Advice is context-relative

Profile 1: A person with a failed marriage, an unwanted child, and many regrets of time wasted and relationships lost.

Profile 2: A person in a successful relationship, in a career that gives them time and challenges, facing future obstacles, but loving their life at the moment.

Profile 3: A person in a happy relationship, with very-loved children, who has seen the worst of the worst, but has prevailed through tenacity and talent.

Question: Is it likely that when you ask them for advice in a certain situation, they will all give you identical advice?  It depends on the situation somewhat, but generally the answer will be ‘no.’

Prima Facie Analysis: In choosing who to ask for advice, you are essentially prejudicing the chances of your future actions.  A person who has lived through more shades of moral gray area will tend to be more permisive than one who has never found themselves in questionable situations.

Concern: Sometimes there are some people you just can’t ask for advice.  Sometimes you only have one or two people you can ask for advice.

Worry: Some people only surround themselves with happy people.  Some people only surround themselves with funny or smart people.  Some surround themselves with yes-men.

Secunda Facie Analysis: The type of person you are has a huge impact on who you feel comfortable with, which has a huge impact on who your friends and consiglieres are….  which could be absolutely terrible..

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Pregret

I thought I’d invented this word. Oh, well.

Have you ever been writing an answer on a test and you’re fairly certain it’s wrong, but you write it anyway because the alternative answer sounds even more wrong?

That happened to me yesterday.

But more importantly, I just realized that I’d unnecessarily recreated a concept.  Last week, when I wrote my Callooh! Callay post, and last year when I invented the concept of an anti-life, I thought I was being bright and making a useful concept.  I didn’t stop to wonder if anyone had thought about it before, I just went with it.

But someone had already created it.  Specifically, Otto Binder and artist George Papp in issue 68 of Superboy.  I’m talking, of course, of bizarro world.

Now, I hate superman for many reasons (some of which Steve will probably point out in the comments).  So I didn’t think about bizarro world when I recreated the concept.  But now that I realize it is the same thing as anti-world, I feel like a guy on Linux in a world of PC.

My only consolation is that bizarro world is the opposite of the DC universe, not our own universe. (Believe me, the metaphysics of this bother me.)  I’m also slightly consoled by the fact that I hate superman and don’t want to be referencing him– however slightly– in even my rarest of posts.

So yeah.  I feel a bit cheated and self-conscious, but silly for feeling that way because it’s a stupid comic. (Not that comics are stupid: just Superman and all associated ‘Super’ superheroes.)

And now I have to think of an awkward end to this post/segue to link to this somewhat related post.

Last Year: Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts (part 1 of 2)
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why i blog — Pixelated Mind edition

(gakked from Ashley)

I have thoughts.  I need a place to store them so that I don’t forget them.  You have eyes + time.  You want to read thoughts and be entertained and maybebe intrigued.  Me + U = Magicks.

That’s all there is to it.  When I don’t blog, I feel like I’m living in a permanent zombie state, where nothing I’m experiencing is really happening.  Yes, I know that sounds weird, but nothing feels as ephemeral (even if is still awesome) as just hanging out with my friends and doing my job.  It’s just the same thing ad infinitum.  With text, however… there’s a sense of permanence that doesn’t let things blend into each other.  At least in my own twisted mind.  A girl with a misspelled last name once said:

“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

—Virginia Woolf

And…  and that’s just it.  Plus: jokes.  Jokes just plain suck if nobody laughs.  I mean, just look at my birth!

Last Year: Zoom zoom whir whir
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Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts [part 1 of 2 of (part 2 of 2)]

80. My circle of friends hasn’t really changed since middle school. This alone makes me want to leave New Mexico.

This is Daniel’s long awaited response,

In a recent conversation, Pixel and I argued whether or not “streets-smarts” was anything beyond a made-up term that stupid people used to make fun of the smart. My friend doesn’t think that street-smarts exist, and originally I might have agreed, until my friend “the walking dictionary” decided to start researching the different types of “smarts.”

I’ll play devil’s advocate; this is my defense for the existence of street-smarts. The problem with street-smarts is that it remains nearly impossible to define with any clarity. Furthermore, the examples about the nature of street-smarts create a sliding slope of puzzling interpretations. The difficultly with language and terms is nothing new. The nature of words have always created serious problems for those who study their logical forms. Take the word “chair” for example. The word chair can be easily misunderstood with the simplest of alterations to its form. A chair is something a person can sit on, it often has four legs, and supports the human figure. Yet when does a chair become a seat, bench, stool, place, or settlement? If the legs were removed would it still be a chair? Does a chair need to be made from wood or metal? The truth is that words can become very complex things, but this is nothing we didn’t already know before.

There have been several objections to language and the troubles their terms create, yet language remains one of the most important developments ever made. My friend Pixel doesn’t believe street-smarts exist, I might have agreed before, but I don’t now. Neither does the chair. The importance of words should not be restricted to rigid definitions, because this would make discussions impossible. A chair is nothing more than a word. Like ’street-smarts,’ what matters is what the connection implies. When I tell my brother that my friend Carlos can’t do anything without the direction of a book, this criticism will never appear in the dictionary, but my implication suggest some element the two of us can relate. The term street-smarts only exists because it contains something people can use to relate the implications, these words offer the means to meaning, and are only instruments of our ability to share.

Thus, unless Pixel is willing to toss out the rest of the dictionary, street smarts must stay.

(Editor’s note: Part One can be found here.)

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Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts (part 1 of 2)

66. Even though I usually get in the 99th percentile in standardized tests (both academic and IQ), I don’t believe in standardized tests. At all. They don’t measure anything except for how well the participant can study for them. Believe me, I’ve boosted my scores by hundreds of points at a time without increasing my intelligence or scholarly aptitude in any way. This, of course, means that No Child Left Behind was based on a false premise. Sorry nation’s youth.

I have a secret. I don’t think street smarts exist. I think people came up with that concept to show that smart people can’t be smart about everything. I think they saw some sort of lack of ‘common sense’ among really smart people and came up with a way of describing this: the titular ’street smarts’

These come up fairly frequently when I tell people that I’m going to go for my Ph.D. Somehow, this triggers an association and, sure enough, they end up saying some bull like, “well, I think book smarts are okay, but street smarts are what is important.”

To wit: a few days ago, my friend Daniel and his girlfriend Ana started talking to me about street smarts. And, seeing as I was really interested in what the phrase even meant, I started arguing with them (type 2). These were their positions:

• Daniel seemed to think that street smarts were a way of analyzing things such that you would think of a quick or easy way of doing something that was unfamiliar. He seemed to believe it was something that could not be learned and had to be innate. He saw no contradiction in a person’s possessing both street smarts and book smarts.
• Ana believed that street smarts required a form of physical action and involved a sense of resourcefulness. She felt that people with ’street smarts’ would generally not be educated and gave the example of orphans or street children that grow up learning to hustle tourists. Though reluctant, eventually she admitted she saw no contradiction in a person’s possessing both street smarts and book smarts.

• Both gave the example of a person surviving out in the woods alone using only their wits. They also both gave the example of opening up the hood of a strange car and finding out what was wrong with it.

To me, the differences were irreconcilable. Daniel’s definition seemed to be what I would consider intelligence and Ana’s would be what I would consider learned resourcefulness. Both seemed to have something to do with common sense and no correlative association with book smarts, which we soon defined as general trivia or particular knowledge. This may have been a bit of confirmation bias, but I left unconvinced that the term ’street smarts’ had any value.

If by ’street smarts’ one just wishes to contrast ‘book smarts,’ why not just say that knowledge alone does not make someone intelligent? If ’street smarts’ means common sense, then why not just say that? Ditto for resourcefulness. There seems to be nothing left for ’street smarts’ to refer to that’s not better expressed with another word.

No, instead I think that street smarts are a subtle way to suggest that there is a high degree of correlation between being intellectual about abstract concepts and lacking wits to survive in the concrete world. Otherwise, why would there even need to be a term for it? And why is it always used in contrast to another made up term: book smarts. It’s not true that intellectualness and everyday wits are mutually exclusive, obviously. But as a direct result of this unspoken assumption, people use the term with abandon. As well they should: I’ve never heard anyone take offense.

Not that I’m saying that people that feel they lack ‘book smarts’ are stupid, far from it! I actually think that knowledge and intelligence have a very low degree of correlation. I don’t assume that somebody doesn’t know how to change their oil simply because they’re a professor, but neither would I assume that from a person that works at In-N-Out Burgers.

Stay tuned for Daniel’s response tomorrow.

p.s. Here’s an idea for a good recipe for a Spinach-Artichoke dip.

p.p.s. Today is the National Day of Reason, so take off your aluminum hats, topple a pyramid scheme, and thank a scientist for life-saving cancer fighting bacon candy.

p.p.p.s. How many common words can you name? I got 44.

(Editor’s note:  Part Two can be found here.)

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