossible as many can no longer afford the boots and straps; or the food to gain enough energy to tug on them, never mind the night school fees.

But is your suggestion a-one o' them sly suggestions in disguise, along the lines of, "Everyone ought to be able to do what I would do/did"?

Cugel, lucky enough to be growing up when civilisation was still the fashion.

I did make that point, it's not and can't be a way out of relative poverty for everyone.

But it can and is a way out of poverty for some people possibly quite a lot where there are skill shortages in the economy

Very nearly everybody unless they could reasonably be considered educationaly sub normal could go from a minimum wage job to one that's better paid by study\ skill training. People end up in low wage jobs for a lot of reasons, that are not generally the fact they don't have the IQ for something better

There no guarantee obviously, but it's a real possibility

[Nearholmer]

People end up in low wage jobs for a lot of reasons, that are not generally the fact they don't have the IQ for something better

Agree.

One of the things this country truly, desperately needs a great deal more of is genuinely good quality education and training, because that’s the prime way to improve productivity, by having higher skills in the population …… a very high productivity economy doesn’t have oodles of drones doing low-paid jobs, it has automation to do many of those tasks, and efficient arrangements to eliminate some, and highly skilled people doing highly skilful things.

There is a wide open opportunity to use ‘greening’ of the economy to improve skills and move people into better jobs, and I await without much hope the government announcing that it will lead that happening.

[jois]

People end up in low wage jobs for a lot of reasons, that are not generally the fact they don't have the IQ for something better

Agree.

One of the things this country truly, desperately needs a great deal more of is genuinely good quality education and training, because that’s the prime way to improve productivity, by having higher skills in the population …… a very high productivity economy doesn’t have oodles of drones doing low-paid jobs, it has automation to do many of those tasks, and efficient arrangements to eliminate some, and highly skilled people doing highly skilful things.

There is a wide open opportunity to use ‘greening’ of the economy to improve skills and move people into better jobs, and I await without much hope the government announcing that it will lead that happening.

I know it's popular on here to blame the government for everything but there needs to be a degree of self help as well, there a myriad of skill courses available that are free if your on benift, not that dear if you need to pay and for which their are intrest free loans available,

Waiting for the government to get it's high wage high skill economy up and running may not be the best plan

[Nearholmer]

People need a framework within which to help themselves, and they aren’t being provided with one. People can’t enrol on training schemes that don’t exist, or gain good quality on the job training in industries that only want to recruit fully skilled and experienced staff.

It needs both components, leadership from the top, and willingness, and crucially belief from the bottom (if that isn’t a dismissive term to use for 20yo working in low-skilled, dead-end, low-paid jobs).

Gimcrack training schemes don’t work - they need to be industry-led, and the government needs to wind industry up and point it in the right direction by starting things like a proper national campaign of building insulation, and getting its finger out over electricity distribution for EV charging and electric home heating.

Think about how the development of the national grid worked, because it’s a good example: it was centrally led, it created work for industry, and on the back of it the country grew a massive skill-bank in both public and private sectors (which has been allowed to decay away since the early 1970s).

[jois]

People need a framework within which to help themselves, and they aren’t being provided with one. People can’t enrol on training schemes that don’t exist, or gain good quality on the job training in industries that only want to recruit fully skilled and experienced staff.

It needs both components, leadership from the top, and willingness, and crucially belief from the bottom (if that isn’t a dismissive term to use for 20yo working in low-skilled, dead-end, low-paid jobs).

Gimcrack training schemes don’t work - they need to be industry-led, and the government needs to wind industry up and point it in the right direction by starting things like a proper national campaign of building insulation, and getting its finger out over electricity distribution for EV charging and electric home heating.

Think about how the development of the national grid worked, because it’s a good example: it was centrally led, it created work for industry, and on the back of it the country grew a massive skill-bank in both public and private sectors (which has been allowed to decay away since the early 1970s).

You can pick up a national qualification in word processing or a whole variety of building skills less than a mile from where I live, that's with out actually looking ,as I've done both of them

Do building jobs exist ? Yes they do, does it get you a job, no but it sure helps

[Tangled Metal]

'Intelligent' idiots abound. Common sense is often missing.

Al

I don't think it's common sense that's lacking in this case but lack of experience of " how the other half live". That or empathy but more likely a lack of awareness.

Yes, his comments annoyed me because it plays into the nasty tory trope, but it is this idea of intelligence isn't enough in the political class but an absence of ignorance on society as a whole. Also is this an example of ignorance causing us to realise a lacking in intelligence? I think his comments were ignorant and unintelligent in their reasoning.

So in response to Mattheus it's the ignorance / intelligence I'm interested in as applied to power / political power. The MP got me motivated, shall we say, to comment and gave an example too.

[al_yrpal]

My comment isnt related to the MP its just what I have observed in my life...
A man who I knew who wrote a dozen lines of code which earned him $10 million but was a total disaster in his personal life due to lack of common sense in the way he lived his life. Highly intelligent, gifted, but a total wreck.

Al

[Stevek76]

Definitions of intelligence vary considerably but whatever way you take it, no one is omniscient so everyone is partly ignorant, on the grand scale of things massively ignorant!

I always tend to think of intelligence more in the sense of what IQ tests attempt to test for. Specifically ability to learn and solve novel problems and concepts. In reality this is almost impossible to test for because doing so requires knowledge of what the subject already knows.

He's obviously intelligent to get where he has

Is he? I think people underestimate quite how much advantage a silver spoon rammed up the posterior can provide. I've a friend who teaches a science subject in a fairly well regarded private school and they are quite blunt about just how thick some of the children are. These are people who'd absolutely flunk out in a state school but through dedicated spoon feeding can get very good grades.

[pwa]

I can think of at least three people I have known well, who have excelled in their chosen fields because of self-belief and an ability to make others think they are good at what they do. In spite of being a bit lacking in the little grey cells and relying on others beneath them to do all the real thinking. The incompetent delegating to the competent, but taking the credit.