Any newbie Linux forums 4036

Phil Coen

You are wrong. In fact, if you did a Google search for the newsgroup posts of the better contributors, you'd mostly find people who have never asked many questions at all, and if they did, the questions and answers were highly esoteric. Were you privy to the rest of their lives as well, I suspect you'd also find the same pattern: people who are capable of figuring things out by themselves even when given poor tools and a paucity of information to go by.

If all of the people here were suddenly cast back into a stone age society, none of us would have the necessary skills to survive. However, some of us would, and those folks would be the more adaptive, the more creative problem solvers. I'd bet even some who (like me) would be ill adapted because of physical problems like poor eyesight would develop techniques to overcome and survive.

People aren't equal mentally. I'm a lousy musician, and would die quickly in a society where ability to recognize pitch was necessary to avoid rest (the bird beasts that sing in high C are dangerous, the other warblers are not). I am a good general problem solver and have earned my living doing that for a long time now. I have fair "people" skills, which helps, but there are people with far better intuition and knowledge of human nature. Now who's "smarter" - the musician, the politician, the problem solver? Depends on what you are testing and why.

That's not to say that everyone is good at something. Some people are pee-poor at everything.

-- Tony Lawrence