[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.

[chrisseaton]

> You don't need exceptional intelligence to do that.

You need the intelligence to see which rules really impact you and which don't. That requires insight.

> What could be smart is to successfully build that same capital without resorting to such lazy and harmful tactics

Often being 'lazy' is the smart thing to do. Why do extra work that you don't need to do?

What's why I think you're confusing it with morality. You're saying it's better to do it without being lazy... but why? If being lazy gets you the same or better result, then surely it's the smart thing to do?

[seba_dos1]

> Why do extra work that you don't need to do?

Because of the consequences.

Tesla had used customer-grade components for control & entertainment systems in their cars. Nobody else did that, what a smart thing to do! They recognized that there's a rule to break to cut costs!

...unfortunately, the customer-grade touchscreen panels in their cars were breaking so often for exactly the reasons why you don't use them in cars and go for more expensive and harder to obtain industrial-grade components instead that they were fined and forced to recall whole production runs.

Now, if you actually did figure out a thing that nobody did before in order to put less work or cut costs and achieve the same or better results - you'd be indeed smart. Neither Trump's campaign nor Tesla's use of customer-grade electronics were examples of that. They just did something that others did not because of other factors than their intelligence.

Some rules are there for a reason and breaking them does not make you smart.