Bagaimana Mengetahui Orang Pintar Dan Pura-pura pintar?

Hay Sahabat Bitter, kali ini Bitter Coffee Park akan mengajak Kalian Ngobrol ala Obrolan Warung Kopi tentang: 

Bagaimana Mengetahui Orang Pintar Dan Pura-pura pintar?

Ajak bicara. 

Kebanyakan orang pintar akan lebih cenderung diam di awal. 

Mereka akan mendengarkan Sahabat Bitter terlebih dahulu dan sesekali mereka ikut mengajukan pertanyaan. 

Tapi setelah itu mereka akan menyampaikan pemikirannya, dan pemikiran mereka sangat valid. 

Mereka akan bisa memberikan alternatif yang lebih baik atau mengkoreksi kesalahan.

O ya, mereka juga tidak segan bilang “tidak tahu”. 

Ini yang paling membedakan mereka dari orang-orang sok pintar. 

Orang sok pintar selalu tahu semuanya. 

Seperti para bacotan warganet kebanyakan adalah hasil karya orang-orang sok pintar.

Bagaimana rasanya bicara sama orang pintar?

Sebelum bicara (dan kenal) dengan orang pintar, biasanya Sahabat Bitter akan merasa lebih pintar dari dia.

Saat berbicara dengan orang pintar, maka Sahabat Bitter akan merasa sedang memimpin pembicaraan. Tapi diam-diam, Sahabat Bitter akan diarahkan ke sesuatu yang lebih baik.

Setelah bicara dengan orang pintar, Sahabat Bitter akan merasa terinspirasi.

Apakah Sahabat Biter ingin jadi orang pintar?

Ikuti Tips berikut ini

1. Coba perbanyak diam (dan mendengar), 
2. Perbanyak membaca, 
3. Turunkan ego, dan 
4. Jangan terlalu berasumsi. 

(Yang ini jangan terlalu dipercaya, Bitter Coffee Park sudah coba, tapi sampai sekarang masih sok pintar, belum sungguh-sungguh pintar)

Bitter Coffee Park percaya bahwa orang pintar memiliki pikiran pemburu-pengumpul (Intuisi dalam Myers-Briggs), sedangkan kebanyakan orang memiliki pikiran petani dan keduanya sering tidak cocok.

Orang pemburu-pengumpul sering menjadi sangat introvert di masa kanak-kanak, karena mereka mengerti bahwa mereka berbeda dari sebagian besar orang (hanya sekitar 10% dari populasi) dan ketika mereka tumbuh dewasa mereka merasa disalahpahami dan bahwa mereka toh tidak bisa membuat perubahan.

The Little Prince baca “Pangeran Kecil” dan Sahabat Bitter mendapatkan gambaran bagaimana rasanya bagi anak yang berbakat untuk tumbuh dewasa: Sahabat Bitter melihat gajah di dalam boa di mana orang lain melihat topi (NB: ini adalah metafora):

Setiap kali Bitter Coffee Park bertemu dengan orang dewasa yang tampaknya cerdas, Bitter Coffee Park akan bereksperimen dengannya dengan gambar Bitter Coffee Paek Nomor Satu, yang selalu Bitter Coffee Park simpan. Bitter Coffee Parm ingin melihat apakah dia benar-benar mengerti sesuatu.

Tetapi dia akan selalu menjawab, "Itu topi.".

Jadi Bitter Coffee Park hidup sendiri, tanpa ada orang untuk diajak bicara.

Jadi, apa gunanya membicarakan sesuatu yang tidak bisa dilihat orang lain ??? 90% dari waktu dan energi kita akan terbuang dan itulah sebabnya kita tetap diam. Orang akan berpikir kita gila.

Artinya:

Saya pikir mungkin dia gila, tetapi dia hanya sangat intuitif.

Lebih lanjut tentang pikiran pemburu-pengumpul di sini:

The hardest problems for evolutionary psychology - part three: introversion

While introversion is usually not mentioned as a problem for standard evolutionary psychology, it should become clear that for any theory that assumes that females will have a preference for successful alpha males, introversion in males should be a puzzle. I have cursed my deep introversion many times in my life, not because I couldn’t reach for alpha positions, which I actually do not want, but because it has left me feeling like an omega male instead. I never was able to even make a big effort to try to impress a girl, because it actually feels “fake” for me, just like showing off with an expensive flashy car or a shiny new iPhone would feel “fake” for me.

For these reasons I had the feeling, I was a born “omega male” when I was a teenager. I wasn’t even interested in the usual stuff my teenage friends were interested in: cars, sports, and hanging out in clubs.

Later, at university when I came across Evolutionary Psychology, I used the following explanation for girls who complained about guys to me: females get exactly those guys who the previous female generations chose to mate with. So, there is not much reason to complain about guys whose genes were actually chosen by females.

As true this actually is, there is an important detail missing here. Not all girls go for alpha males. Not because they can’t get one, but because their genes are programmed not to want one in the first place. They prefer nice and intelligent guys to muscle-flexing sporty guys. At university, I met quite a lot of girls, who seemed to be happy with introverted, geeky “omega males” like me. And in my 30s I finally found the girl who would be happy to get married to me.

What does this mean for evolutionary psychology? It means that instead of postulating one general mating strategy it there should be at least two opposing mating strategies with many shades in between. In general, the girls who start to have sex earlier are more interested in the alpha males, whereas the girls who tend to start sex later prefer “partners in child-rearing” (alloparenting), who are actually less sexually dimorphic.

More r-selected	More K-selected
Early-onset of puberty	Late-onset of puberty
More hierarchically structures	More egalitarian
Partner: status-oriented (alpha males)	Partner: alloparenting oriented
Higher sexual dimorphism is more attractive	Lower sexual dimorphism is more attractive
More promiscuous	More monogamous

Where do these two different mating strategies come from? They stem from our evolutionary past as hunter-gatherers and farmers/herders respectively.

Hunter-gatherer societies practice alloparenting, with many members of the band helping to raise the children. They are highly egalitarian and showing-off, as well as a display of status, are discouraged and mocked at. There are simply no hierarchical positions like “alphas” and “omegas”. One way of achieving this is for females to mate with humble, introverted males instead of assertive, extraverted ones. It is in this way that females actually have indirectly control over males. This means that introversion in males is ancient and goes back at least 200.000 years when early homo sapiens appeared.

Here are some reasons why hunter-gatherer females chose introverted males, all of which help maintain the egalitarian and monogamous hunter-gatherer lifestyle:

1. More humble and potentially less aggressive
2. Less able to form big coalition to achieve and maintain alpha positions
3. Spending more time with “family” and children than trying to make allies or find new mating opportunities
4. More monogamous

When humans took to farming and herding they could have a more steady supply of calories and they could double the rate of having children (every 2.5 years instead of every 5 years) and start puberty earlier. It also allowed the more extraverted (higher levels of dopamine) and physically stronger (higher levels of testosterone) males to accumulate more resources than those males who didn’t have as much “drive”. 

These two mating strategies (with the shades in between) accounts much better for the patterns we see today: some girls starting sex early and going for the “herder” alpha males and some girls starting late going for the kinder and more intelligent “hunter” types, with “farmer” types typically in-between. Of course, evolution has produced many mixed strategies too.

Currently, our world seems to become both more extroverted and more introverted. While the world of work has been getting more extroverted, or private lives have been getting more introverted. I suppose it is because extroverted types tend to be less willing to settle down have children, as the possibilities for them seem endless both in the job and mating markets, whereas introverts quickly reach their limits in both domains. It would at least explain the table below:

The psychology and biology of gifted children and highly intelligent people

Much has been written about gifted and high IQ people and to a large extent, the focus has been on their cognition, for obvious reasons. I have a gifted son and as many parents of gifted children can attest, these kids can be quite challenging for any parent: from daily chores, such as buckling up the kiddo in a car seat to the point when he or she fails in conventional schools.

While cognitive psychology has been a passion of mine since my early years at university, there comes a point when you can’t explain giftedness in cognitive terms anymore. For example, when your kid prefers to cry for an hour over some simple piece of homework he could easily do in a matter of a few minutes and threatens you to run away from home. Why would an eight-year-old child say "I wish I were never born"? Such behaviour would leave any parent just puzzled and perplexed. What is the biological foundation of such seemingly irrational behaviour? 

Here are some traits gifted kids typically display, that have little to do with cognition: 

1. look younger than their age/ have neotenous traits
2. look more “unisex”, i.e. they don’t accentuate their gender
3. start sex later than their peers
4. have a highly developed sense of justice
5. might be clumsy and/or ADHD sufferers
6. tend to be socially awkward and at least a bit autistic;
7. tend to suffer from social anxiety
8. are likely into “alternative reality” stuff like fantasy, sci-fi, comics, etc.
9. are playful and many of them really heavily into computer gaming
10. might be quite lazy and reluctant to do work when they don’t see any point
11. as a consequence might show signs of ODD (oppositional defiant disorder)
12. picky eaters
13. highly sensitive (HSPs)
14. external motivation (like grades at school or money) is much less important than internal motivation (their passions) 

In order to make sense of these diverse behaviors and traits, I delved into personality psychology. The one personality trait that correlates with high IQ is “Openness to experience”, which in turn correlates with the (controversial) trait N (iNtuitive) in Myers-Briggs, first described by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

Giftedness and trait N are highly correlated, as you can see from the following statistics:

From Myers-Briggs studies some of the above traits can be accounted for: Ns tend to be very creative (cognitive fluidity) and idealistic. It is also known that the introverted intuitives often suffer from mental problems such as social anxiety and ASD.

However, I still couldn’t account for half of the traits on the above list, so I turned to evolutionary biology. r/K selection seems to explain a lot: highly intelligent people have faster brain growth in infancy but grow more slowly in general. My two boys (both IN types) are both quite short for their age and their skeleton is almost two years behind the average. 

What in our biology could make people grow more slowly? The answer is probably buried deep in our past: hunter-gatherers grew up more slowly than later farmers and herders who had more caloric intake at their disposal. They were highly egalitarian as they couldn’t accumulate wealth and that also made them highly defiant when facing hierarchical power structures (European colonialists never really could “domesticate” hunter-gatherers).

One by one those giftedness traits began to make sense: picking eating and being highly sensitive were probably more advantageous out in the wilderness than in a farming village. Hunter-gatherers (Ns in Myers-Briggs) are also more monogamous than herders (SP in Myers-Briggs), who have the earliest onset of puberty and the shortest life span among the different early modes of subsistence (the third being farmers or SJ in Myers-Briggs). It is, therefore, no big surprise that highly intelligent people do not accentuate their gender, whereas people who inherited their personality from herders or pastoralists do so to a high degree, i.e. sexual dimorphism is diminished in hunter-gatherers as well as gifted people. Hunter-gatherers are also quite playful into adulthood, as play is used to reduce conflict among them. Farmer personalities are more serious and business-like in contrast to hunter-gatherer personalities. 

The final piece of the puzzle is trying to explain why hunter-gatherer personalities should be more intelligent than their farmer and herder counter-parts:

One explanation is that hunter-gatherers needed more cognitive fluidity and vigilance (hence the ADHD) to survive in the Savannah than farmers who had to rely far more on conscientiousness, routine and hard work. This explanation still doesn’t account for why hunter-gatherers (Ns) tend to be more intelligent on average than herders (SPs). Here the answer lies probably in natural selection. Hunter-gatherers have an out-group sociality and sharing and caring attitude. In mixed hunter-gatherer, farmer and herder societies hunter-gatherer minds who were of average intelligence probably lost out (nice guys came last) in the genetic race and there were high selective pressures on hunter-gatherer genotypes to become more intelligent. 

So, higher IQ might at the end of the day be nothing more than a protective mechanism! Just like social anxiety: if you are very open, you better have a defense shield in place! Introverted intuitives are already socially anxious by the time they go to kindergarten because they are aware they are different. By the time they are in their teens, they might be complete outcasts because they don't play power/alpha games and as they tend not to be violent they can become easy targets for bullying. The extraverted intuitives also are in danger of becoming outsiders and social phobics during their teens, unless they already have an established network with other hunter-gatherer minds.