Kaz*CheesyDoritoBomb* wrote:
Forrest wrote:
the silence of false understanding
Sometimes I just don't know things and to keep things rolling I take the silent way and only grunt when someone asks me something.
I think we're talking about different sorts of silences. You seem to just be keeping your mouth shut when you don't have anything to contribute to a group conversation, which is fine and better than making things up to look smart. I'm talking about when one person is talking directly to another, and the second doesn't understand the first but, rather than asking for clarification, just says "ah, yeah" and nods, but as becomes clear later in the conversation, really didn't understand a word that was said to him, and just pretended to understand so as not to look dumb.
Of course there are also sometimes genuine misunderstandings where person 2 really thought he understood person 1, but person 1 meant something different than what person 2 thought he meant, but that situation distinguished itself later in the conversation from the silence of false understanding, when the two parties try to clarify their terms. But when someone is deceptively silent just so as not to look stupid, he's not going to later admit "oh I thought you meant this, sorry, I see now, you meant that instead, now I get you". Then again, maybe a really clever bullshitter *would* do that... and then do that again when discovered that he still really didn't understand... and in this way a socially clever but intellectually dense person could make it seem like he's not really uneducated, they're just having communications issues, which could maybe be the other person's fault.
Also, this (clever-but-dense people) segues nicely into a comment on PNM's topic: you've got a good point that there are different factors to be separated out here, and I should clarify what I mean by these terms. I'm using "smart" and "intelligent" roughly synonymously to mean the product of willingness and ability to learn, which are really two separable factors; you can have eager but slow learners, and otherwise bright people who just wall off their minds to new thoughts. I'm somewhat sloppily combining the two here, but my emphasis is mainly on willingness to learn. I'm not really talking about knowledge or education level (what you seem to mean by "intelligence") at all, beyond the type of scenario being discussed, where one person is saying something that another person doesn't know about - like, say, if Slamlander tried to explain the workings of his favorite heuristic algorithm to me, while I can't code my way out of "Hello world", simply because despite my intelligence I haven't learned that sort of thing yet (and maybe never will - nobody learns everything).
In other words, I'm discussing how intelligence (smartness) seems to factor into the type of conversations that occur between people with different levels of knowledge or education in the topic area. Smart (intelligent) but less educated people will respond to more (apparently) educated people's comments with questions, curiosity and an eagerness to learn - which, importantly, doesn't mean blind acceptance of what the more educated person says, as someone who's not only willing to learn but skilled at it will ask critical questions of the (apparently) more educated person to be sure they really know what they're talking about and aren't just full of shit. Dumb (dense, unintelligent) people will either attack a more educated person (try to make them look or feel bad for being "too smart", arrogant, elitist, or whatever) or pretend to be more educated than they are so as not to look "dumb" - themselves conflating intelligence and education, a fatal mistake, for being smart (intelligent, willing and able learn) starts with admitting what you don't know.