skills

Competence, Knowledge, and Intellectual Cosplay

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Gods, I miss competence and knowledge. Yeah, this is going to be a rant, but know what? I earned it.

I really miss competence and knowing things as an ideal. The idea of setting a goal, taking measurable steps, and getting there. The competence that did big things like get us to the moon or electrify America. The everyday knowledge that lets doctors save lives and mechanics turn a pile of junk back to a working car. I feel America (and perhaps other cultures) don’t appreciate knowing stuff and doing things.

There’s a joke I’ve seen going around that today’s scientists don’t have time to invent robots or clone sheep because they’re too busy explaining the earth isn’t flat. A nice metaphor, but it’s more like they’re not only explaining the earth isn’t flat, but a Senator wants NASA investigated for concealing the flat earth. Oh, and people are selling Flat Earth Crystals that will protect you from COVID and 5G.

What’s worse is I’m trying to be sarcastic and I feel I haven’t been sarcastic enough.

I don’t get it. I grew up with science and education, in white-collar family from a hard-working and self-educated blue collar family. I knew people who worked their way up with a high school degree – who also had a huge personal library or ended up so knowledgeable they taught college. I grew up with educators and mechanics, people who knew how to get stuff done and were respected for it.

I grew up with people who got their damn vaccinations so they and their kids didn’t die. Yeah, sometimes there was smoking, drinking, and foods that were 50% lard, but that was sort of different – at least that’s what I tell myself. Also a lot of stuff was brown and green, that style where mid-century modern gets depressed, but that’s another story. Anyway we used science despite the lard and bad color scheme.

Of course America has always had an anti-intellectual streak, running through parts of its culture. Despite being very much an intellectual myself, I don’t like intellectualism, I don’t like pretentious putting on of airs and putting on a show of knowledge – because that often becomes a show only. I think that has been an issue in American – and other – history where people use the annoying pretension of some faux-intellectuals as a reason to hate knowing things in general.

It’s Ok to hate pretentious posturing, but people end up hating being intelligent period.

Most anti-intellectual activity I see appears to be resentful. How dare someone tell me what to do! How dare someone be smarter than me. How dare someone hurt my feelings by noting I may be wrong! There’s a weird entitlement in a lot of American anti-intellectual attitudes where people want to be treated as equals to people know something they don’t.

(Of course it seems said anti-intellectuals also hate any idea of treating OTHERS as equal. Bigotry goes hand-in-hand with being anti-intellectual).

What’s funny is that people who are anti-intellectual in America miss the value of hard work – which they usually want to praise otherwise (at lest for others). Being knowledgeable, skilled, and informative takes work. That doctor, that car mechanic, that person that knows something you don’t probably put in the work, so show some respect.

Ultimately I find the American anti-intellectual attitude is lazy and emotionally insecure. It’s an incompetent form of oppositional defiant disorder. It’s “you can’t tell me what to do” mixed with “I don’t wanna do the work.”

Which is why it’s easy to grift people. It’s easy to manipulate people with anti-intellectualism. Hell many anti-intellectual grifters – which are a huge amount of our political and media and Influencer class – are lazy in their own way. They don’t want to do work, they just want to lie and get their way. They’ll work very hard at not actually understanding stuff.

But know what’s weird? Watching anti-intellectuals dress themselves up as intellectual. Dare I say they’re a form of intellectualism, the posturing know-it-all attitude that they supposedly decry. The anti-intellectuals seem pretty damn intellectual sounding.

It’s the pretentious faux-Federalist papers rants by supposed Constitutional experts who read a meme. It’s the “just asking question” anti-vaxxers who throw terms around to sound smart while showing they don’t know anything. It’s the people who try to tweak science to justify flat Earth or whatever. All these people who supposedly hate “the intellectuals” are cosplaying as intellectuals, meaning they’re the intellectualism that supposedly annoy people.

It’s like those conspiracy theorists who decry the mainstream media while quoting from it extensively to justify their stories. Ultimately these kinds of people, the grifter anti-intellectual types, can’t avoid wanting validation. This makes them into what they supposedly hate and they still don’t know anything or if they do they don’t use it.

I’m ultimately an uncomplicated person. I like real learning, real results, and people who get stuff done. I like competence. The modern parade of anti-intellectuals putting on cosplay and decrying what they’re pretending to be is dangerous, exhausting, and unsustainable. I know it’s for political power, but these days I think a lot isn’t going to last.

You can’t outrun the changing climate, disease, and decaying systems. Real intellectuals know this.

Steven Savage

Why I Wrote It: Skill Portability

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Skill Portability is an book that comes out of a weird phase of my career writing. It’s a lovely little book, but one I didn’t intend to write until I thought about it.

Many years ago I had an obvious insight on my writing – a good writer keeps writing books. It improves skills, it shares knowledge, and it gets your name out there. As I wrote about careers as well as creativity, I asked myself “what more should I write.”

That’s when I realized that a major part of career advice is transferring skills between one job and another. This is important in general, but moreso for my audiences of fans and geeks – people who want to move their interesting skillset elsewhere. That’d be a great book . . .

. . . because I’d already written it.

Many, many years ago I had written a series of columns on transferring skills between jobs, careers, and even hobbies. I had thought of it as done, but really, sitting on my blog they weren’t doing much (and they’d aged a bit).

But reviving these columns? Expanding them and rewriting them? That had potential for a new book and for helping people even more.

But were they good enough? Well, yes – because I’d already had a system.

The columns themselves outlined a system to analyze how useful skills were – called DARE. It stood for Direct, Advantageous, Representative, or Enhancing – four categories of skills people have. A pile of columns is one thing that may or may not be “bookworkthy” – but one with a system? Something with structure can be built on.

An organized way of thinking about anything, from recipies to job skills, is something that people appreciate. A system allows people to easily understand and employ whatever you’re teaching them. A system also helps one structure something for communicating – like, say a book.

It didn’t take much to turn the columns into a more comprehensive book, and one that’s a nicely useful and light guide.

The real lesson here is that if you think of taking previous writing and expanding it, it helps if it has some organized format to begin with. A system like the above leads to a book. A short story with good structure can be the center of a novel. Structure is a sign you might want to take something farther.

Conversely, if you are writing something or creating something you might think of expanding, consider how it’s organized. Build a system to organize your writing. Put parts of a speech into a clear mnemonic. Something to give it form – because that form can be more easily built on.

Also I’m glad to write up this blog post – because it helps me see the value of the forms I build so automatically. This nice little book wouldn’t have existed without my habitual organization.

Hmmm, maybe another lesson on writing is write on why you write . . .

Steven Savage

You’re Doing It Wrong

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

I hurt my back recently – nothing big – but I did need some physical therapy. It’s been going great, but then the therapist told me something that blew my mind – I was walking wrong.

This news was a bit stunning, as I’ve been walking for decades and figured by now I was pretty good at it. But apparently, the way I was carrying myself wasn’t helping my back and made things worse. It was weird, but a few changes in how I held myself, and I had a noticeable difference in my discomfort.

On top of everything else I’d done to myself, I’d started – or had been – walking wrong. This gave me pause for thought – followed, of course, by a pause for blogging.

There’s a lot of things we do that we’re used to, skills that are habits. They’re instinctive and automatic, and we’re probably pretty good at them. Just like my walking – but it could be cooking, driving, writing, etc.

But just because we’re good at something doesn’t mean we can’t end up doing it wrong.

We could end up adopting bad habits over time, slowly corrupting our abilities with bad choices. We miss the point where our practices outweighed our skill – perhaps our attempts to cook quickly lead us to make poorer dishes.

A crisis or bad experience could lead us to bad choices. Perhaps we restrain ourselves, or overdo something, or avoid a challenge. My back injury seemed to result in my favoring my back the wrong way.

Perhaps we don’t practice our skills or avoid a challenge, and our abilities weaken. They can’t support our ambitions or our goals. We use them, but not enough, not in the right way, and they fade and become fragile.

Or maybe we become too strict in our practice, too linear. We’ve got checklists and outlines, policies and procedures. We become stiff and unyielding in our ideas, and even though we do things, somehow nothing gets done.

We can all become bad at things we are expert at doing. Even walking.

This is why it’s essential to practice and keep learning, no matter what we do. This is why it’s good to ask questions when you have a problem with something that’s normal or something you were once good at doesn’t seem to be going well. Those things we do well may change.

Here’s your assignment – what’s something you’re really good at, and how do you ensure you stay good at it? Think it over . . .

Steven Savage