littlesarbonn
Posts: 1710
Joined: 12/3/2005
From: Stockton, California
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SlaveBlutarsky
It's funny, I was on a date a couple weeks ago with someone getting her PhD in some literary discipline and she said something like 'How can someone be so smart having never read a good book?'
I laughed and couldn't give her an answer. She asked me if I'd read like 50 different books, including a bunch of the classics and I had read like three. I read a lot, but fiction/literature isn't something I've ever had a huge interest in. I've got some time off in May and plan on reading about the middle ages and Turkey. That seems more interesting to me than shakepeare.
Sometimes, academics can get all stuck up on themselves. Not all, but some of them can. An example was very recently when I was presenting a paper for a synthesis, additive paper I wrote that used several communication theories, political science concepts, game theory and computer iterative processing. I was at a peace and conflict symposium, and everyone else there had either a qualitative approach that used some historical foundation or a quantitative presentation that involved crunching numbers on either surveys or logistical information of numerous international conflicts. When I presented something that wasn't just an explanation about what we already know or how to redefine what we already experience, everyone perked up because I was trying to show how to create a new theory of exploration in peace using concepts that build from ones we already know, a theoretical exploration of future behaviors. What was interesting was that both groups fell back into their own camps and offered almost no evaluative information but complained, based on only what kind of science they were used to, convinced that if science wasn't done that way, then it wasn't useful. It was the representatives from the State Department who became my biggest fans to the point where I couldn't get rid of them, but they were only there observing and weren't part of the presentation group, indicating that they were probably of the few that were actually interested in learning something new.
The point is, people like to be seen as smart, but they don't want to be shown to be lacking in anything. Instead, they'll deconstruct everything around them until they really have nothing to say. Not everyone is like that, but way too many are.
Your example resonated in me because for many years I found myself thinking that I wasn't really educated because I didn't feel myself to be well read. I was, but didn't think I was. So, I went on a personal venture to read everything that could help me in this lack of knowledge. What I discovered was that it was a great experience to learn new things, but along the way I kept running into people who really liked to hear themselves talk. In grad school for my first higher degree, I came across all sorts of people who were able to say really intelligent things that didn't mean anything. They'd use the word "normative" and I was floored because I rarely used the word. Then I started to discover these were cover words to mask the fact that they didn't really have anything new to add to the conversation. The second run through grad school, I was cognizant of this, and I made a point to be a real ***hole whenever I came across these pseudo-intellectuals. My recent run through grad school was a completely different experience because I had a different experience that helped me put it all into perspective. I'll get back to that last grad school experience in a second....
This other experience was my relationship with the first woman who ever owned me. She was a college educated woman who graduated from one of the University of Californias in a social science. I'll come straight out and say it. She was probably the most brilliant individual I've ever met. Hands down. I could talk about penguins as a joke, and she'd give me a verbal dissertation on the entire life process of the species. I'd mention an obscure historical event, and she would add interesting quips about some of the main characters in that story. There wasn't a thing she didn't know about, including me. And she never did it in a way to say, "Hey, look how smart I am." She did it in a way that made me feel like she really wanted to share information with me, to give me something to use and enjoy.
A few years later, I went back to school and took a different direction (instead of physics and biology) and decided to do the social science route. When I hit graduate school, I found myself much more interested in sharing what I knew, but for the purpose of sharing information, not to show what I knew. And I found people wanted to know this information. People would come to me and ask me about certain things, figuring I just probably knew it. And I usually did. If I didn't, I told them, and either led them to the right information or researched it further so I wouldn't lack it again. I found myself able to steer other graduate students to better studying, and I'm pretty proud of that. But I got a lot of that from that woman who once owned me. If she gave me anything, she gave me the desire to make sure knowledge is shared, not hoarded and not exploited.
That's what I think a lot of people are lacking these days. They see knowledge as something to be used, rather than something to be shared.
I apologize for this really long data dump of information. It wasn't really supposed to be this long. I'll go back to my crayons now.
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<---- FYI, this picture looks JUST like me
http://www.littlesarbonn.com/Stickman/Stickman.htm
The Adventures of Stickman and the Unemployed Lego Spaceman
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