Supersmart

Science fiction, being a literature that is fundamentally for geeks and knurds about geeks and knurds written by geeks and knurds, has had a lot of stories about characters who possess superhuman intelligence. Sometimes the characters are aliens (Clarkes' Childhood's End), sometimes machines (Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), sometimes "the next stage of human evolution (van Vogt's Slan)." Sometimes they are born that way (Shiras' "In Hiding"), sometimes somebody made them that way (Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon") and sometimes it's some sort of accident (Anderson's Brain Wave).

Of course, it's not just the psi powers that can muddy the waters. In Heinlein's "Gulf" we're presented with "Speedtalk," a language that follows the principles of General Semantics and makes your thinking better because, um, well, because General Semantics is so cool.

That leads us to another problem with the stories of the supersmart. Once given the gift of supersmartness, the protagonists often come around to various views, opinions, and theories that happen to coincide with either the author, John. W. Campbell Jr., or the average Analog reader, depending. Often it's all three, at least in a certain (and obvious) category of story. But one should also bear in mind the case of the translation of "Flowers for Algernon" to the big screen, where Sterling Silliphant's screenplay inserted all sorts of cliché's of mid-60s liberalism into Charlie's dialog.

The real difficulty is that it's very hard to write convincingly about someone who is smarter than you, and it's really, really hard to write convincingly about someone who is smarter than anyone who ever lived.

So there are various cheats. One cheat is to mash together all the tales of mental prodigies into one package. Good Will Hunting was one such. Math genius, plus eidetic memory, plus (apparently) total logical comprehension of everything he read, so he could put down a college student for just regurgitating his textbooks, without himself just regurgitating some more textbooks.

Also, he was really good in a bar fight.

There's a similar problem with the TV show, Numb3rs, where Charlie Eppes is a math genius (and former prodigy) who uses mathematics in all sorts of crime-solving ways. The show's advisors do a decent job of making the math realistic, but what they can't do is make it realistic that one single mathematician would be an expert in so many areas of applied math, all the more so because he was a math prodigy, and math prodigies tend not to be in the applied areas, but rather in things like number theory.

The focus of the supermind story is also important. Often the focus is on the genius' relationship to society and the people around him, so it's often an extrapolation of the gifted or geeky readers' experiences. One important question is whether or not the story offers some useful lessons to said gifted geek.

I remember being struck by one passage in George O. Smith's The Fourth R (which turns out to be available from the Project Gutenberg, imagine my delight). A wise old man named Judge Carver is speaking to the protagonist, who's been artificially given a full adult's education by a "brain machine":

"Let's take the statistics first. You're four-feet eleven-inches tall, you weigh one-hundred and three pounds, and you're a few weeks over fourteen. I suppose you know that you've still got one more spurt of growth, sometimes known as the post-puberty-growth. You'll probably put on another foot in the next couple of years, spread out a bit across the shoulders, and that fuzz on your face will become a collection of bristles. I suppose you think that any man in this room can handle you simply because we're all larger than you are? Possibly true, and one of the reasons why we can't give you a ticket and let you proclaim yourself an adult. You can't carry the weight. But this isn't all. Your muscles and your bones aren't yet in equilibrium. I could find a man of age thirty who weighed one-oh-three and stood four-eleven. He could pick you up and spin you like a top on his forefinger just because his bones match his muscles nicely, and his nervous system and brain have had experience in driving the body he's living in."

"Could be, but what has all this to do with me? It does not affect the fact that I've been getting along in life."

"You get along. It isn't enough to 'get along.' You've got to have judgment. You claim judgment, but still you realize that you can't handle your own machine. You can't even come to an equitable choice in selecting some agency to handle your machine. You can't decide upon a good outlet. You believe that proclaiming your legal competence will provide you with some mysterious protection against the wolves and thieves and ruthless men with political ambition--that this ruling will permit you to keep it to yourself until you decide that it is time to release it. You still want to hide. You want to use it until you are so far above and beyond the rest of the world that they can't catch up, once you give it to everybody. You now object to my plans and programs, still not knowing whether I intend to use it for good or for evil--and juvenile that you are, it must be good or evil and cannot be an in-between shade of gray. Men are heroes or villains to you; but I must say with some reluctance that the biggest crooks that ever held public office still passed laws that were beneficial to their people. There is the area in which you lack judgment, James. There and in your blindness."

"Blindness?"

"Blindness," repeated Judge Carter. "As Mark Twain once said, 'When I was seventeen, I was ashamed at the ignorance of my father, but by the time I was twenty-one I was amazed to discover how much the old man had learned in four short years!' Confound it, James, you don't yet realize that there are a lot of things in life that you can't even know about until you've lived through them. You're blind here, even though your life has been a solid case of encounter with unexpected experiences, one after the other as you grew. Oh, you're smart enough to know that you've got to top the next hill as soon as you've climbed this one, but you're not smart enough to realize that the next hill merely hides the one beyond, and that there are still higher hills beyond that stretching to the end of the road for you--and that when you've finally reached the end of your own road there will be more distant hills to climb for the folks that follow you."

Mickey Spillane did a similar turn in a book called The Twisted Thing, but he had the gizmo make the young boy into, mentally, a real adult, supersmart, but still locked inside the body of a boy. It's a horror study really, and doesn't end well. But what caught my attention in that one is that the supermind notes that Mike Hammer, not really the brightest guy in the world, manages to almost keep up, owing to the fact that Hammer is a specialist in criminal matters, and specialization allows lesser talents to equal or even surpass greater ones who cannot specialize in everything.

These are real lessons, and not just applicable to someone who is supersmart, but even to us folks who are middling to very smart. And ultimately, it's a lot better to pull such lessons from wish-fulfillment fantasies than such panderings as "they're just jealous of your intelligence" and "if everyone were really smart, they'd agree with you about stuff."

The Smartest Guy in the Room

If you’re reading this, odds are that you’ve spent at least some time in your life as the Smartest Guy in the Room. I’m going to hope that everyone at least temporarily lets me get away with the sexist aspects of that statement, though I’ll stipulate that there are plenty of times when the smartest guy in the room is a female. For that matter, I’ll state at the outset that the smartest guy in the room needn’t even be the most intelligent. The SGITR syndrome has a more to do with competition and aggression.

At Hickman Elementary and Donelson High School, Mark and I swapped back and forth for the top scores on standardized tests, achievement tests, PSATs, ACTs, and SATs. Mark went to Oberlin for a while, had a bit of a flameout, then attended and graduated from U. of Indiana, Bloomington in mathematics. Mark was shy and not nearly as aggressive as I am, but during his college years at least, he had the math version of SGITR, which shows up in casual statements like, “Oh, I can never remember that equation; if I need it, I’ll just re-derive it.”

In primary and secondary public education, the occasional Bronx High School of Science being the exception, it’s pretty easy to be the SGITR. My high school graduating class had about 200 students, so all Mark and I had to do was be in the top percentile. Larger schools will have a more in the top 1%, but still, everyone will know who’s who pretty quickly, and the pecking order sorts itself out.

If someone is really invested in being the SGITR, though, college can be a shock, especially if the school is science-and-engineering. If someone goes to MIT, RPI, CalTech, Cornell, or any of several dozen other schools, suddenly he’s confronted with an entire school full of 1 percentiles, each and every one of them with his own history of being the smartest guy in the room.
Some guys just go into shock, like the turkeys dropped from a plane; they just fold their wings and drop like stones, to flunk out of school in the first year or two. Others intensify their competition, sometimes sliding into stereotypes like cutting relevant articles out of library journals so their classmates can’t get them, or pestering their professors to squeeze out every last little decimal of their GPA.

I was lucky in a lot of ways. I was already a weird guy from a strange part of the country (there were exactly two of us from Tennessee in my class at RPI). Moreover, my skill set was markedly different from other RPI students. My math skills were about average (for a ‘Tute student), but my verbal skills were way above the norm, and I had some other things going, like my 3-D visualization is off the charts (if you ever need your trunk packed, I’m the guy to ask for help).

So I branched out. There were a ton of guys studying Math Analysis until 2 A.M., I went for operations research and statistics instead. I became a “publications nurd,” and wound up editing three student magazines during my undergraduate years. And so forth.
I also ditched the lingering traces of my southern accent, because people assume that someone who talks like that is stupid. I might have decided that I didn’t want to win the SGITR competition, but I didn’t want to lose it, either.

Still, I thought about what that competition entailed, and indeed, what all social competitions entailed. I mean, if you’ve got a hundred people and only one winner, what does that make the other 99? Losers? Those odds suck, even for the winner.

So the first thing to do was to put the whole thing in perspective. It’s easy to come up with a lot of things that are more important, at least in terms of the social competition, than being smart. Looks for example, or money. Sure, people will try to claim that smart people make money, but all you have to do is to look at the fate of all those mathematicians to see how silly that is.
But I was more interested in my own valuations, so I deliberately made a list of mental attributes that I thought were more important than raw intellect.

Honesty topped the list. Part of the reason for that is the recognition of how hard real honesty is, even to define. It’s not just a lack of dishonesty, or the inability to lie well (which I have pretty well down pat, but so what?). Real honesty takes considerable courage, because it first has to be turned on itself, stripping away rationalizations, lazy assumptions, comforting suppositions, and cherished theories. Cheap candor is easy; honesty is heavy lifting.

There comes empathy and compassion. I’d need an entire essay (probably more) to examine the nature of those currently popular political philosophies that try to rationalize what is basically a fear of compassion. Empathy and compassion, the ability to see and feel things from another’s point of view, are essential for any civilized view of the world, and it’s revealing that so much effort is being expended to avoid what is seen as “weakness” or “relativism.”

Curiosity isn’t the same as being smart, either, but without it, someone only learns if they think there is an advantage to it. That brings up the matter of depth and breadth of knowledge, another factor that isn’t the same as intellect, but is often mistaken for it.

Making my list at least gave me the intellectual reasons for abandoning the smartest guy in the room competition. I can’t say that I don’t still have the reflexes, of course. You don’t easily drop something that played a big part in your formative years. But I do notice when there is a smartest guy competition going on, and I sometimes manage to bow out honorably. It’s most difficult when someone is trying for an argument, of course.

I once spent an extended period of time consciously attempting to avoid arguments. Toward the end of the experiment, I remarked to a friend of mine, “You know, everyone calls me argumentative, but as nearly as I can tell, it’s everyone else who is trying to contradict every thing I say.”

She said, “Hey, I don’t try to contradict with everything you say.”

Then she cracked up, realizing what she had said. “Okay, proposition granted,” she said.

I am pretty lucky to have friends like that.