[seba_dos1]

Absolutely. Fouling and breaking the rules does not make you a better football player just because the referee did not notice. You won, but you're not smart, you're a cheater. Playing by the rules requires more effort - you need to be smarter to win.

I find it really weird that you even ask.

[chrisseaton]

> Fouling and breaking the rules does not make you a better football player just because the referee did not notice. You won, but you're not smart, you're a cheater. Playing by the rules requires more effort - you need to be smarter to win.

A smart person dutifully operates as best they can within the rules.

But a smarter person realises that actually the rules aren't what everyone thought they were in the first place.

There's lots of examples in history.

Navies originally thought that submarine warfare was unfair somehow or against some unwritten gentlemanly rule. The less smart thing to do would be to take that rule and not use submarines. The smarter thing to do would be to say 'don't care' and build submarines anyway.

Football isn't a good example because you're volunteering to play by the rules in the first place.

Operating inside someone else's artificial rules is not smart.

[seba_dos1]

So, basically your point is that saying "don't care" about "unwritten gentlemanly rules" is an indicator of one's intelligence.

I'm pretty sure that it certainly is an indicator of several personality traits, but it doesn't tell you anything about being "smart".

[chrisseaton]

If everyone is just mistakenly assuming that these rules are important or were ever really rules at all... and you're the sole person to realise that actually these were never rules all along and you don't need to follow them... then yeah I think that's a really smart insight to make.

Challenging assumptions, thinking outside of constraints, re-assessing the foundations of the way we do things, redefining what is possible... smart.

Galileo had to break the 'rules' to model the solar system. Do you think he would have been smarter if he'd followed the current thinking instead?

[seba_dos1]

Thanks, I understand now. There is a grocery store near me which has a spot that seems poorly covered by security cameras. So far I thought that I shouldn't just grab things from there into my pockets and leave without paying, but I see now that it wasn't smart - I don't need to follow these rules.

BTW. Did you even notice that you just compared Trump's campaign to Galileo's work?

[chrisseaton]

> Thanks, I understand now.

I don't think you do. You've just made a moral point. But we're talking about how smart people are, not how moral they are.

It could be very smart to find a way to steal something. That doesn't make it moral to do so.

> BTW. Did you even notice that you just compared Trump's campaign to Galileo's work?

But again, that's moral not smart.

See if you can rephrase your point without any reference to morals, and I think you'll see where you're confused.

[seba_dos1]

I haven't even referenced morality at all. I just applied your own definition of "smart", no more no less.

Just taking things because nobody's looking is not "smart" regardless of its morality, of course. Even if you were doing it to steal from the rich and feed the poor, there's nothing smart in it, even when it's successful. You don't need exceptional intelligence to do that. Just like you don't need exceptional intelligence to build your political capital on xenophobia. That's just dumb brute force, not smartness. Everyone knows you can do that if you're willing to get dirty enough, it worked many times in the past already. What could be smart is to successfully build that same capital without resorting to such lazy and harmful tactics, as that would require much more wit to pull off.