seanbonner: Intellectual Purgatory

August 25, 2007

Intellectual Purgatory

Last night while walking from place to place in Kensington Market, Jay Goldman (pictured above) imparted this bit of wisdom, which he in turn had heard from some one else at some other point (I forgot those minor details):

There are three kinds of people - Extremely smart people, extremely dumb people, and then all the folks in the middle (which referrers to us mostly).

The extremely smart people go off and become Doctors and Lawyers and things like that, because they are smart enough to get through the schooling and then it's easy money for ever after that point. This is why those people are smart.

The extremely dumb people do things like open factories making crap like shot glasses and napkins and other other completely boring things that are everywhere. These people make a million dollars because everyone uses their products, even if they are boring.

The folks in the middle, that's us, are just smart enough to have asked "why would I want to start a factory making shot glasses, that sounds boring" and not smart enough to have decided earlier on to become Doctors and Lawyers, and are therefore stuck in Intellectual Purgatory .

Posted by sean on August 25, 2007 07:33 AM | View blog reactions
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Comments

I like that.

Posted by: radarmatt on August 25, 2007 08:52 AM

I can't help but find this analogy completely flawed.

The difference between "smart" and "dumb" people is based on the which is the "sexier" endeavor - at least on the surface. But nowhere do I see where intelligence or wisdom would come into play whether someone has the ambition and vision to either learn the engineering and management skills necessary to build and run a factory, or to learn the biology and science of the human body to become a doctor.

Posted by: David Markland on August 25, 2007 11:35 AM

Sean got it almost right, but not quite.

It's not necessarily a case of boredom that prevents those of us in purgatory from opening widget making factories, but rather that we're just smart enough to come up with a whole bunch of reasons why it wouldn't work. The 'dumber' folk don't come up with the list and just go out and do it, and end up muddling through the problems which do come up and figuring them out and making millions of dollars. In the meantime, if you're looking for those of us stuck in the middle, try your local indie coffee shop where we'll be sitting around and smugly blog about how clever we are. See you all in purgatory!

(Full credit goes to Mark Stein, of www.straticomgroup.com, for the original idea)

Posted by: Jay Goldman on August 25, 2007 02:34 PM

Heh. This categorization reminds me of a story my father heard from a faculty member at UNB law school over forty years ago:

"Years after law school, 'A' students become judges. 'B' students represent the crown and prosecute the wicked. 'C' students ... well, I was a 'C' student. I became rich."

Of course dividing any population between two extremes and the middle is a crude way of describing difference, but nonetheless it's useful for describing central tendency among populations. Jay's example accounts, in a way, for the large class of consumers in our society. Although I'd be inclined to substitute levels of enterprising ambition for intelligence.

[Interesting blog. I arrived here via a Google search alert for Kensington Market, an alert which has brought me to blogs and websites about anarchy, bondage, cats, couture, and cooking, among other places. I guess it's just another recursion to arrive at the home of Metroblogging.]

Posted by: Amy Lavender Harris on August 26, 2007 06:07 AM