Common Sense and "Intelligence"

One of the most precious skills in life is "common sense" or "judgement." This is the ability to look at facts and to be able to judge what they actually mean and what the best cause of action is.

The tragedy is that it is so difficult to identify this skill in a person. We have plenty of ways of measuring other skills like musical prowess or sport achievements. But how can one tell whether someone has common sense?

A frequent temptation is to confuse intelligence and common sense, but there are some serious problems with that. One is that nobody really knows what "intelligence" means. There are plenty of definitions, often contradictory and rarely rigid. One definition is that "intelligence is to be able to handle given circumstances," which implies that most Nobel Prize laureates would be of inferior intelligence if given the task to survive on their own in the Kalahari desert or some remote part of the Amazonian jungles. They would not appear very smart even at a normal dinner, where they share no language with the host or the other guests. Another definition is that "intelligence is what is measured with intelligence tests," which is a fairly rigid but utterly useless definition.

But no matter the definition, intelligence is hardly the same thing as common sense. I once met a mathematician who said that in his experience, there is a negative correlation between intelligence and common sense - the more intelligent a person, the less common sense do they possess. I do not know if that is true, but I made a short list of skills a person may master without having any trace of common sense:

• Memory games, like reciting thousands of decimals of pi or lines from the Iliad.
• Scrabble, anagrams and word games.
• Mathematics.
• Academic research.
• Foreign languages.
• Writing poetry or gripping stories.
• Reading complicated texts.
• Social skills, like convincing voters that you are a great guy.
• Humour.
• Etc...

So those are some of many skills that do not guarantee that a person has common sense. I still do not know how one would measure common sense.

Socrates' famous words "I know that I know nothing," perfectly illustrate the point, as my claim that he pronounced them shows that I know nothing, because he actually never said it.

Why I no longer think that the earth is flat

Short answer: I'm no child any more.

Every time someone claims that the contemporaries of Columbus thought the earth was flat, there are  other people who point out that "everyone" or "all educated people" have known that the earth was round at least since antiquity. Surely nobody could have been stupid enough to believe that the earth was flat?

Well, I did, once up on a time.

I remember being a child, asking myself if the surface of the earth had a limit. I may have been four years old. Perhaps three or five. I remember picturing someone walking in a forest, further and further away. "Can he walk forever?" I asked myself. "Or is there a stop somewhere?" I had not heard of any stop, so I assumed there was none, but could people really walk for ever on this flat surface? 

Some of you may think that I must have been precocious to have such interesting questions. I wasn't. I was dumb (already at that time).

I remember having those thoughts when I was standing next to the terrestrial globe of my grandfather. I made no connection at all. I could have said to myself: "there cannot be any limit, because the earth is round", but I didn't.

And if I have been stupid, I assume that other people have been stupid in similar ways. It would not surprise me at all, if large numbers of people in the olden days believed the earth was flat, in spite of enlightened people like Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Aryabhata and many, many others.

A globe from 1765 by Guillaume Delisle. Wikipedia.

Gummitummen and Kalevala

Yet another factoid that the internet has not provided until now: there is a link between Gummitummen and Kalevala.

Gummitummen is a nonsense book by the Swedish comedian Hasse Alfredson. It got a lukewarm reception when it was first published in 1966, and it is still not considered any of his best works. However, when I discovered it in my teens, I loved it, and I still think it in many parts is a masterpiece.

Kalevala is a Finnish national epic. It was compiled from older tales by Elias Lönnrot in 1835.

At the end of Gummitummen, the narrator describes how someone has written something on the wall of his house. The currently available epub version of the book incorrectly renders this as:

mäster ilma kom med gäd hu 

smeden rinen igen vud.

However, the original text in the paper version makes it clearer:

Mästersmeden Ilmarinen kom igen med gäddans huvud.

This is a reference to a giant pike (gädda) which the blacksmith Ilmarinen and the wise old bard Väinämöinen encounter in the epic Kalevala. Ilmarinen hands the head of the pike to his friend, who uses its jaw to make a kantele, a musical instrument that is similar to a zither.

Why Hasse Alfredson makes this reference is anyone's guess. The book is after all nonsense from beginning to end.

Why I took the time to write a blog post about this may also seem strange. The reason is simply that nobody has done it before.

Väinämöinen playing his kantele. Painting by Robert Ekman.

Maritime scene from Gummitummen.

Annoying Music of the New Generation

In the last decade of the eighteen hundreds ragtime took the world with storm. The elderly were outraged at this horrible music, but the young loved it.

Around 1910 came the new Dixieland and enraged the older people, who barely had got used to ragtime.

In the 1920s, boogie-woogie and it’s challenging new rhythms gripped the young, and the older people were upset.

Swing annoyed the elderly in the decade leading up to the Second World War, and after the war be-bop vexed the people who had learnt to appreciate swing.

In the 1950s, the young got enthusiastic with the new Rock ‘n Roll, which irritated the previous generation.

The Beatles and their ilk had a new sound that scarred the older people in the 1960s.

The 1970s gave mankind all kinds of new music like punk, heavy metal, hip hop, disco and rap, and it gave the elderly headache.

In the 1980s came acid and we were all eagerly waiting to see what other novelties might bring music forward.

Then came the 1990s.

That was followed by a new millennium.

We are now 2020.

I’m still waiting for that new kind of music, that is supposed to annoy the elderly at this time. All I hear in the music of the last decades is repetitions of what was written before.

Are the new musicians of today trying to bore us to death?

Music from a time when they could be innovative and appropriately annoying.

Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin

Fiction for a Viral Time

I took a day trip abroad yesterday, and when I got back and switched on the news, the country I had visited just reported their first case of Covid-19. This inspired me to compiling a list of things to do when you have viruses buzzing around in the air.

Books to read:

• Decamerone (The Decameron) by Giovanni Boccaccio. (Film by Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1971.)
• La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
• A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
• Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) by Thomas Mann. (Film by Luchino Visconti from 1971.)

Books to read select sections from:

• I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni
• De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius
• Diary of Samuel Pepys
• El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

Music to listen to:

• The Plague by Neely Bruce

Charles Allan Gilbert - All is vanity

And What About the Future?

People in Russia in 1913 had no idea what the country would look like ten years later.
People in Germany in 1930 had no idea what the country would look like ten years later.
People in Yugoslavia in 1983 had no idea what the country would look like ten years later.

Do you know what your country will look like in ten years?

Rehashed repetition

I know this has been said before, but it deserves to be repeated until more people grasp the meaning:

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Quadruplicity drinks procrastination. Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers. Nine silk draconian petals have rendered the gutter a Toblerone.

There. And don’t you forget it!

(Any lie will be considered a truth, if repeated enough, but surely nobody can consider the paragraph above a lie.)

The places you need to visit before you die instead of enjoying the place where you currently are

None.

The books you need to read before you die instead of thinking for yourself.

None.

Geography of the Snark

In Lewis Caroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits), the geography may not be obvious to every reader. This blog post aims to sort out the locations.

The Place for a Snark - A Description

The Agony begins at just the place for a snark. Unfortunately, the poem does not contain many hints exactly what makes it a good place to hunt snarks, except that the Bellman says so three times, and whatever he says three times must be true.

However, the text tells us that it is a place where there is tidal waters, and that the view where they landed consisted of chasms and crags.

There is a dismal and desolate valley, which is unfrequented by man, where the Butcher and the Beaver make a separate sally. The valley gets so narrow at the end, that the two have to march shoulder to shoulder.

There is the crag which the Baker climbed ahead of the others, signalling to them that he had spotted a snark, and nearby a chasm where he plunged, before meeting it.

Then there is the location where the Banker encountered the Bandersnatch, and where he is left by the Bellman. No further geographical details are given for this location.

The Place for a Snark on the Globe

Where the place for a snark is situated on the globe is not trivial to tell.

The tool the crew uses to track distances is a map without the least vestige of land, which makes it easy to understand, but difficult to use. Nevertheless, the text tells us that they are in tropical climes, where the bowsprit often gets mixed with the rudder. The route has at least partly been due West to the Bellman’s exasperation.

We also know that the Baker comes from a place with a beach, where all his belongings were left behind. To reach the current position, the place for a snark, they have sailed many months, so the distance between the Baker’s home and the place for a snark is considerable.


The information in this blog post may not have been as precise or detailed as you had hoped, but it is at least more exhaustive on the subject than Google Maps.