Never Take a Good Fresh Idea to a Smart Person

Tell a smart person something fresh and radical - an insight unlike anything she's previously heard, or requiring a shift of perspective that doesn't come easily - and she'll swirl it around in her smart mind...for a few quick seconds.

"Have I heard or read anything like this before? Does it sound vaguely like something I've previously determined to be dumb? Does it 'seem smart' (i.e. conform with my cognitive biases)?"

That's the process. And it is inherently unsuited to recognizing and valuing fresh thinking. But smart people won't grind away at it. The idea will be granted only a few fleeting seconds of attention, because their minds are like powerful, expensive blenders. If the fruit doesn't swiftly crush, there's obviously something wrong with the fruit.


Tell a dumb person something fresh and radical - an insight unlike anything they've previously heard, or requiring a shift of perspective that doesn't come easily - and they'll try, laboriously, to think it through, and either 1. fail (in which case, you may enjoy benefit of doubt, because, being accustomed to noncomprehension, they might be capable of self-doubt), or 2. really work on it, slow-and-syrupy-like, until they get it (vanishingly few very smart people, to my enormous surprise, are capable of slow-cooking a line of thought, because doing so makes one feel brutishly stupid. This constitutes my edge, btw).

Never take a good fresh idea to a smart person!