Each of us, I believe, have experiences where we recognize that there are other people that are just plain better than us with respect to something.
From my personal experience, I can name at least a couple of instances where this realization really hit home. Here I'll share two, but I have had many more of these experiences as I've had the mixed blessing/curse of trying my hand at all sorts of things over the years, from drawing comics to speaking Spanish. (Protip: don't spread yourself too thin; dedicate yourself to doing not more than a few of things really well, at least while you don't have buckets of $$$ you have earned. Okay, I digress; back to the narrative!).
In high school, I joined the swim team. Having come from the casual corridors of PE (and dropping out from organized basketball), I didn't have much of a sense of what physical challenges met. I did my casual push-ups and crunches here and there. But I never really submitted myself to the "market" of organized athletic competition. So I dove right into swimming. Despite a lot of hard work, I never managed to scrape far past the slow lane. Regardless of whether technique, inadequate conditioning, or something else had a big part to play in this failure to climb to anywhere near the top, I found myself with unambiguous evidence that I was below average with respect to physical fitness, as measured by swimming.
Okay, maybe competitive sports weren't for me. What else do the cool kids do? Why, listen to cool music of course! Can I plz b cool?
I have come to realize that as far as musical proclivity goes, I am also below average. This, I suspected when I didn't really make much progress at all in piano lessons in my childhood. But this really became clear to me when I spent more time with a Christian group during my college years. Whereas friends I knew would effortlessly pick up lyrics, guitar strum patterns, how to harmonize in singing, and the like, I lagged behind miserably. As of today, I am at a stage where I can hold a melody, understand many musical ideas analytically in terms of music theory, and muster some pleasant sounds on a guitar, but I realize that very little of this came naturally. I realize I rarely, if ever, get so-called "ear worms" (songs getting "stuck in your head") though I enjoy listening to music. I have good reason to believe that with respect to an inclination towards all that is musical I am below average.
Unequal outcomes
We can respond to realizations that there are people way better at stuff than us with jealousy, bitterness, and resentment. We can likewise respond by redoubling our efforts to compensate for our weaknesses. Hard work, in many cases, may make up for raw talent. But in one form or another, we must come to terms with the fact that other people are simply better than us on measures we may connect with our self worth.
For swimming, this was fairly easy to do for me. Having not really climbed the ladder of athletic success at all, it was easy to give up on the game of being a very good athlete. I just needed to redefine my goals in terms of something I could realistically achieve. As far as athletic ability goes, I want to maintain a level of fitness that is good for long run health and allows me to enjoy recreation (e.g. skiing, hiking, etc.) for as long as possible. This means avoiding risky behaviors that may lead to permanent injury and opting for sustainable practices. I don't play tennis. There is a long way for me to go in learning about what a good workout means, but I know for certain that I am not shooting to be an alpha athlete.
Music was something that was a bit harder to come to terms with sucking at. In particular, because music has such a huge social dimension to it, recognizing my inadequacy with musical things was not as easy as walking away from the swimming circuit. Nor did I want to. The vast majority of people who enjoy music, it seems to me, do such casually, hearing things they like simply getting into that music. Lyrics about getting into the groove and what-not tell us this much as well. So maybe I have been quite a try-hard in my response to not experiencing this same reflexive joy with music. I went serious sauce on what is spontaneous and fun thing for most people, developed an intellectual interest in music, and took to learning how to play a thing or two on guitar. While I believe that I can cultivate my musical abilities much more, I understand that this probably isn't a wise thing to do with my time now, because it is really fighting an uphill battle. I am naturally better at other things. So I severely limit how much time I devote to exploring music for the time being.
I consider the above two stories I sketched here "success stories" in realizing inferiority in particular domains as I have emerged without anything like butt-hurtness with realizing my personal shortcomings in these areas. Really, relinquishing the idea that I was somehow "equal" with everyone else at things like swimming and playing guitar, and that my shortcoming were because I simply wasn't trying hard enough, have been liberating. Likewise, recognizing that people that are really good at things put in enormous effort into those things has been a humbling, and empowering realization.
Focus and discipline, I understand, pay off. I've read my share of books about learning/mastery in pursuit of techniques for learning effectively (e.g. Peak: Secret of the New Science of Expertise (Ericsson & Pool, 2016), The Five Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger & Starbird, 2012), Outliers (Gladwell, 2008), etc.). However, above and beyond raw willpower and dedication is the elephant in the room...
The Bell Curve
It isn't just hard work that makes great swimmers and guitarists, it is also genetic endowment which is essentially unearned. Sometimes we suck at things, and it isn't because we didn't work hard enough or were not diligent enough, it is simply because we are inferior in those average. Half of the population is below average in everything (yah, yah, we're assuming an un-skewed, symmetrical distribution of skills for everything, I'm thinking about the statistics, don't worry 😛).
With regards to sports, people for the most part, have no problem recognizing these things. All other things being equal, taller people make better centers on the basketball court. Men, with greater upper body strength than women, can on average throw heavy things further. Lighter weight people make better jockeys than tall, muscular Dutch men. Fair enough.
The aforementioned discussion, however, becomes much more sensitive to people when we move away from how this writer sucks at singing and swimming, and how certain groups of people have undeniable advantages in sports, and turn to more general traits. Specifically, I mean general intelligence, which is typically measured with a well-known metric called IQ.
Who cares about how fast you swim, nobody is going to be trying to out swim sharks any time soon. So talking about genetics and sports is kosher.
But general intelligence? That is something that modern, complex societies still reward. Civilization has got us past "might makes right" in the simplistic sense that the stronger person can beat the weaker person over the head with a rock and take all their stuff. But civilization has not got us past the point where intelligence wins. I doubt most of us, in a sober analysis, would want this to be the case either.
There are many people smarter than me
It was in my undergraduate years that I first realized that there were lots and lots of people that are smarter than me. Call me a smug, smart-ass high school student in the past, but in my small pond, I was up there with respects to grades, test scores and the like. But then, at my University, I met people that likewise were at the tops of their schools with respect to those metrics. Then, I saw through some highly competitive classes, that I was not at the top anymore in terms of intelligence. I likewise saw that I wasn't at the top in terms of diligence either. Whereas I was generally considered a very hard working person in high school, I found both smarter and harder working people in college. The majority of these people were from particular demographic groups, which I will not name. Chances are though, that you have a relatively clear idea about what these demographic groups are 😉.
As individuals, and likewise as a society/nation/species, we need to deal with the fact that some people are simply put, smarter than other people in general intelligence. No more bullshit about how there are different sorts of intelligence and everything evens out in the end. Certain people are simply superior by metrics of general intelligence. This of course is compatible with the fact that people do differ in these "specific indulgences" as well. I'm just saying that the fact that certain people, on all conceivable metrics are smarter than other people, really shouldn't be that controversial. Some people truly have it all (c.f. Parable of the talents).
This is by no means an insult or a degradation of people of lower intelligence. Just as I maintain human dignity despite struggling to achieve basic musical competence and huffing and puffing my way across a swimming pool behind my peers, people of below average intelligence (i.e. half of the population) maintain dignity as human beings. We don't choose what IQ we're born with, likewise we don't choose which race we belong to, how tall we are, or the nation we're citizens of.
This is, however, a call to reckon with reality both as individuals and as members of various communities.
People that are smarter than me create many things of value
We do no service to either lower IQ or higher IQ people by pretending that there aren't differences in intelligence among people. And likewise, that differences between intelligence may exist between groups of people whether defined by nationality, ethnicity, musicianship, etc. (there are infinite ways we may categorize people). Why is it not productive to pretend differences in IQ don't exist among groups?
Simply put, there are tremendous costs to doing so. Here, I'll give some examples from higher education, the place I've been involved in for the past half a decade or so.
If we strongly urge less intelligent people to take more and more education in areas we realistically do not expect them to succeed in, we hurt those people essentially convincing them to take on heavy debt through student loans and such. Had these people instead chosen to pursue honorable work in non-degree requiring professions, they would likely emerge substantially more well off financially in addition to not suffering the humiliation and emotional damage that comes from trying to compete with their naturally endowed, bookish peers that far more easily win the "game of school".
Additionally there are more indirect social costs like people actually becoming racist, sexist, etc. by affirmative action policies that are put into place with the assumption that differences in success of various people groups are due solely to the unequal distribution of (material) resources. The socialist pipe dream is that a benevolent state can sensibly redistribute wealth through top-down planning and thereby alleviate or eliminate socioeconomic differences between people. I've talked to at least a handful of people belonging to Hispanic, black, and other traditionally marginalized-in-the-university groups about this, and for the most part, they have expressed negative attitudes towards the idea of promoting equality of outcome (i.e. equity).
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| Equality vs Equity |
Rather, these friends I've talked with would like to know that their success came not from a "free" boost, but from them pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and proving to the world that they can succeed. It feels good to succeed in spite of the odds. These friends have expressed to me discontent over the perception that their peers look at them, and think it is policies of equity that got them where they are rather than their own hard work. "You got into this school because you belong to GROUP".
Because of policies of affirmative action and the like, members of dominant groups (in the university) do become racist because there are racist policies in place that encourage them to be racist. If universities artificially admit more non-East Asians (there are other groups we can talk about, but I'll talk about the racial stock I belong to), East Asians will recognize that they are not being objectively assessed on things like test scores, grades, and the like and deem themselves, in terms of these metrics, to be superior to "subsidized" groups, who are given equity boosts. In a more objective, freer selection process, East Asians, I believe, wouldn't have these prejudices. They would look at the MINORITY X group across the table at dining commons and understand that this person got to the same university by the same standards they did. But now, because we have messed with equality of opportunity (i.e. 'equality' in the diagram above), East Asian students may look across the table and see political agendas, rather than individuals. Nobody is winning here.
And surely, we would prefer a society where people see each other as individuals and judge each other based on their moral character rather than seeing people solely as members of tribes with particular political agendas... right?
The way forward
As individuals, we must choose games we have a chance of winning at. Saying to everyone that they have a good shot at being a computer programmer or a movie director or a celebrity or any other high-skill endeavor is not helpful. Sure, we can encourage people to try and fail at lots of things and find their place on the hierarchy of abilities. But I don't think it is wise to encourage people to shoot far beyond what all empirical evidence suggests they can do. This can be incredibly destructive.
Recognizing who we are in terms of abilities and natural endowments, and what we are realistically capable of doing (which can include a good deal of optimism, understanding that humans can train themselves to really excel in areas they initially such at) is important because it ultimately means teaching people to deal with truth rather than convenient feel-good fantasies.
Take a look at the Equality vs Equity picture above again. In which picture does society (the totality of the people) reach higher? Quite literally, the equality picture shows this. Equality (of opportunity) is important for helping people that can really help us all reach high. Imagine that the cure for cancer is up there at the top of the image. Would we rather have the equity situation, or an equality situation where eventually a really tall person would come along and reach that cure for cancer?
This is to say, we need people like Elon Musk (prototypical example of a person who has a higher IQ than you and your friends) to build rockets, solar panels, and electric cars and deliver us a better future. We need really smart, capable people to control more resources than less smart, less capable people. Equality of opportunity will certainly produce inequality of outcome. But, how bad is this really? When more resources go to smart people, we may expect that societies as a whole really end up wealthier as a whole. The income disparity between the rich and the poor may increase. But, if this ultimately means an increase in the wealth for the lowest of us (e.g. by having access to the Internet, clean running water, readily available food, etc.) isn't this preferable?
Here, I am by no means offering a defense of corruption or abuse of power. Smart people are indeed capable of being at the same time evil and smart. The solution to preventing people from doing evil though, I think, is not through lies (pretending people are more equal in ability/intelligence/etc. than they really are) but rather through truth and sensible negotiation. How can we make a society that recognizes reality, including differences between people groups, and incentives the best behaviors us as humans can muster?
At a minimum, one basic display of respect of dignity we can give to each other is to say to one another that I believe you can handle truth. It doesn't take a genius to recognize many truths, and allowing people to see certain things clearly is, rather than being insulting, a reaffirmation of their humanity as a conscious being capable of rational thought. Deciding to speak honestly with one another and negotiate win-win arrangements in all sorts of interactions, I believe, is the way forward.
Labels: culture, learning, markets, philosophy, psychology
