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April 15, 2005

Talking "Smart" Doesn't Make You Smart

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&e=8&u=/nm/odd_gibberish_dc

A bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.

"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."

This brings to mind a guy I used to work with. I probably recall this story online every couple years, cause I forget I've told it, but that's okay, I'll tell it again. I don't know if it's ever made it to marchdecember.

So this guy, I don't know what his problem was. I don't know if he thought himself an amazing intellectual, or if he just had a hard time communicating, or what. I suspect the former, because he sure loved to come in and tell you all about stuff. He would go on and on, and the guy had really, really bad breath. I mean, seriously awful, so bad that you could walk by a room and smell him, even after he'd left the room!

Anyway, for all his brainpower, he was essentially a glorified mechanic, and he liked to make my life miserable.

At the time I was in charge of the account for the company's biggest client. And they would send a lot of broken junk to us that they wanted fixed. Well, they'd go to this guy, and they'd come back to me with one or two pages explaining what was wrong and why he couldn't fix it. (It was pretty rare that he just plain fixed something.) And they were ridiculous. I mean, so full of gratutious words they didn't make any sense at all.

"This VIEWSONIC CRT MONITOR DISPLAY is UNREPAIRABLE. Blue lines APPEAR on screen. Further investigation shows the ELECTRON GUN is MALFUNCTIONING and REPAIR or REPLACEMENT would cost $500 (FIVE-HUNDRED) dollars. DO NOT REPAIR! DO NOT REPAIR!"

This would go on and on. One time, he bypassed me and called the customer, and left him a fifteen minute voicemail. The customer called me irate, stating that his voicemail system had no skip option, and he had to listen to him drone on and on.

The thing is, he wasn't a BAD guy. I'm sure he was very nice. But he tried to talk down to you, he tried to act like he was exceptionally smart. I have said it before, and I will say it again. Fancy talking does NOT equal smart. My IQ is in the range of 140. But I've been told many times that my writing is enjoyable because it is casual, readable, approachable. I don't intentionally make it that way, it's just the way I am.

You see, the mark of a good writer, as I learned way back in high school, is writing that is clear and concise. This is also the mark of a good speaker. Leave out the unimportant stuff. Drive home your point. Say what you have to say. George W. Bush can't pronounce half the words in the dictionary, but he's smart enough to find the right words in the right way when the moment arrives. "We can hear you," he says to firefighters in NYC after 9/11. "The whole world can hear you!" In comparison, John Kerry could go on at great length about nothing at all. He used big words, and acted very smart. Perhaps he is, though he doesn't show it. Bush does. The difference is Bush is smart. Kerry is studied.

Take me. I'm far more smart than studied, despite the fact that I just graduated from the University of Washington. Why? Because I didn't need to be studied. I could do nothing in a class for three weeks and still get good grades. I'd just have to cram like crazy for a couple hours before an exam, and I'd be fine. So I'd drive to school, sit in the car for a while, and then go take the exam.

See, I have absolutely no study skills. I've never had to use them, and I don't know how now. I get extremely bored while studying. Stuff just doesn't hold my attention. I had a pretty hard time in French this last year, because it did require a lot of my attention. Ironically, I worked harder on my French than I did my Econ, in a year where I was taking my 400 level Econ classes finally. But the Econ just came naturally to me.

To be sure, this adds a lot of stress. And people look at you kind of weird when you walk into the bookstore halfway through the quarter because there's an exam next week. "I guess I should actually buy the book," I'd say. That said, they mostly went unread.

I had one class where the professor announced that he would be uploading all the slides he used in class. And what did he do in class? He read the slides. Plus he was a crazy British liberal. I would always get odd stares from people whenever I came to class, because it was such a rare event. I think I maybe went four times the whole quarter.

That's not to say there weren't classes I truly loved, and attended as often as possible. I was actually disappointed when I got sick and missed Professor Leffler's class on monopolies and such. I liked the guy so much Jennifer teases me to this day about "The Kleffler" (because his first name starts with a K.) I was beginning to wonder if I had picked the wrong profession, and he helped reignite my passion for the subject. Nothing felt better than the day after recounting a personal experience, he pointed to me and asked me to analyze the situation for him, and I nailed it! I mean, this was a hard class, and when called upon a lot of people would hem and haw and throw out a guess. I was just like.... "CONFIDENCE!"

Anyway, I am WAY off subject now. I said good writing was clear and concise. I never said it was short, or even made a point. Then again, I never said I was a good writer either.

Posted by March at April 15, 2005 06:44 PM

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