(06-02-2016 09:20 PM)Paracelsus Wrote: (06-02-2016 09:50 AM)Samseau Wrote: ![[Image: VPU0Ugn.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/VPU0Ugn.jpg)
A small meditation on this piece of shit infomercial posing as an article:
Isaac Newton lost his ass in the South Sea Bubble. The rough history of his involvement can be summed up here:
![[Image: 20131210-image.jpg]](https://sovman-w3tc-sovereignman.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/20131210-image.jpg)
"I can calculate the movement of planetary bodies, but not the madness of men" is the quote attributed to him in the wake of his failed investments.
There are two observations we can make out of this and Hawking's supposed "bafflement" at Trump's popularity:
(1) Highly intelligent people are perfectly capable of self-delusion. If Newton did indeed say the words attributed to him, it was a schoolboy-level attempt at preservation of his ego. He blames his failure at investment on something completely outside his control -- on people's irrationality. In reality, his failure at investment came down to two things: his own greed combined with hot hand fallacy, described in The Big Short as a belief that a state of affairs will continue indefinitely.
Highly intelligent people often tend not to understand persuasion.
We've often said around here that real smart guys are often bad at game for instance. Most of us kind of fit that description - we had to actively learn.
The assumption often tends to be that people both see the world in the same way that you do and that your highly prized intelligence and logic is the way the world really works. This was something that was a theme in a
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode of all places, when Hercules found himself on the island of Atlantis and met a woman that lived outside the city who had prophetic visions of the islands' sinking.
Yet no one could believe it and she was branded an outcast. The king put her and Hercules in a lot of trouble because according to the highly-prized "logic" and "reason" of the Atlanteans, no such thing as the sinking of the island was possible. It was logically inconsistent, nonsensical superstition.
But the island did sink, and it sunk because of the Atlanteans' own enterprise and greed, fueled in no small measure by their belief in neverending "progress." When I read Quintus' intro to Roosh's
Free Speech Isn't Free manuscript, and his entry about Easter Island in
Thirty Seven on this theme, it really rings true.
Highly intelligent people tend to dismiss the importance of emotion and the irrational, which is why a lot of them go into fields where they don't really have to be productive or sell anything, like government or academia. It's somewhat alien to them.
I've used this analogy before. They essentially think that the entire universe can be seen in visible light, but when that's your only tool for measurement, you miss the vast majority of what actually is. "Logic" falls in such a place.
Bereft of anything but "logic" and "reason," you'll miss most of what exists of human behavior, something Quintus also wrote about in
Thirty Seven.
This is why these guys often have bad game, and it's why they missed Trump's rise.
Stephen Hawking fits the description. Highly intelligent physicist (though nowhere near as consequential to the field as is often believed), but he's never had to do any business or live outside his ivory tower, essentially. So he misses most of what exists, at least in the universe of the human animal.