"Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid," by Robert J. Sternberg

And yet ... Well, this is what they call "going deep" in one of those sports like football or hockey, but "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid" seems to be something of a magnum opus for Sternberg, whose interest in intelligence research began in grade school, when he was found to score low on IQ tests and was shunted into the slow classes. His faculty bio tells the story of a child, and then a young man, subsequently obsessed with aptitude testing: He designed his first, which he called the Sternberg Test of Mental Aptitude, in seventh grade, and got in trouble at school the same year for surreptitiously testing his classmates with the Stanford-Binet. Sternberg's summer jobs were with entities such as ETS, the company behind the SAT. But his troubles continued. In college, he majored in psychology and nearly flunked, then switched majors to math and did even worse. Somehow he got back into psychology and graduated with honors. And, as he relates in the third person, "The summer after the first year, he got his ideas for componential analysis, and so began his career as a serious psychologist!"

This book seems something like a magnum opus because you have to wonder about Sternberg a bit in terms of the smart/stupid question. Despite several honorary doctorates and a C.V. stuffed with prestigious positions and awards (he is, among other things, a Guggenheim fellow and the president-elect of the American Psychological Association), he seems unduly excited, as a middle-aged Yale professor, to be a "serious psychologist!" Despite an outstanding body of work on theories of intelligence and aptitude testing, his career has consisted in large part of collaborations and the editing of other people's stuff. He seems like what you'd call a hard worker. For example, his chapter in the present book begins like this:

"According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), a person who is stupid is '1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse; 2. Lacking or marked by lack of intelligence' (pp. 1784-1785). A person who is foolish is '1. Lacking or exhibiting a lack of good sense or judgment; silly. 2. Resulting from stupidity or misinformation; unwise.' (p. 707). The two definitions refer to quite different kinds of entities."

Yes, it's the old "according to the American Heritage Dictionary" opener, known and dreaded for its ubiquity and universal inappropriateness by graders of undergraduate papers throughout the English-speaking world. "Hmm," your basic college sophomore will think, "I'm supposed to write a paper -- but where do I start?" And 75 times out of 100, the solution will be found by looking up a key term (such as "psychology," "narrative" or "Machiavelli") in the wise old dictionary and saying what it says, thus committing a crime against sensibility and reason equalled only by the scream-inducing "since the dawn of time" opener, which ... well, not to go off on a tangent here or anything.

What this is, besides a cardinal stylistic sin, is reasoning from usage -- a logical fallacy of sorts. Ostrom, the author of "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things," does the dictionary thing too, on the first page of his book (oddly enough), except he uses Webster's. But if Ostrom were to jump off the Empire State Building, wouldn't it be "stupid" to ... Well, never mind; it's just tangents everywhere. Anyway, this is simply not the sort of thing you'd expect from an acclaimed professor of psychology and education with more than 60 books under his belt. By the time one graduates from college, one learns to at least swipe from Bartlett's.

But essentially, I believe Marcus Aurelius summed up the point in, as I recall, "Meditations," Chapter 6, Verse 5: "The controlling intelligence understands its own nature, and what it does, and whereon it works." "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid" suggests a man at the verge of that great and humane understanding: Imagine that the young Sternberg had instead gotten run over by a school bus and had found himself one day, decades later, manning his perch at Yale's Department of School Bus Studies, at the very pinnacle of the school bus academy, surveying the achievements and the awards strewn about him (as a star bus driver, an ace bus mechanic, an acclaimed designer of buses, with his first bus designed in seventh grade). "But ... it is all as bitter ashes," he thought. And he set to work, at long last, on a book called "Why Kids Can Be So Careless Crossing the Street."

Perhaps that bit of humor was "impulsive." In any case, it would be a case of "neglect" not to say that "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid" is a valuable addition to a valuable new field of inquiry, and Sternberg is to be commended for initiating its ... But I'm "vacillating." It's an interesting book, and it's not "overdoing" it to say that it "walks the edge" between  ...

... Um, since the beginning of time (backsliding)  ...

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