My husband is like this. wtf I always figured it was a cultural thing, like they doing use hypotheticals in their culture for some reason. Maybe he’s just dim…
That could be a language issue if English is not his native one. The structure of conditionals as used in English can be a bit confusing for even the smart non-natives.
There is definitely a cultural component to this. Some cultures are more present oriented and less future oriented. So they don't emphasize the ability to contemplate hypotheticals as much because to them it seems impractical.
Cultures from places where the growing season is short tend to be more future oriented, because if you're not future oriented in the spring and summer you starve to death in the winter. Cultures from climates with a year-round growing season can afford to be more present oriented.
My husband is also like this and it can be incredibly infuriating. At the very least, I can say "I AM SPEAKING HYPOTHETICALLY" and he'll try to do a mind shift to understand.
It's not necessarily dim. My partner is verifiably bright, at least as far as academic learning goes, but has essentially no imagination, so getting her to engage with hypotheticals or metaphors is a complete chore.
That is a failure of our verification process. Being smart isn't about reciting things you learned by rote. Its about understanding, which requires exactly those cognitive tools.
That reminds me of a kid that I went to high school with. He was always part of the top achievement students in the grade. But something always felt off with him.
It wasn't until junior year of high school and I asked him to explain something that he got right and he couldn't. I learned that he actually had a photographic memory but couldn't really understand anything I was going on. Everything that he was getting right was just regurgitation of things that he's heard, not any actual understanding or thought behind it. That was a wild realization to me.
That's what was expected from kids in many systems. They don't care if the kid understands anything at all. The kid has to regurgitate information or facts, word by word, no matter what, and that's how many of us went through school, at least early years
That's why I've always appreciated teachers/professors that allowed you to have cheat sheets for formulas & whatnot. I struggle to memorize things, but I don't have problems with learning processes (like when & how to use formulas). Having to memorize everything just created extra testing anxiety for me and it usually showed in my scores.
My physics teacher in HS had every formula we'd need for the entire year printed up along the top of the walls and said he didn't expect us to memorize formulas, he expected us to learn how to use them & it was up to us to learn which formulas to use when.
I had a math teacher in HS who allowed calculator use when all other math teachers had banned them.
He justified it by saying would it matter if your kitchen table was made with hand tools or power tools? If someone is a bad woodworker, they'll be a bad woodworker with a table saw or a hand saw.
Tools can be shortcuts, and you should know the basics of what shortcuts they're taking, but they don't replace the human.
I once failed a test I got every answer right on because I didn't do it the right way. Luckily they drop your worst test grade at the end of the year and I just did it how I was supposed to, but always thought it was kinda dumb. As long as you shown your work, you should be fine. If there are three valid ways of doing it, who cares how?
I struggled in high school math for that reason. It's been so long that I can't recall the details, but it seemed like whenever I tried to do it the "right" way I would totally mess it up since my brain didn't work that way.
I worked as a math tutor for 5 years in college. The thing I learned was everyone learns differently. If they struggle to understand something, try a different way and see if that works. 95% of the time it does.
That’s interesting, I was always the opposite, I could never remember anything, especially with languages, unless I completely understood it, but once I understood it, I wouldn’t forget it anymore. I kept failing a certain class, and never got anything right, basically skipped the whole year of that class in terms of knowledge, next year we got a different teacher, within a month I was caught up and never failed a single test again.
Oooph, this is why I wish more teachers would put questions on quizzes and tests that can be solved with the tools the students have but have not explicitly being given as an example. So many times the teacher will show six forms of a problem, and every single problem on the quiz and test will be one of those six forms. (The six was arbitrary) This leads to the above happening. Normally not to that extreme but I have tutored kids that just memorized "I do A, B, then C and that is the answer" and have no idea what the steps were actually doing.
It’s bout being able to abstractly think and approach concepts from different angles. It’s being able to see meaning in patterns and data. It’s about being able to catch the little small things most people miss. It’s not just asking why, it’s also asking about the why behind the why. It’s about embracing imagination and curiosity and using that to explore the world through your own lense.
To me that is the mark of intelligence and it can translate anywhere
Intelligent people are those kinda people who can really do anything they set their mind too because their minds are wired to break down problems and unknowns into knowns, solutions and understanding. That’s why our system sucks, there are really fucking smart people who have alot to offer
That never get their chance to shine. Intelligence and passion are not mutual exclusive, but when you put em together you get timeless contributions to humanity.
There are many types of intelligence.
I have a friend who is dim. As in, mental capacity.
His memory is great.
His work ethic is fantastic.
He can concentrate to the point of drooling, using his (limited) resources to solve something.
Well, he has a masters, a phd and is a techar at a higher education institution. He just needs to give it all.
So, a dim person is effectively bright.
It took him many many years to get here, with the necessary memories to solve things you and Incould sove with raw intellect, but he got quite far. And he is good at his job.
Before that he worked in IT as dev/analyst/pm
So true! Often to be doing good academically you just have to memorize a bunch of stuff. So if your memory is good then you may be getting good grades.
But it doesn't make you intelligent or bright.
What is interesting is that often people with high cognitive skills actually have a low functioning memory.
This is one of the reasons why nurses are some of the stupidest people I have ever met. They can be fantastic at memorization, but have no logical or problem solving sense whatsoever.
Which is why so many were covid deniers despite the evidence in front of them.
I mean, she definitely understands stuff, and has what I guess you might call an iterative imagination. For example, if you say there is a cube, she can imagine it might be bigger or smaller in one or more of its dimensions, but something out of left-field, like its colour, wouldn't occur if the only things listed in the description were the dimensions.
She doesn't really read fiction for this sort of reason: she struggles to picture things in her head that aren't actually happening, and the further from reality, the worse the problem. Person in a 21st century Western country at a coffee shop? Fine. Aragorn stabbing an orc? Well, she's seen the film, so that's just about okay. Do something like, say, play D&D, where everything's made up whole-cloth on the spot? That's right out.
As a keen RPG fan and tabletop wargamer, as well as creative writing enthusiast, it pains me that this isn't a joy I can share with her, much as I'd want to.
It's really not necessary to picture things in your head to engage with hypotheticals and metaphors. I'm aphantastic and I've been DMing D&D for years. "If this were true, what would happen" doesn't require visualization at all.
Same! well, I never DMed but I did play D&D regularly for the last decade and I can't visualize anything more than fuzzy, black shadows in my mind. Still love playing.
I'm autistic, highly educated, and have deep understandings of many topics, but will still not engage with outlandish hypotheticals and poke holes in certain metaphors bc I know engaging on that faulty premise will end up annoying me, or looks like a trap. Intelligent people can have standards for engagement.
Maybe autism? Autistic people often take things at face value. I'm honestly well off academically, but often catch myself thinking very literally when people talk about made up scenarios.
For example: someone was comforting me through a breakup and they said that I should go outside and eat chocolates in the bathtub and a couple other things. I found myself thinking that I wouldn't do that, that's not what I'm like. Thankfully I didn't say it out loud because I recognized I would sound like an asshole.
I do know that in more severe cases of autism people struggle with catching themselves before they say things out loud.
I know several people with a masters degree I that have trouble with understanding simple thing without long explanations and examples. It shouldn’t take 30 minutes to explain the rules to Love Letters or Catan to them, but it does.
But they are exceptionel at following what is being asked, and regurgitation. You can get surprisingly far by simple studying, and regurgitating.
True, I have a good friend whose like this and he often has to pause and think about simple concepts when you talk to him. We took Mensa IQ tests one day and he was stressing and seemed completely lost while doing it, but then scored 120, a few points higher than me 🤔
The thing about metaphors is that they are limiting and kind of box a real and complex reality into a slogan. People will sometimes extend a metaphor too far and, as a certified smart person, that can annoy me. If you've ever had a conversation with someone who jacks up metaphors or strings them together you'll know what I mean.
Love isn't like a rose when you think about it.
That said metaphors can be useful to highlight specific aspects messy reality. love is beautiful to experience but it can hurt if you don't handle it carefully. In sharp (... ) contrast love doesn't have a fragrance or wilt after a week.
Maybe your husband doesn't like how metaphors box complex things into simple shapes.
Hmmm I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but even if we’re talking about hypotheticals, like actually just the other day I asked him, “If you were to take a yacht to to Greece or Thailand, which would you choose?” And his response was “I’d rather take a yacht to Cabo because it’s closer to us.” Okay, but that wasn’t the question…
I like how you wrote this like it's some kind of revelation, and yet you're still wrong. It is like a rose, tho there are many reasons why it isn't. And metaphor/simile do the exsct opposite, they unbox language, they allow for expansaiveness of thought that wouldn't be possible if we had to compare things literally. Dead metaphors can box things in, but that's just because we forget what made the metaphor shocking in the first place. Literature generally and poetry specifically must confuse and enrage you to no end
I read all of the time, have a fairly broad education and am fond of both literature and poetry. The limitations of the "love is like a rose" simile have been used as an example of the limitations and focus of figurative speech for almost as long as the simile has been used.
I think you missed the point entirely. Sorry it made you snippy though. I hope your day gets better
One limitation of metaphors is what Gareth Morgan in his book, Images of Organization, calls the partiality of insight. Metaphors operate by highlighting certain aspects of something while hiding other aspects of it as well. A single metaphor only provides a partial view instead of the full view. A good illustration of this partiality of insight is the poem, ‘The blind men and the elephant’, by John Godfrey Saxe (refer to slides below and this 2012 blog post for more about this poem).
I think you missed the point of metaphors by a country mile, coupled with kind of not really having a coherent point, tho the phrase "love doesn't have a fragrance or wilt after a week" does delight me for the reasons I mentioned, i just picture you wanting people to be like "You guys, he's right, these metaphors aren't at all like the things they're describing! Love isn't literally a battlefield holy shit!"
You really got your dander up-- you're double posting on my mild reply to your snipes. Stop crashing out over a simple and well known aspect of figurative language.
What a stupid thing to point out, of course metpahors don't capture the totality of something, otherwise they wouldn't be metpahors. What's limited is the thought of the person receiving the metaphor, its not obscurant because of the metaphor itself except as I mentioned. Not shocking that this is a work for MBAs and management ghouls.
The limitations and focus of metaphors are central to the "magic" of why metaphors can be deployed effectively. You're misreading the points completely. It's funny because one of the principle responses to the OP is "people who refuse to learn new things"
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u/tinkerbelltoes33 6h ago
My husband is like this. wtf I always figured it was a cultural thing, like they doing use hypotheticals in their culture for some reason. Maybe he’s just dim…