07.+What+is+Intelligence+(February+2006) - Get a Free Blog

What is Intelligence? 50
When his wife arrived to collect him, and thus put a finish to our
discussion, she groaned visibly when she observed the subject matter of
our conversation, of which, she was clearly, thoroughly bored.
It was equally clear to me, that his work had become an obsession to him,
which was on the one hand quite likely not effective with regard to his
teenage charges, and on the other clearly damaging to his current
relationship.
I heard a year or two later that the couple had split up, and he was
personally in a bad way.
This guy was a Ph D in psychology.
Another acquaintance who was a trainee doctor undergoing a basic
psychiatric training period, reported when he asked a consultant
psychiatrist in the hospital to advise on a patient who was worrying him,
“please leave me alone, I have problems of my own.”
This is not the exception, this is closer to the general case.
Numerous doctors and psychiatrists have addictions of various kinds,
most visibly alcohol and various drugs, despite their psychology Ph D’s
or whatever, and there is no evidence to suggest that their personal
relationships are any more successful than anybody else’s.
In fact, the more likely reality is that the ordinary population who live in
a simpler, less intellectual way are generally speaking happier and more
successful as human beings.
And one of the major reasons for this assertion is that the current
intellectual training and education that the average “educated intellectual”
is getting, is actually contrary to the operation of this intuition, this spirit
of genius, or in its lesser manifestation of commonsense.
Why?
Because as we have said, excepting the “hard sciences” (meaning purely
rational ones, whose finding are proven as fact) academia is largely an
escape into abstraction.
Let us give an example.