supergee | Jul. 11th, 2011

Jul. 11th, 2011

There are people who think common sense is wonderful and people who think it's awful. I am one of the latter, but I try to be reasonable about it. Common sense is what tells us that the Sun goes around the Earth. More generally, it's what seems obvious to us because we learned it before our critical faculties were developed. Sooner or later, we learn that it's not that common, and those who were indoctrinated differently may have common sense that is the opposite of ours, so I am wary whenever anyone says it is what we should all be doing or makes the absurd claim that it is as valuable as uncommon sense.

So it's good for me to encounter someone invoking "common sense" and not talking out of their ass, such as Digby discussing a couple of recent examples of people in power behaving abysmally. I just wish she'd been a bit more precise and referred to what they failed to do as "common courtesy" or "common decency."

Thanx to The Sideshow.

Dr. Elliot Gelwan on antidepressants and salt.

Thanx to Follow Me Here

A marvelous example of "You've got your nerve not doing my homework for me" from Charlie Stross

$supergee: (fractal brain)$

We have two images for smartness. To derogate the intellectual content of an activity, we say that it's not rocket science or it's not brain surgery.

It strikes me that the two activities are in a sense opposites. Rocket science is rich in verbal and mathematical symbols, and it can work at a distance--at interplanetary distances, in fact. Brain surgery is nonsymbolic and done by direct contact. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about brain surgery, pointing out that surgeons have great intelligence in their hands; they are able to cut out all the bad parts and save all the good parts, no matter how closely they are entangled. Gladwell added that this intelligence may not be joined to verbal and symbolic skills.

I greatly prefer the intelligence of rocket science. I think we became really human when we figured out verbal and mathematical systems and structures to deal at a safe distance with a material existence that I find simultaneously too boring and too exciting,

Robert Anton Wilson didn't agree. In fact, in one of his books (Natural Law, or Never Put a Rubber on Your Willy) he used me as a horrible example of the sort of person who doesn't love the material world enough. He later recommended Leonard Shlain's book, The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, for its view of the approaches.

I could not make it through the book. It featured a form of gender essentialism so extreme that it probably would have offended Robert Heinlein. Men are verbal and violent (which always go together); women are neither, and that's it.

And yet I feel I could have profited from the book if someone had cut out the malignant and necrotic bits. I love the Alphabet(s: letters and numbers) and am tempted to diagnose those who love the Goddess with Stockholm Syndrome. But a theory that doesn't recognize the intelligence in brain surgery is obviously inadequate, so I need an approach that values both kinds. Too bad that Shlain didn't have the verbal skills to think his theory through better and explain it clearly. He was a brain surgeon.