No, it means you get stuck only half as often. And can travel twice as far, plus rescue 2-wheel drive cars stuck in their own icey driveway.

It’s important to distinguish intelligence and knowlege. Smart people do “fall prey” to cognitive biases, but people with knowledge and understanding of cognitive biases (placebo effect, confirmation bias, selection bias, etc.) are less likely to fall prey to those cognitive biases.

No one should put on airs because of their superior intelligence or knowledge, of course, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all strive for greater intelligence and better knowledge. There are no sound arguments for stupidity, ignorance or gullibility.

The alternative is to argue the benefits of a Mormon culture that leads the world in the multi-level-marketing of false hope (180 of the country’s top 250 MLM companies are based in Utah), most of which depend on people having cognitive biases (especially the placebo effect and the logical fallacy of anecdotal evidence).

BTW — love the story of the Harvard Ph.D. being put in his place.

I made no claim of superior knowledge. I only made a claim of knowledge. I do not believe that I have superior knowledge to those around me. Perhaps this is because I live in a major university town, and thus most of my ward members are incredibly intelligent men and women earning PhDs in things I will never understand and are able to understand things of the scriptures that I am just now beginning to learn.

But, furthermore, I know that I know things that others don’t know, but I also know that they know heaps of things that I don’t know. So my knowledge is neither superior nor inferior. It is simply knowledge. And when we have knowledge, should we not share it?

All I was suggesting was that, perhaps, we, as Latter-day Saints, fear to share what we know lest we are accused of being smarter-than-thou.

In #40 we see the justification (weak as it is) for that kind of assertion of a superior understanding. The thing is we all make some type of claim to wisdom, divergent as they may be. The quote from 2 nephi in #40 is both a denial of one type of wisdom followed by an assertion of a greater wisdom.

Cor 1. 27 – 28 provides a remedy to this kind of back and forth by challenging the validity of any assertions concerning wisdom or intelligence in the most fundamental terms.

“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are. . .”

This is a remarkable passage for a number of reasons not the least of which is the final assertion that God choses things which are not to bring to nought things that are. This lays bare a very basic structure that all assertions of knowledge conform to. This being that they are always made in terms of being, of what is. By this understanding then, about the only person we can look to for a reliable source of wisdom that meets the standard of this divine priority of non-being and abjection is Georges Bataille.

I would like to address this post from a slightly different angle. Yes, all of us, I would imagine, have, at one time or another, been guiltier of the “smarter-than-thou-therefore-holier-than-thou” attitude. I know that I certainly have been! But I also know that there is no sin in knowing many things, provided we follow Jacob’s counsel which is to “hearken unto the counsels of God”.

When I am in my Sunday School classes, or in my Priesthood meetings, I strive to not dominate the discussions. Instead, I follow the counsel of D&C 88:122. I share my thoughts and insights, and I hope that others will share theirs, so that in the end, “all are edified” and we rejoice together in our knowledge of the goodness of the Lord.

Of course, if none of us knew anything, there really wouldn’t be all that much to share…

Many years ago, I was visiting Utah and attended church in Orem with a family I knew. For priesthood, I attended the high priests group with the husband, who was a BYU professor with a PhD from Harvard (as he was fond of reminding people). After priesthood and as we were leaving the chapel, he said something to this effect: “You know, I looked around the men in the high priests group, and the differences were quite striking. I mean, you have men who are 3rd and 4th generation farmers, with just a high school education, and then you have men like me and [named a few others], who have PhDs and are college professors. I just marvel that the same Church is able to encompass both types.”

To which I replied, “Maybe from where the Lord sits, there really isn’t much difference.”

He was not amused. ..bruce..

LDS culture is unique in my experience, in its competitiveness over what intelligence is or means, that coexists with a strong anti-intellectualism.

Insecurity anyone?

How or why does relative intelligence matter? Why is so much attention paid to the stereotype and the straw man?