Eccentric Flower:199809/knowledge vs intelligence

sixteen september ninety eight two p m

knowledge vs intelligence

My lunch went well, although I'm sure I talked too much. I always do.

Got an email a short while ago about the difference between intelligence and knowledge, which takes this whole information/elitism thing into a dimension I should have figured out for myself.

The correspondent says that while intelligence is sexy, a lot of knowledge isn't necessarily. She notes that I shouldn't try to conceal my intelligence, but I also shouldn't assume that everyone knows the things I know. Or, for that matter, assume that most people don't know the things I know.

This is an important distinction, but unfortunately not a very useful one for getting rid of the thing that's chafing me, because frankly "intelligence" wasn't ever really the sticking point; "knowledge" was.

Back to the allegory of the cave again. If I make a Plato reference, am I flaunting my knowledge overmuch? Am I making any implicit assumptions, good or bad, about the knowledge of my audience (whoever they may be)?

I say no to the first question. I say yes to the second question, but not in a bad way - I'm assuming my audience knows enough to catch the reference, which as far as I'm concerned is the polite thing to do.

Would it be more, or less, polite to write at a third-grade level, the way they tell technical writers to do? To me, that's insulting. If you're here and you find these postcards interesting, I assume that you know what words like "flaunting" and "chafing" and "deride" mean; I assume that if you don't know about the allegory of the cave, you can grab the idea from context; I assume you have a brain.

What I don't like is when someone takes my assumption that the reader has a brain and equates it with my being smug about the amount of knowledge I have.

This comes back to geekdom eventually - I figured this out last night. One of the reasons the accusation in the paragraph above bothers me so much is that it's one of the negative characteristics I associate with the "geek" label - I know WAY too many hacker/fan types who are determined to prove that they know more than you on any subject that's important to them. (And no, Anita, they're obviously not ALL like that, but the stereotype is there, and has some truth to it.)

I think that's entirely too much about the subject, don't you? No more.

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