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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   3727 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Are Brits on average more intelligent than Americans, at least verbally (restricting both sets to college-educated people, say)? As an American I know I might be conditioned by silly tropes of British sophistication but I feel like there's something here.

  • Based on what Youtube serves up to me occasionally, British talk shows seem more clever
  • Prime Minister's Questions, despite being nonsense, seem to require more quick-wittedness than any comparable American political event I can think of
  • Social customs seem to require saying lots of things in subtler, more roundabout ways, which is simply more mentally taxing for both the speaker and listener

Not that any of these are amazing displays of intelligence. There just seems to be a greater demand on one's verbal faculties in everyday life.

I think there's just more educational stratification in Britain. Upper-class Britons including, to throw out two random examples, Boris Johnson and the actor Tom Hiddleston, still receive a classical education at Eton and Oxbridge which is very verbally-loaded and includes learning Latin and Greek. The comparable tradition in the US died out nearly a century ago (the last American president to know Latin well was apparently Herbert Hoover).

By contrast, the best and brightest Americans today go into STEM fields and receive an education that is very challenging technically, but not so much verbally, at least in my experience (I was genuinely challenged by some of my math, physics, and engineering courses, but writing an essay for a humanities class was always something I could blow off until the last minute and I literally fell asleep during the verbal portion of the SAT and got a perfect score).

An interesting anecdote that might highlight this distinction... I don't know if it's still up-to-date, but I read recently Tom Clancy's Submarine, a overview of modern (in the early 90s) submarines, and one of the points made clear is that the British nuclear submarine officer is a leader first, his training is first and foremost in leadership and then in his specialty, while the American nuclear submarine officer is an engineer first.

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