Houdenbako Blog

The Mind Needs Exercise, Too

I really miss intellectual discussion. Nobody will have a sincere, critical argument with me. Some of the responses I get are 1) Polite deference, 2) Condescending dismissal, or 3) Exasperated annoyance. I am not going to complain about any one individual giving me one of these responses, but I am going to complain about no one ever giving me anything better. The people who think they are smarter than me won't explain why I am wrong - won't offer any guidance - while people who think I am smarter than them get intimidated immediately, and concede anything I might say while ignoring my offers to give them a some background. Instead of a culture of open reasoning, I encounter only forms of superiority or inferiority complex. Neither seems to have any time to spare on the issue, and neither recognizes that there might not be strictly one right answer. I'm not sure how either type succeeds in the world. Of course, come to think of it, I don't seem to be succeeding in this world, either. I'm not in the business of ranking the intelligence of all the people I meet, but it stands to reason that if I meet people much smarter than me and people much less smart than me, I should probably fall somewhere in the middle - a part of most random distributions that is densely populated. It would be a bit like meeting only people more than a foot taller and people more than a foot shorter than me. I feel sometimes that my brain is gradually turning to mush because nobody will test me.

This was the biggest disappointment of college for me. Maybe I was an idiot to expect that at an engineering school, but it was attached a much larger university. I remember a couple attempts to join organizations, and joining as an underling wasn't too exciting. I should have started my own organization - but I doubt anyone else would have joined it. College was where I learned that brilliant or dull, everyone was basically keeping their heads down and trying to get out in one piece. They were too harried to feel comfortable discussing something unrelated - even with some official hot air about interdisciplinary approaches - and I tried on many occasions. One other thing just didn't add up: A lot of people I knew were not so pressed for time that they couldn't indulge in various time-killing activities as sports, alcohol, or parties. So like, yeah... they definitely had priorities.