{"id":147,"date":"2018-06-19T07:24:14","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T07:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/?p=147"},"modified":"2025-03-06T17:17:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T17:17:57","slug":"smart-vs-kind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2018\/06\/19\/smart-vs-kind\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Smart vs Being Kind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally written in July 2017, over at @1000wordvomits<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was a child, I was told that I was smart. I wasn\u2019t great at socializing, but I was alright. I was the class clown, the smartass, so I did have some friends. But I never really developed the deep, lasting sort of friendships that some people have for life. Sometimes I felt like I was missing out, but most of the time \u2013 even now \u2013 I think of it as, \u2018that\u2019s just what life is like for misfits\u2019. There\u2019s good and bad, and that\u2019s the \u2018bad\u2019. The price you pay.<\/p>\n

It took me two decades to really begin to aspire to be kind.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s so good about being smart?<\/h3>\n

1. There is a certain intrinsic pleasure to knowing things.<\/strong>\u00a0Richard Feynman describes this beautifully in \u201cthe pleasure of finding things out\u201d. (He was also a very kind person, I believe.)<\/p>\n

2. There\u2019s a practical value to it.<\/strong>\u00a0Smartness is generally correlated with making good decisions that lead to superior outcomes. (It\u2019s necessary but insufficient \u2013 smartness is the sharpness of the knife. You still need to handle the knife well, and apply it to the right things. Lots of smart people obsessively sharpen their knives but don\u2019t use it for anything useful or constructive.)<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re smart, in the conventional sense, you should recognize opportunities (in my view this requires sensitivity, in the \u2018perceptive\u2019 sense) and take advantage of them (in my view this requires strength, in the \u2018executive\u2019 sense). You should also spot potholes and avoid them. (Spotting the pothole is perception. Avoiding it is execution. Smartness is the gap between seeing and doing \u2013 smartness is orienting and deciding, maybe.)<\/p>\n

3. There\u2019s also a social aspect to smartness.<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m not saying that smartness guarantees social success (though I do believe that if you\u2019re truly smart rather than superficially smart, you\u2019ll figure out how to achieve your social desires and\/or modulate them appropriately). What I mean is that there\u2019s a sort of global subculture that venerates smartness. Think of all the tropes of trickster type characters, and how people love brilliant assholes like Tony Stark and Dr. House. If you\u2019re smart, you can satisfy quite a lot of your social needs by scoring points with smartness geeks.<\/p>\n

The smartness-as-spectator-sport trap<\/h3>\n

Here\u2019s where it gets a little dicey \u2013 winning friends in most smartness tribes \u2013 their approval requires being right. It requires Winning. I\u2019m talking about smartness as a contact sport for spectators. You get rewarded for the most brutal takedowns (\u201cLiberal DESTROYED conservative with simple argument, leaves him SPEECHLESS!\u201d)<\/p>\n

When you start to get addicted to winning, you start to get attached. You start to avoid certain things \u2013 particularly areas that you\u2019re not so sure about. You start picking your battles according to what\u2019s winnable, rather than what\u2019s most interesting or useful.<\/p>\n

This is where we get to what separates the pros from the noobs. The smartest people embrace their ignorance. They are intimately familiar with the limitations of their models, and they are excited when they discover that they\u2019re wrong about something. (I recall this book about physics \u2013 \u201cTime, Space and Things\u201d \u2013 where the author would spend paragraphs explaining the imperfections of all the models he was about to show us. It was lovely.)<\/p>\n

Where does kindness enter the picture? Kindness\u00a0nourishes<\/em>\u00a0(not coddles) fragile things and makes them strong<\/h3>\n

I find myself thinking about Pixar\u2019s Braintrust. It\u2019s a sort of council of storytellers who provide advice and counsel to whoever\u2019s working on a story. They understand that ideas in their formative stages are precious, fragile things, like babies. You can\u2019t shake them too hard at the start, or they\u2019ll die. You need to nourish them and let them flourish first. You need to ask lots of exploratory questions with good-faith, rather than cross-examine them looking for flaws and mistakes. Once it\u2019s found its legs, THEN you can start to challenge it, spar with it, and it\u2019ll grow stronger as a result.<\/p>\n

When I was younger, I truly believed that the best way to learn and grow and progress was to subject everything to relentless scrutiny. To debate, argue, attack from all sides. I still believe that that can be true in some cases, and that individuals who are deeply committed to learning and intellectual development can benefit tremendously from welcoming such behavior. Inviting criticisms and takedowns. Soliciting negative feedback.<\/p>\n

BUT, I\u2019ve also grown to learn that there\u2019s this whole other side to the picture. What you see is NOT all there is. There\u2019s a lot that you haven\u2019t seen, that you can\u2019t see \u2013 and if you saw it with an open mind, you\u2019d almost definitely revise your model of reality.<\/p>\n

In the past, I used to argue violently with everything and everyone. Not in a vicious way, just in a high-contact way. It was a sport, it was a way of life. With every fight, I was learning. (On retrospect, I was often just learning how to fight better, or to pick fights where I\u2019d have a higher probability of winning, but that seemed like progress at the time.)<\/p>\n

I lost some friends along the way, which I was sad about. But I usually found a way to live with it \u2013 mostly by convincing myself that they had in some way been too sensitive.<\/p>\n

I had a Kurt Cobain quote in mind \u2013 \u201cBetter to be hated for who you are than loved for who you\u2019re not\u201d. It seemed radically profound at the time, but on retrospect that\u2019s entire oversimplistic thinking. We have more than two options. (Also, I\u2019m now the same age Kurt Cobain was when he died, and next year I\u2019ll be older than he\u2019ll ever be. Just a thought.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what you miss if you\u2019re unkind or non-kind: people opening up to you in private.<\/h3>\n

A lot of the most interesting information in the world is locked up inside other people\u2019s heads.<\/p>\n

If you care about having an interesting life, you have to care about winning over other people \u2013 so that you can access that information. If you really want to be smart, you\u2019re going to have to tap into people\u2019s perspectives, insights, questions and so on. You can\u2019t learn it all from books and essays \u2013 because there\u2019s a lot of \u201cliving knowledge\u201d that never makes it into those things.<\/p>\n

People only started opening up to me in private in the last 3-5 years or so, and it\u2019s completely changed my life. I mean, I did have conversations with a handful of close-ish friends a decade ago, but now I have people actively coming to me and telling me things that they wouldn\u2019t dare say publicly. And that\u2019s some very powerful, very interesting stuff. It\u2019s great at many levels. And it\u2019s a very beautiful feeling to be that person that earns other people\u2019s trust.<\/p>\n

Just to wrap up \u2013 it\u2019s possible to be both smart and kind, obviously. That\u2019s the end goal. Being smart doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re going to be kind, not-kind or unkind. Being kind doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re going to be smart, not-smart or stupid.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m saying is \u2013 there\u2019s definitely a subset of smart people (and people who aspire to smartness) who think that being kind is unnecessary, or tedious, or for pussies, and so on. And I think that\u2019s extremely unfortunate. Your intelligence gets enriched by kindness. That\u2019s the case I\u2019m making here.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Update: I saw a tweet recently that talks about something similar but frames it in a different, interesting way:<\/p>\n

\n

it\u2019s a strange thing to spend years assuming the task of one\u2019s life is developing intellectual nuance only to realize that in fact it\u2019s moral clarity<\/p>\n

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) June 19, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n