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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2187443" data-attributes="member: 4937">No.  I'm a Democratic Populist.  I believe that the majority tends to be intellectually superior, or at least I don't believe that the aristocracy shows any better judgement on the whole that the masses do.  Distributed problem solving provides far better answers than centralized intelligence.  Education is not always of any particular help, and a great ammount of education can be a hinderance to wisdom if only because it tends to make one forget what Socrates said: that true wisdom consists of knowing that you are not wise.In fact, I tend to have a snicker at the ivory tower academics and self-styled philosopher kings, because I'm nearly as smart as they come and I have seen the heights.  And you know, from the heights the average person doesn't look so bad.  If anything, intelligence is a special brand of stupidity and foolishness which can be focused to be merely narrowly useful in a small subset of the problems presented by the universe.I wouldn't say this except that I abhor snobbishness, but I say this as a man who once took an IQ test and had the tester come back to me with his jaw hanging loosely and tell me that no one had ever scored that high in the history of the testing institution.  In high school, afterwards, teachers would stare through the doors at me during class to just find out who I was.  I say that not to brag, but only to provide evidence that I'm qualified to have an opinion on this.I don't think I'm that smart.  I've been given just enough smarts to recognize true intelligence when I see it, and I tell truth - it isn't anything like you think it is.  It more like what Einstein said: True intelligence is nothing more than persisting in solving a problem longer than anyone else.</blockquote>

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