[Closed] Intelligent people doing unintelligent things

Well, I read this for a start...

Well, I read this for a start...

[img] [/img]

My boss.
Talks like a right **** at times.

I get really confused by 24 hour clock times.

I've looked at a meeting start time of, say, 15-30 and thought "who the hell has a meeting at half past 5?" 😯

I'm 46

I'm going to stick up for your second mate. Self checkout takes twice as long. They trick you with a short queue but it's just not worth it. Plus you can't use your own bag without triggering some kind of alarm. Also notifications is a mine field. Yes it's easy to turn them off but sometimes you still want an indication that something has happened just without it playing a tune and different apps do thus differently.

Where I "work"' we have the soldering iron test for graduate engineers. We take them out onsite, get setup and plug in soldering iron and then get them to pass you the now hot soldering get iron. If they scream and drop it after picking up the hot end the're destined for project management, if the pick it up by the handle (a pass) then they will end up in maintenance/operations.

If they pass, next thing we do to them is see how long they take to realise the reason the solder isn't melting is because some barstards wrapped binding wire onto the solder reel 😀

Notifications on the phone I can kind of understand. So many apps talk to each other or link in via Facebook and I'd bet that most people barely use any more than about 10% of their phone capability anyway.

I saw similar things with some of my chemical engineer work colleagues - these are people who could write out complex chemical equations, work out the process of electron transfer etc but then go and use a calculator to work out their Excel spreadsheet then type the number in manually.

a friend at cambridge was reading physics.

He was caught trying to fry an egg by hovering the pan above the stove top.
It was an electric ring, and he was determined not to electrocute himself. He also refused to turn his fridge on for a term as he was worried it might blow up.

I think he now designs CPU chips.

Plenty of folk who seem distinctly odd in normal day-to-day life are the most gifted when it comes to dealing with fantastically abstract or complex problems at work.

He was caught trying to fry and egg by hovering the pan above the stove top. It was an electric ring, and he was determined not to electrocute himself

😀

Where I "work"' we have the soldering iron test for graduate engineers. We take them out onsite, get setup and plug in soldering iron and then get them to pass you the now hot soldering get iron. If they scream and drop it after picking up the hot end the're destined for project management, if the pick it up by the handle (a pass) then they will end up in maintenance/operations.

Plus you can't use your own bag without triggering

Ermmmm!

I used to work with a chap who I'd say was comfortably in the genius IQ range. Worked for Disney as an animator. Programmer. Physicist.

He maintained a fifteen year online relationship with a 25 stone single mother of five, who lived in a trailer in New Mexico.

such as working out how to turn notifications off on his phone

I consider myself fairly tech savvy, but after spending nearly 2hrs trying to work out 'Do Not Disturb' on my wife's android phone I gave up and just told her to switch it off when she needed it to be silent! No combination of days/times/notifications seemed to work.

I was seeing someone years ago who was studying at Oxford for her doctorate. I used to visit her and meet up with her friends. they were amongst the brightest and best in their chosen fields.
yet they were all completely mental when it came to everyday things. I would not trust a single one of them to help me across the road!
I think the years of single minded focus in one area meant that they'd forgotten all the simple things most people take for granted...such as not trying to make cheese on toast...in a microwave

Ermmmm!

My brother with a degree from a very fine establishment, PHd in something with lasers and an MBA declared last Christmas that he avoided tesco as they just were out to trick you with their pricing - that they may be but he should be able to work out if the 2 for 1 is good value or not...

Oh and thinks it's incredibly rude to be on your phone on a train so turns it off, really useful when your trying to work out when to pick him up

Education is not necessarily a sign of intelligence.

A maths machine I know has no common sense. famous lines include "Do they kick in kickboxing?"

Forum moderators who can't use the quote feature or cut'n'paste

😳

too much education definitely steals from the commonsense area of the brain.
my flatmate managed to put a steaming hot cast iron Le Creuset pan on the carpet. not sure if it was to save taking it back to the kitchen until later, or if he found out halfway between kitchen and dining table that it was hot.
same flatmate couldn't suss out how to use my vacuum cleaner, so as his nan was coming to visit, panicked and went and bought a new one. tbf it did have both an on-off switch, and a thumb operated speed control.
2 Masters degrees in engineering, and makes sure you know that.

Pal of mine who was doing a maths PhD at Cambridge asked me what that big yellow thing was in my kitchen. It was a melon. Found the same bloke in a supermarket with an arm full of boxes of dates, weighing them on the vegetable scales. When I asked what he was up to, he was just checking they were all indeed 500g. The test paper he wrote to get in was so good they gave him the best rooms in the college above the Pepys library, therefore no water allowed in the rooms. Probably no bad thing.

I'm with engineer No. 2 with self-checkouts - if the price remains the same why not take the option that allows for a person to have a job ?

And self-service checkouts always seem hateful things to deal with.

Oh and thinks it's incredibly rude to be on your phone on a train so turns it off

He's right! He could text though.

A scientist/engineer friend (designed and built engines for German car company) was also a theist. One day we were having a chat and it went a bit philosophical. Knowing me to be agnostic/atheist he tried a kind of (in his mind) 'gotcha' question on me. (Paraphrased) -

'He: So let me ask you this - if you left a pile of metals on the moon for billions of years, and somehow you could return to view it - would that metal become a watch?'

Me: 'No, unless...' (I'm thinking 'unless some evolving lifeform, such as we, actually take that inert/lifeless metal and then someway down the line actually build a watch from it, and leave it in that same spot on the moon' - but I feel a bit embarrassed for my good friend so keep quiet)

He: 'No. It can't. So how come you believe in evolution?'

[img] [/img]

I'm with engineer No. 2 with self-checkouts - if the price remains the same why not take the option that allows for a person to have a job ?

And self-service checkouts always seem hateful things to deal with.

Agree with this. They're wrapping the customer doing their job under the pretense of convenience.

Self scanning is a good compromise.

I shared a flat with a guy at uni who apparently was a bit of a maths genius by all accounts and generally came across as a highly intelligent guy. However he lacked any form of practical common sense which would manifest itself in any number ways on a pretty regular basis. A prime example being when I found him in the kitchen trying to fill up the salt cellar through the tiny little hole at the top. I pointed out to him that there was a big whole at the bottom with a rubber bung in it which could be removed to easily fill it up. He rather testily explained to me, like I was a small child, that he'd already tried the approach of filling it via the bottom but the salt just came out of the small hole at the top when filling! At no point did it occur to him to simply put his finger over the hole

'No. It can't. So how come you believe in evolution?'

I hope you answered, that it was a poor example as he could not prove that the metal bar was already the optimal lifeform to survive and the watches died out as they didn't have anyone around to pick them up and see what the time was.

We all do odd stuff, I would hazard a guess that there are those that try new things with success, those that try new things and fail and those that just sit there doing the same things day in day out.

Not necessarily a sign of intelligence but those that try push the boundaries for everyone..... or they get nominated for a Darwin award.

could not prove that the metal bar was already the optimal lifeform to survive and the watches died out as they didn't have anyone around to pick them up and see what the time was.

When I worked in a bike shop folk like these were called "clever thick c**ts"

We once had an engineering graduate fiddling with a large nut (fastener) in the workshop whilst talking to one of the fitters. A short while later he proclaimed the nut was stuck on his finger. Cue much hilarity whilst about 60 engineers and workshop staff gathered round to watch it being hacksawed off 😀

My brother with a degree from a very fine establishment, PHd in something with lasers and an MBA declared last Christmas that he avoided tesco as they just were out to trick you with their pricing - that they may be but he should be able to work out if the 2 for 1 is good value or not...

He's right. Supermarket pricing is all psychology and nothing to do with the cost of the thing.
All the different deals are designed to confuse, so it becomes more effort than most people are willing to expend to work out what's best value , so they just use shortcuts like 'the brand I like' to make their decision. which rarely means the cheapest. But low-price items still exist so the ad campaign can boast about 'everyday low prices compared to our competitors'

2 for 1 isn't value - it's designed to get you to buy 2 of something when you only needed 1. You then habituate using twice as much, they remove the deal 2 weeks later and you continue with your new-found habit.... hello to higher sales!

Trust me, I work in marketing 🙂

I think Dunning Kruger may apply here 😉

such as not trying to make cheese on toast...in a microwave

This is fine, actually. toast in the toaster, ham on a plate with cheese on top in the microvave. Both done 1 minuteish later. Butter toast, herby tomato/ pesto/whatever, Fish slice or quick fingers gets the ham and cheese on top.

In your face 90 seconds after starting. Loads quicker than waiting for the grill, and 97.5% as tasty.

Back on topic: friend of mine is a currency trader. Very, very clever, as well as the actual trading, he's designing the algorithms for the autotrading stuff.

Turned up to a surf trip in Indonesia with his standard UK surfing clobber: 4/3 fullsuit, jeans and jumpers. Said he hadn't really thought about the weather!

I grew up with one of these.

My dad was an engineer/draughtsman before he retired. If you've ever flown in a British jet designed in the 50s/60s, or worked on a British oil rig in the North Sea then the chances are that my dad designed a bit of it.

I once found him screaming blue murder at a piece of furniture he'd built. Turns out that he's tried taking a plane to chipboard.

An old girlfriend of mine was a bit clever - all A's at A-level ( back in the day when that was hard ) and she did extra special papers. She was off on her way to Cambridge to study maths and physics, sponsored by a car manufacturer.

I gave her an old bike and she "helped" me get it back into a usable state. We were working on the bike one day and she was annoying me, so I told her that if she oiled the rims of the wheels then it would go down hill much faster ( remember rim brakes ? ).

she was annoying me, so I told her that if she oiled the rims of the wheels then it would go down hill much faster

Do you often show psychopathic traits?

You really need help.

I saw similar things with some of my chemical engineer work colleagues - these are people who could write out complex chemical equations, work out the process of electron transfer etc but then go and use a calculator to work out their Excel spreadsheet then type the number in manually.

I feel I should stand up for chemical engineers here.

Unless you've got the patience of a saint, anything beyond +-/* is far quicker by hand than it is in excel unless you happen to be doing the same thing repeatedly (and by and large everything is more complicated).

Like people who write up the notes of meeting for a phone conversation in MS Word and leave them on your desk "Dave called about the Project Execution Plans", when a post-it on the monitor would have done.

Tools for the job.

For example:
This calculates the wet bulb temperature based on relative humidity, quicker by calculator and pen and paper than trying to type that, unless you have a data-set consisting of hourly readings for 15 years.
=(F4*ATAN(0.151977*(SQRT(G4+8.313659))))+(ATAN(F4+G4))-(ATAN(G4-1.676331))+((0.00391838*POWER(G4,3/2))*ATAN(0.023101*G4))-4.686035

Or this (absolute humidity from the same source data) is probably borderline.
=((0.000002*$F4^4)+(0.0002*$F4^3)+(0.0095*$F4^2)+( 0.337*$F4)+4.9034)*G$4/100

I feel I should stand up for chemical engineers here.

Be fair though, we are a bunch of geeks.

I still use a pencil and paper to write up calculations. Many of my younger colleagues are horrified at the thought.

Back on topic: friend of mine is a currency trader. Very, very clever, as well as the actual trading, he's designing the algorithms for the autotrading stuff.

Turned up to a surf trip in Indonesia with his standard UK surfing clobber: 4/3 fullsuit, jeans and jumpers. Said he hadn't really thought about the weather!

Ah, that reminds me, went to the Nurburgring a few years back, a bloke came along who was a post grad researcher at Oxford, I think a Microbiologist. 5 day trip only one pair of jeans and a t-shirt. it was very warm and he would sleep in a different t-shirt and shorts!

mind you, I'm no intellectual slouch, obviously. But I still managed to run over and nearly sever my own thumb with my skis the other day. And also properly chin myself by trying to remove a 6ft length of 3"x2" that was nailed to some plyboard by standing on the plyboard and lifting the 3x2 off in the direction of my glass jaw. When it went, it went.

You really need help.

Funny, that's *exactly* what my shrink says.

I'm with engineer No. 2 with self-checkouts - if the price remains the same why...

wet bulb

*pffft*

So true. My regular cycling buddy has a top Oxford degree and a string of qualifications and is a consultant physician, which involves lots of biochemistry, yet he is completely impractical; he can't even adjust the headset on his bike or remove his back door to plane it.

I saw similar things with some of my chemical engineer work colleagues - these are people who could write out complex chemical equations, work out the process of electron transfer etc but then go and [b]use a calculator to work out their Excel spreadsheet then type the number in manually[/b].

We do this - Easier to validate a calculator than it is to validate an Excel spreadsheet.

Now, if only they would make a proper scientific calculator that doesn't have 2 hidden digits we'd be laughing.

While I could call out Mrs North (PhD) for her amazing dizziness (she's blonde, which explains everything), by and large my experience of people with the least common sense also tend to be those with the least intelligence.

Viz the boy at school who looked at the lorry driving down the road, waited patiently on the pavement and then decided - at the last moment - to cross. Wham!

(He survived it and returned to school after recovery. Was still dim when he came back.)

I think a Microbiologist. 5 day trip only one pair of jeans and a t-shirt. it was very warm and he would sleep in a different t-shirt and shorts

Nedrapier: The thing was they didn't bother with the toasting of the bread first, they just put slices of bread topped with cheese in the microwave and expected it to come out toasty...it didn't 😆

People make all sorts of assumptions about things they don't specialise in, and those that specialise will often have a more noticeable discrepancy between their area and more "common sense" things.

Doesn't mean I didn't laugh a bit when my (then teenage I think) loadsa A levels, 1st class computer science degree, older brother believed my (mean) younger brother that the correct technique to launch a BMX bike off the skate ramp little bro had built was to lean really far forwards as he took off. Concrete drive too.

brooess - Member

Trust me, I work in marketing

I'll admit to a recent moment of stupidity.

Needed to drill a hole in the bike store. Step ladders were upstairs, toolbox looked the right height.

All good until rather than me drilling into the wall, physics moved the toolbox backward and I fell forwards. Dropped the drill, hurt my wrist and nearly pulled the water heater off the wall falling into it.

Quickly checked there was no blood and made the area look like I could say, "nothing happened", when the other half asked what the almighty noise was.

Pretty sure we all do it.

One of the professors here (science department, Russell Group university) once had his shoelaces tied by a technician as he'd 'forgotten how to do it'. I also watched the same professor spend ten minutes getting out of a parking space that I can comfortably get a 20ft van in and out of in one pass.
An ex-officemate (PhD in microbiology) used to have two Yakults a day as 'I know they don't do anything but if I have two then they might'.

It's fair to say that by far, the smartest people I've ever met have been through work. Some of them have exceptional amounts of real-life abilities too, but some of them I really worry about!

The drilling story reminds me of my dad (who has held down a multitude of professional positions - Engineer, teacher, social worker).

A month or two back he got bored waiting for the guy my parents had paid to fit the tap to come around (booked for the next day of something, husband of a friend or something). He decided to fit it. First step? Turn off water? Oh no. For some reason he got started on the job, then went to turn off the water once it had started pissing out everywhere. Then discovered the stopcock was broken and had to get said husband of friend out rather urgently. It's not that he doesn't realise these things need to be done, he just sort of feels like he can't be arsed so puts them off until later in the job. This is but one example.

a lad i knew at college was studying mech eng.
he knew everything mechanically to do with cars especially how a front wheel drive system worked...how the brakes,steering and suspension all worked together. he could even describe how all the various components went together and in what order.

he didnt know how to remove a wheel though

One of them burns incense in the bathroom now and again and the way he does it is to light it with one of those massive boxes of matches, and then upturn the box on end and poke the incense stuck into the 'drawer'part to hold it.
Now, to me, that goes against all the general impression of intelligence that this gentleman otherwise displays, on quite a fundamental level...

I used one of those self checkouts. I couldn't find a STFU button. So just the once: you'll understand.

Senior Engineer colleague i was sharing a house with

First day in eg west africa find the house oven broken and he wants to have cheese on toast.

- toasts the bread. Puts the cheese on the toast - decides to lay the toaster on its side and puts the toast and cheese back in.

Thanks to afro engineering when the cheese melts the toaster trips out the whole compounds generators.....

Toaster never worked agai

I'm an IT/systems geek. I helped my mum the other day by fitting a few new slabs to her patio that had cracked. I had to cut one to fit around the drainpipe. I flipped the slab, placed it in the desired place and drew the markings on, so that you couldn't see it from the top. Made my cut and flipped it over... 😳

The OP's examples aren't as stupid as you may first think.

If the matches are safety ones then it's unlikely the incense ashes will set the box alight, they need to be struck against the other corresponding chemical on the side to light so there is some logic in it.

EDIT: poly beat me as I was typing, slowly 😳

Phone notifications can be a minefield so I can see how it frustrates people. Really annoys me when I get a new phone until I get it sorted a week or two later.
As for the till tracking, what do you think ClubCard, Nectar, Match&More etc are designed to do? If they know what you buy regularly then they know what to stock and what doesn;t need o be on offer to sell.

I do agree that people tend to have either common sense or high intelligence, rarely lots of both.

To me, intelligence is something which is an indicator of an individual's ability to apply thought processes to understand and problem solve within a broad spectrum of topics and activities. The assumption that engineers must be intelligent because they are able to apply knowledge to a task, is perhaps misguided. They may be able to do that simply because they've been trained to do so, within a relatively narrow framework. If they cannot apply their innate 'intelligence' to other tasks and concepts, including those which fall well outside of their normal sphere of thought and activity, then they possibly aren't particularly 'intelligent'. I've met plenty of people who excel in their particular field, but who aren't what I'd call particularly intelligent, because they lack the ability to act beyond their narrow remit of skill.

Does anybody remember the TV show Married With Children ? They tried to get Kelly through her exams, but in order to get the info in her head they had to sacrifice some other non-critical pieces of information. Like recognising the sound of the doorbell.

That is how some smart people operate !

[i]I've met plenty of people who excel in their particular field, but who aren't what I'd call particularly intelligent, because they lack the ability to act beyond their narrow remit of skill. [/i]

+1

And also properly chin myself by trying to remove a 6ft length of 3"x2" that was nailed to some plyboard by standing on the plyboard and lifting the 3x2 off in the direction of my glass jaw. When it went, it went.

Can we explore this phenomenon further. Specifically - whenever i'm doing something like this I always have a moment of clarity in which i realise how this is going to pan out, but that moment either comes just too late to prevent it happening or even worse - you just carry on and let it happen anyway.

Most recently trimming a small piece of plastic off a pipe to make it a good fit to the next piece, using a stanley. And spotting that having run the knife around the pipe, if it went through now then I was cutting towards and not away from my fingers. And then thinking 'well, i've got this far and it hasn't gone wrong......'

My dad is a dentist, spends all day poking, drilling and cutting in people's mouths with never a slip or an incident. Give him any sharp implement at home and watch him cut himself with it.

Oh how I used to laugh, until I realised it's genetic and I've inherited the same ability.

I know of a chap with a doctorate in structural engineering who failed miserably to put shelves up (L shaped brackets, not enough screws so put them in the bottom holes).

Oh and I don't use automatic checkouts or speak to Siri.

Last weekend, I spent more time than I care to admit waving my wet hands under a paper towel dispenser to try and get it to 'start'.

a lad i knew at college was studying mech eng.
he knew everything mechanically to do with cars especially how a front wheel drive system worked...how the brakes,steering and suspension all worked together. he could even describe how all the various components went together and in what order.

he didnt know how to remove a wheel though

Not that unusual. I can design you a oil processing platform and pretty well describe how it all works and operates. There's no way I'm stripping down a pump though. Wouldn't know where to start (well I'd start by looking for the manual with the instructions but you know what I mean). Besides I might get dirty.

Nedrapier: The thing was they didn't bother with the toasting of the bread first, they just put slices of bread topped with cheese in the microwave and expected it to come out toasty...it didn't

Aha. Yes.

Common sense. Only common past a certain point.

decides to lay the toaster on its side and puts the toast and cheese back in.

I still use a pencil and paper to write up calculations. Many of my younger colleagues are horrified at the thought.

My boss still does it too, it's great when it comes to checking his working because it's all there, long hand. But an utter pain in the ass when it comes to revising it.

So often I'll end up re-issuing his calcs either in excel, or photocopying and adding a sheet stating "inputs changed by a factor of 1.365, therefore output scaled by (1.365+1.365^2) as per equation (4)" if I'm out of time.

It's the ones still using slide rules that scare me, at least you can photocopy a nomograph!

Education is not necessarily a sign of intelligence.

A maths machine I know has no common sense. famous lines include "Do they kick in kickboxing?"

Reminds me of a lad at work (recently chartered surveyor).

Every year we go on a walking (drinking weekend). A few years ago on a very warm trip to Wales he randomly asks if sheep drink! About a minute later there is a water trough with sheep drinking from it. He's never lived it down and never will!

He's good at his job and can quote contract clauses etc but has zero common sense.

Bloke at school was pretty bright (I think his dad worked at CERN or something), but ruined it one day by asking the physics teacher if the reason that birds don't get electrocuted when sitting on powerlines is because they stand on one leg (i.e. that the power doesn't flow through them).

It took him a while to live that down.

Round these parts though (and I mean at work in the Cambridge Science Park) there are a lot of people that fit the 'special' category. Ridiculously clever, but don't have the common sense to do even simple, normal tasks.

I'm with engineer No. 2 with self-checkouts - if the price remains the same why not take the option that allows for a person to have a job ?

This is exactly the reason why I use them

The OP's examples aren't as stupid as you may first think.
If the matches are safety ones then it's unlikely the incense ashes will set the box alight, they need to be struck against the other corresponding chemical on the side to light so there is some logic in it.

This might be true for striking but safety matches (and indeed cardboard) could be lit by an ember no? Plus probably a million places more appropriate spring to mind to wedge an unattended burning ember on top of than a box of matches. 🙂

I don't know for certain about people who are actually intelligent, but I reckon I've only achieved competence in anything at all through concentrating or specialising heavily, largely at the expense of developing the general capabilities expected of an adult human being.

I expect that many people who are very good at what they do have traded breadth of knowledge for depth of knowledge in one narrow area. If you spend much of your life deeply involved in a very complex subject then I expect that much of what falls outside of it may present more of a challenge than it does to others.

Nedrapier your banking friend is he also a keen roadie and married to a Chinese girl?

Working in the IPO or once known as the Patent Office you met an incredible sub species known as examiners, the smartest cleverest people utterly devoid of common sense and interpersonal skills. Imagine a whole building of these poindexters 😆

This story is old but a good one :

http://www.songofthepaddle.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?2879-Funny-expanding-foam-story

When I worked in a bike shop folk like these were called "clever thick c**ts"

I suspect they knew you as "minimum wage nobodies" 😉