Smart Folks

I just finished reading this New York Times opinion article. It reminded me of something I heard from an instructor when I was at Auburn.

It was my second time to take Differential Equations (I took several courses twice) and my instructor was a graduate student. He was, by his own account, somewhat lazy. I don't recall him ever giving a real lecture. He preferred instead to assign homework and then have selected students go to the board the next day and work the problems. Since I had taken DE before and had kept copious notes, I had the solution to many if not most of the homework problems. The solutions were easy to copy to the board and we got credit for "working a problem at the board." Often, when students were at the board "working" problems the instructor would broach off on to a non mathematical subject. On one occasion, I remember he was talking about the government. I don't remember the details of what he was saying but I do recall that someone suggested that since he had all the answers, maybe he should be president. His response was that he was an intellectual and that intellectuals should never be president because they would be so certain of the right way to do things that they would be contemptuous of the people and would become dictators.

Seems like the NYT article sort of supports that theory. Although the smart people didn't get to the top of Wall Street, they did get high enough to reek havoc. Maybe we should IQ test everyone and prohibit people above a certain IQ from holding positions of authority or influence in companies or in the government. This would accomplish two things. First, smart, conniving, people would not be allowed into positions where they could disrupt the lives of others. Second, everyone would know that Presidents, Vice Presidents, Managers, Supervisors, etc were kinda slow and they would not pay them too much attention. The world might be a better place.