I've found that your perception of how smart other people are goes up with the quality of the education you receive.
Good schools have a filter to keep out the worst of the riff-raff; and once you are out of school, most of us spend most of our time after school with our peers. Many of my peers went to very good schools, and nearly all of those people have a much higher opinion of humanity in general than i do, simply because they have never been exposed to a group of average people. See, I went to one of the worst high schools in the state, then I skipped college to get a .com job, so my last interaction with the proletariat was unfiltered.
The upside of a top tier education is in realizing that you can always improve your work in some manner. The pitfall is when that sentiment morphs into your work being inadequate.
A year later and I'm still wrestling with accepting the things I produce.
you realize this the first time you work somewhere that has standards high enough that you are the least effective person on the team.
But yeah, everyone /needs/ that experience of being in a place where they are the least competent person on the team. I have met people who have not had that experience, and they are nearly impossible to work with. Just saying, though, school isn't the only place to get that experience.
Watching people who can barely afford to eat play the lottery because they think they might actually win.
Watching people who shouldn't be buying anything on credit judging the qualify of a loan by the monthly payment.
Watching people base their entire lives around a book written by a bunch of ignorant (by modern standards) pre-industrial men, and praying to the sky weekly to make their lives better.
Smarter is the wrong word, more knowledgeable would be more appropriate. Pre-industrial was just a way of calling them ignorant by our standards. I wasn't actually referring to industry so much as their lack of modern science. I really should have said bronze age or iron age men.
> And why judge people by "modern standards?" Doesn't that just beg the question?
Because they're modern people. They have access to vastly more information about the world than someone 2000 years ago did and to ignore all that is stupid. To base your life around the writing of bronze age hippies who probably didn't realize they were tripping on ergot and not actually talking to God is sad.
Again, having loads of information doesn't necessarily imply it is relevant. We know loads more about chess now, does that make people smarter about life in general?
I expect the average person to be less intelligent than many of my better-educated peers expect. Heh. I know one guy who is much better educated, and somewhat more intelligent than I am who thought I was average. At the time, we had the same job description (he was a bit more senior to me, and quite a bit more competent, but we did basically the same work.) - the point was, in his world, someone in the 98th percentile seemed, to him, average.
Good schools have a filter to keep out the worst of the riff-raff; and once you are out of school, most of us spend most of our time after school with our peers. Many of my peers went to very good schools, and nearly all of those people have a much higher opinion of humanity in general than i do, simply because they have never been exposed to a group of average people. See, I went to one of the worst high schools in the state, then I skipped college to get a .com job, so my last interaction with the proletariat was unfiltered.