Nerd Liberation Movement : Must read

 I came across this funny, but yet serious; article on internet and would like to share with you. The original link to the article is http://www.perkel.com/nerd/nlm.htm

All copyright is acknowledged to the author.

 

Nerd Liberation Movement

~ Coming Out of the Back Room ~

Our Purpose

The Nerd Liberation Movement is dedicated to people who are smart and are not afraid to admit it. In today's society, smart people are persecuted. We learn to act stupid so that normal people are comfortable around us. Some of us are tired of hiding the fact that we are intelligent people. We want to be able to express our intellect without ridicule. We are tired listening to stupid ideas that if you are smart, then you must be deficient somewhere else. We are tired of being accused of bragging, when we are only thinking.

We in the Nerd Liberation Movement are "Coming out of the Back Room". This refers to the expression, "We have this Nerd, and we keep him locked up in the back room." We believe that the world would be better off if smart people were in charge. If you have something heavy to lift, you get the strong person to lift it. If you have something that is high up on a shelf, you get the tall person to reach for it. So therefore, if you need to make complex decisions, then why not let the smart person do it?

It is OK to be smart. It is OK to talk about being smart. Talking about being smart is not bragging about being smart. It's just stating a fact. If you can say, "I'm tall!" or "I'm strong!" then why not "I'm smart!"?

We are making some progress. Years ago, geniuses were burned at the stake for saying the world wasn't flat. (And there's still a lot of flat worlders out there.) But now we are at least not killed anymore for being smart. We have gained politically. The Vice President is a nerd. The first lady is a nerd. And the President is a nerd sympathizer!

It's Tough being Smart

Being smart in a dumb world is like being tall in a short world. A tall person doesn't look at himself as tall, he looks at everyone else as short. And he has to duck through doorways so as to not knock his head on things. Smart people have the same problems.

For example, the news media. These people drive smart people nuts because there are storieshat are beyond the mental bandwidth of the news media to report. For example, the major news centers are talking about air bags in cars. "Air bags in cars are dangerous.", they say. "Air bags have killed 30 children. Manufacturers should be required to put in a switch to turn the air bag off."

Then in you find out that air bags have saved the lives of 2000 people, 400 of which are children. So we turn off the air bags to save 30 kids and let 2000 die instead? Wow, that's brilliant! Doesn't anyone out there know how to add and subtract? Not I'm not against improving air bags to try to save the remaining 30 kids, but turning off the air bags is stupid beyond belief!

It's bad enough that you see stories reported this way, but then comes the shocker. You're in the 1% of the population who caught it. When you try to explain it to people, you realize that more than 50% of the population doesn't have the mental capacity to understand the argument. And these are the people who run this world. Smart people are a minority, and are rare indeed!

10% of your Brain

There's these myths going around about the way intelligence works. Myths that I would like to challenge. For as long as I can remember I have been hearing the average person uses only 10% of their brain. What does this mean? Can someone explain it to me?

Are we talking about 10% on a neuron level here. Like they count your brain cells?

 Total Neuron Count: 498,056,365,012,992
 Total Neurons Used:  50,429,655,502,023
 Total Neurons Free: 447,626,709,510,969

Is this what we are talking about? Or are we saying that we could be ten times as smart as we are and that for some reason we are ten times as dumb as we could be? What is it that these people really mean and it there any basis for this in fact? I think not!

Another popular myth is that I've always heard that your IQ stops changing when you are five years old. For anyone who has two brain cells to rub together, this is rediculus! Me thinks that the person who invented these ideas was really speaking for himself and should have said that,"I only use ten percent of my brain and because of that I assume that everyone is like me." Or perhaps his IQ hasn't changed since he was 5 years old.

Where does this garbage come from? Society creates myths about the mind because they are afraid of smart people. They are afraid to admit that some people are a hell of a lot smarter than other people. Some times people are born that way, but more often than not smart people are smart because they work at it. They keep their mind sharp because they use their brain rather than just let it rot in their head.

I view the mind to be more like a muscle. Use it or lose it. It needs to be exercised or it will atrophy. I think that the average person is capable of much more smarts that the are willing to put out. But thinking, like keeping in shape, takes effort. No pain, no gain. And it take work to keep sharp, but it's worth it.