SMART...in a stupid world

I could read newspapers on my fourth birthday. I was one of the youngest 
freshmen in MIT's class of 1946 at age 16. I always found school boring 
and dropped out at the first opportunity and went into the Navy near the 
end of WWII after my first fling at the jazz life.

At first it was hard to realize that SMART qualified as a disability. I 
knew that my fellows treated me with a strange mixture of respect, 
disdain, and hostility. A similar thing happened when I was a bicycle 
messenger at an army quartermaster depot and zipped through a six hour 
featherbed assignment in 45 minutes - "don't do that, you'll spoil it 
for the rest of us." I heard that in the war plant where I thought we 
should all be doing our best to defeat Hitler but the union steward AND 
the shift manager told me to slow down.

Our prejudices aren't confined to those we deem inferior, we also 
express bigotry against those who outperform us. We are infected with a 
disease whose symptoms include a lust for exclusivity. Even being elite 
qualifies one for ostracism but if we remember that the chairman of the 
board also fucks up a lot, we might have a healthier chance to move 
towards whatever it is we're moving towards.

SMART is a peculiar thing because it depends on some fairly arbitrary 
norms. A visiting Martian might not think the ability to do crossword 
puzzles in ink was as significant as skill at arcade games. Mental tests 
are designed by people who belong to an elite group and have tried to 
get in a position that their tests are called "objective." 

In the uproar over "preferential hiring" the "angry white male" who 
scored higher on some "aptitude" test thinks that he somehow proved he 
was better qualified because the test was biased in his favor. IQ tests 
measure something, they just don't measure "intelligence" - whatever 
that is.