Harold, list,
To be sure, I never heard of any magicians continually claiming that
magicians generally have greater _/general/_ intelligence than their
audiences. Well, currently, I don't know any magicians. On the other
hand, the magician whom I knew was a 'magician's magician' famous (for
coin and card tricks) within the field although not to the general
public; he and his colleague-friends were definitely of above-average
intelligence and talents, although, like most of us, not always wise in
practical choices.
Best, Ben
On 4/11/2014 6:21 PM, Harold Orbach wrote:
Charles Morris was a performing magician in his youth -- Max Fisch
brought this to my attention in 1983 when I was researching Morris's
papers at the Peirce project. Morris has an elaborate album with his
ad's and reports of his performances, etc. As his miserable editing of
Mead's ms's show, he vastly overrated his abilities so magicians
aren't necessarily "smarter" than their audience apart from what they
have read or learned from others of tricks.
Harold L. Orbach
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 11, 2014, at 1:45 PM, "Benjamin Udell" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
Dear John, list,
Thank you, John. That's an interesting article, I'm glad I read it.
I'm reminded of a book about Tausk and Freud that I read when I was
young; it was called _Talent and Genius_, and the author argued that
talent is the ability to recognize genius. It would be interesting if
Dunning tried to find people who are able to recognize people smarter
than themselves - I mean smarter at tasks in which all of them are
engaged, not just smarter-sounding through big words - and look for
what such smartness-recognizing people, if he can find them, have in
common.
Ford Madox Ford somewhere wrote that the reason that it is difficult
to recognize excellent contemporary literature (i.e., literary art)
is that one's mind is filled with fads and fashions that one has not
recognized as mere fads and fashions yet. He said that literature is
anything still 'readable' after 50 or 100 years. It's been a long
time since I read it but, by 'readable', I think he meant not only
_/intelligible/_ but _/esthetically tolerable/_. Of course he may
have had a higher standard of such readability than many of us have.
Anyway, the article makes enough sense that I think I need to change
my claim. If _/everybody/ _ is inclined to self-overestimation in
intelligence (cf. Peirce's remark that everybody thinks himself (or
herself) to know enough about logic), then does anything remain of my
claim about a temptation biggest for the intelligent?
Magicians, when not performing for one another or for aficionados,
perform for audiences that usually lack special expertise about magic
tricks. Such an audience is outside its own area of knowledgeability
and consists of (A) those who don't know that they're out of their
depth, or don't realize just _/how/_ out of their depth they are, and
(B) those who know (or at least believe) that they're out of their
depth. Magicians have noticed, according to a magician whom I used to
know quite well, that Set A includes people who seem smart, seem to
regard themselves as smart, and try (sometimes desperately) to figure
the trick out, while set B includes the other people, who don't try
to figure the trick out and are not much impressed because, "well,
you did it somehow." Thus a magician is in the somewhat paradoxical
position of regarding some people as smart enough to be fooled or
feel bewildered (either way, it's when they get caught up in trying
analyze and explain the trick), and others as too stupid to be fooled
or feel bewildered or, to put it another way, too stupid to be as
impressed as the magician would like! To be sure, they're smart in a
practical way. By 'fooled', I mean, not by the fooled one's known
unknowns but by the fooled one's unknown unknowns.
When I think of that, I think of certain psychologists and physicists
who have been fooled by certain prestidigitators who have claimed
paranormal abilities - no names please. Everybody who cares about
that perennial debate knows where to go for names and arguments from
either side.
It is not difficult in theoretical research to get beyond one's own
'turf' - for example an excellent biologist is not necessarily an
excellent statistician, and vice versa, and the more
interdisciplinary the research, the more it can become an issue. More
generally, most of us have gotten off of familiar turf in various
ways at one time or another, and, _/bolstered by the confidence and,
for some of us, the rewards, honors, etc., that we have gained in
dealing with the more familiar/_, have not taken sufficient account
of where we are now, and have hardly known what hit us.
So, I retract what I said about the method of status as being, among
inquirial methods of authority, "the biggest temptation of the
intelligent" and replace it with the idea that the method of status,
and of granting oneself too high a status of knowledgeability, is the
biggest temptation among the aforesaid methods tempting those trying
for a theoretical or hypothetical understanding that goes beyond the
familiar - but on the other hand, those seriously trying for a
theoretical or hypothetical understanding of unfamiliar things are
likelier to be smart and to rate themselves as even smarter (as most
people overrate themselves in intelligence, if Dunning's samples are
fairly representative).
Best, Ben
On 4/10/2014 4:05 PM, John Collier wrote:
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