Intelligence and loneliness

A milieu where most people are well educated and quickly gain experience socializing with people from vastly different backgrounds? What I notice more often, as a moderator, is simply deliberate immature behavior.

If you're referring to our own arguments, I specifically recall the last time we had an argument. Rather than attempting to answer my questions you just ran off complaining that I was one of the most horrible people you've ever met and wondering whether you ever wanted to post on this website again. Which one of us was "closed off?"

No one ever said that bridging differences is fast, easy and painless. Everything requires work and work is not always fun.

I remember our most recent exchange, which was not an argument because you never replied to my last post. I cited authoritative definitions of terms you were throwing around (such as "strong atheist" and "weak atheist"), contrasting them with your own non-standard usage. Language only exists by consensus. Using words in ways other than conventional is one of the fastest ways to be misunderstood. Perhaps you have another authority that disagrees with mine, but you did not present it. Therefore your oft-repeated assertion that you're not a strong atheist didn't seem to explain the attitude you ascribed to it. This is not a cultural misunderstanding but a linguistic one, and linguistic misunderstandings can be resolved without arranging to meet each other's families and participating in each other's cultural rituals.

 

The best description of that behavior I've ever heard was: "You think you've beaten the system. But all you're doing is hiding out at the very bottom of it."

I'm not quite sure how loneliness is categorized. I'm willing to accept the premise that there are many different kinds of loneliness. So an unintelligent person may indeed not go through "the same loneliness" as an intelligent person. But it's still loneliness and it still hurts.

An intelligent person may feel that he can't find any peers to socialize with because they're all dumber than him. An unintelligent person may feel that he can't find any peers to socialize with because they're all smarter than him.

I confess that I generally find it hard to be friends with unintelligent people. We tend to have different interests so it's hard to find something to talk about. Yet some of them are so generous, so compassionate, so forgiving, that I find them to be role models and I try to emulate their attitudes. And we all love music and dogs. It's usually the smart-asses who find some excuse to not like dogs.

 

You have to be able to relate to the dog as a companion. Verbal communication is a major component of companionship for most people, if not all--I think our species is just wired that way since speech is the key to all of our accomplishments for the last 50K years or so. (Anthropologists look at the things humans have done since then and say it couldn't possibly have happened without language.)

Dogs are extremely sensitive to our feelings through our pheromones and our body language, and most short-muzzled breeds have photoreceptors concentrated in the center of their retinas so they can read our facial expressions. They communicate back with body language, touch, licking and occasionally sound. But they can't understand more than a few words of our language (the world record is something like 200), and they can't talk back. Still, their unwavering loyalty provides a dependable constant in our life that can make bad times more bearable. And even though they can't talk to us, we can talk to them and they listen with great interest. I've often joked that the reason we have dogs is so we can talk to ourselves without looking weird.

Having a dog is also a bit like having a child: having someone to care for gives you a purpose and takes your mind off of your troubles. I don't mean to short-change people who bond with other species, notably cats, parrots and various primates, all of whom communicate in their own way with a significant bandwidth. But dogs were the first domesticated non-human animal so we've had longer to adapt to each other, and we have even interfered with their evolution to make the bond stronger. For example, their alpha instinct is much weaker than that of the wolf, so we don't have to argue over who's in charge. They're also much more gregarious than wolves and are happy to live in a gigantic multi-species pack that would drive a wolf bonkers.

There are different dimensions to intelligence. Join a poetry forum and you'll find people who can blow your ass away when it comes to ferreting out the hidden meaning in poems. Join an online chess or go group and you'll be humbled by how much smarter those people are in formulating those kinds of strategies. Music, history, literature, art... people are intelligent in different ways.

As I've often noted, our species's uniquely massive forebrain gives us the ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. (Some of our companion animals have a limited ability to do this, but not like ours.) Speech was the first communication technology and as I noted it was probably invented at least 50KYA. Writing was the second, invented in the Bronze Age around 5KYA. Then electronic communication was invented in 1834, with the first commercial telegraph. These new kinds of communication created a kind of "companionship" that is divorced from physical proximity.

Look at us right here. We regard each other as companions even though we've never seen each other's faces or heard our voices. Many of us don't even identify our gender and we often guess at age and nationality (male, 69, USA). And it works. You've provided the perfect example of this transcendence of virtual companionship over physical: You miss us when your electronic link is down, even though you've never seen or heard us.

It's become a cliche that when families sit around the dinner table (if they even do that anymore), each person is absorbed in a texting exchange with someone outside the group and they hardly talk to each other.

As I've said before, I applaud this extension of our sense of companionship. I believe it represents our future and promises the ultimate merging of our disparate nations into one more-or-less peaceful global civilization. Our shit-for-brains government has been telling us for 30 years that Americans and Iranians hate each other. Yet when Neda Aga Soltan was gunned down in the streets of Tehran and her friends sent real-time cellphone videos of the event out over the ether, Americans wept for her and wrote songs about her.

I like this future. Billions of companions!

 

My usual problem with unintelligent people is that we can't find anything to talk about. It's a shame that I don't like sports because that's a universal ice-breaker. Of course music is too and I have no trouble socializing with people at concerts and other music events. Flower shows, crafts fairs, dog shows, movies, there are lots of venues that automatically bring people together with a common interest, so it's easy to talk to people I meet there.

Dogs provide a different kind of companionship, purely emotional. I've been comfortable in other countries where the people provide stronger emotional companionship and I found it very pleasant. Back home in the Southwest there's a strong vector of Latin culture and I experienced a bit of that feeling there. But in most of the USA an Anglo-Saxon/Nordic culture dominates and strong emotional companionship outside the narrow confines of the immediately family is rare--and frankly often even within those confines.

Perhaps the reason dogs are so popular in the USA and the UK is that we've designated them as our emotional companions so we can be more cold and businesslike with each other.

That's certainly common enough, but it's bogus. The truly intelligent person can communicate with people he doesn't agree with. There's nothing so stimulating to the intelligent person as a really good argument!

Of course this requires good communication skills. Many people have a high score on their raw IQ, but they never learned to communicate well. And of course this often comes from simply not being very social, and therefore not getting a lot of practice at communicating. A vicious cycle.

You're certainly not describing me here. I have no problem with people who disagree with me. I can spend hours explaining why they're wrong.

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Several of my closest and most loyal friends disagree with me on major issues such as politics and religion. I suppose the real deal-breaker for me is someone who doesn't like dogs. Now that always seems to be a manifestation of a really large fundamental difference in personality... not intelligence

Hey, not everybody is like that. Since my college days and even the last year or two of high school, I was taught by immersion that animated disagreements are a fun way to socialize. When you're done you go off and have a beer together, or perhaps pair off with the gals. (Well we didn't always do "pairs" in the 60s but that's a topic for another thread.)

Is life perhaps really different now? In the 1960s nobody agreed on anything, except the basic broad issues of peace and civil rights. And even those broad issues deconstructed into details over which we disagreed vociferously.

Except to the extent that they give you a perspective on your own ideas so you can constantly reality-test them and adjust them to changing conditions.

I'm about to give up on thirty years of Libertarian politics (which right there shows you that I had already given up on the uncompromising leftist politics of my youth) because our entire civilization is on the verge of becoming a planet-wide "tragedy of the commons." The Libertarians don't seem to have a workable solution to it, whereas the Greens do, or are at least working on it. I can thank my "disagreeable" friends for that, who are clearly not unintelligent.