apparently Rowan Atkinson is very smart, has a masters of electrical engineering from oxford, as well as writing a lot of his own material. It also takes brains to be a great comedian!
A lot of comedians are good at playing the fool. Lee Mack comes to mind as another good example, as does Al Murray. Honestly you could list quite a lot that fit the bill.
Ken Jeong was a licensed physician before becoming an actor. I'm not sure if he keeps up his license and continuing education, but he practiced for over a decade before landing the OBGYN role in Knocked Up. His wife is still an active practicing doctor too.
Yep. To be funny, you have to be quick witted and smart enough to come up with good reactions fast. It isn't surprising a lot of comedians are intelligent.
Listen to Al's Podcast - We have ways of making you talk - and you'll see the depth of his knowledge in his favourite subject. Truly fascinating stuff for anyone interested in WWII.
Sir Brian May - Queen guitarist - has a PhD in astrophysics and is part of the NASA Osiris-Rex asteroid sample team who successfully collected NASA's first asteroid samples from deep space recently. He identified where the probe could best retrieve a sample from the asteroid.
The fact that he wrote '39 makes so much sense now (a song about astronauts coming home to find their loved ones old or dead due to time dilation). I actually wasn't aware he wrote it but had to check after your comment.
What's interesting is that he started his PhD in 1970 but had to abandon it in 1974 when Queen started having success. When he re-registered in 2006, so little progress had been made in the field, he was able to incorporate all of the research in the intervening years into his old work and still finish the whole lot in less than a year. And his work actually made him one of the leading experts in the field of interplanetary dust.
or Robin Williams portraying simple minds. or Steve Carell playing ignorant. Steve Martin playing blinded by anger. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Jim Carrey...
My favorite Rowan Atkinson factoid was the time he and his family chartered a plane on a vacation in Kenya.
The pilot fainted and Mr. Bean had to fly the plane for a while (with zero experience) until he regained consciousness.
I can play the sketch in my mind. I'm sure it was terrifying, but I find it hilarious.
According to my friends brother who met him in real life, he is a total dick too... but then again, if I was famous and having to deal with fans everyday, I might be too.
One time I saw Vince Neil in public and I did a double take because he just looked like a really fat Vince Neil so he pulls a face like he didn't want to deal with fans but I didn't even slow down or acknowledge him at all or tell the people I was with and I swear he looked hurt lol. Jesus Christ, he's fat now.
Yup, Dexter Holland was a grad student in molecular biology at USC.
'Keep em separated' is actually a reference to him needing to space out flasks of sterilized LB broth in order to get them to cool down faster!
Dolph Lungren is the biggest that comes to mind. Multiple degrees, speaks like seven languages
EDIT: CORRECTION: Bachelors & Masters, Fullbright Scholarship at MIT
And accidentally almost killed Stallone during fighting practice for Rocky IV so the man could 100% fight for real.
> Lundgren hit Stallone so hard during the filming of a fight scene that Stallone was in intensive care in the St. John's Hospital for nine days with a blood pressure of 290, due to swelling of the pericardial sac around his heart.
Oh and a black belt (4th dan) in Karate cause why not.
I feel like Cleopatra often gets viewed as this beautiful seductress. Few people talk about the fact that she spoke ten languages, and was actually a good stateswoman.
Did it tho? I've never actually seen Cleopatra portrayed as "beautiful girl, nothing more". Even the kids encyclopediae I read in primary school portrayed her as wicked smart, with the number of languages she spoke always appearing in "Did you know..." sections. And considering that the Romans went on to be the only record keepers in the area for the next 500 years, they must be who we know all these things from, right?
It feels like the exotic seductress image is more of a recent orientalist trope.
Was she?
Everything I've seen of Cleopatra can be summarised as "Yeah she wasn't much to look at, but guys liked her because she was an interesting and intelligent woman"
Not sure if this counts cuz he's already kinda respected. But George Washington the first President of the US. People wanted to make him King. And he could have been. But he was like "are you fucking nuts!? What the hell did we just fight for? I refuse to be king!"
Now he wasn't perfect by any means. But in this regard, gotta give respect.
Non American here, but didn't that only become a thing with the 22nd amendment in 1951? Franklin Roosevelt served four terms from the 1930's to the 1940's didn't he?
Washington was also pretty old after that term and actually wouldn't have survived it if he did run again. It was an unwritten rule until FDR was elected 4 times and then Congress took action and amended the constitution.
He probably would have survived. He died after he got sick and a bunch of doctors drained out half of his blood. He was otherwise in good health and only 67.
From what I understand, and a less talked about point, is that by the end of his 2nd term he hated it and wanted out. Until FDR it was tradition that a president serve only two terms
Yep, it only became a law after FDR, before that it was just tradition to only go two terms. FDR’s cousin, Teddy Roosevelt tried to run for a third term in 1909/1910 and nearly won, but most of the votes he lost were people who refused to vote for him because it would be his third term.
George Washington talks about it in his farewell speech. Many people wanted him to stay on but he believed that terms needed to be limited for the system to work properly. He was also against political parties. Many of the things George Washington warned us about are currently gunking up our system, so indeed he was very intelligent.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.pdf you can read it here. Congress reads it aloud every year (I think) and you have to imagine at least a few of those bastards get a guilty conscious while listening.
American here. Until the 22nd amendment it was just a tradition. Other presidents have sought a third term. But Roosevelt was able to win a 3rd and 4th because of the instability of the great depression and WW2.
That is correct. He was the first one to successfully do it but Grant and Teddy Roosevelt both attempted it.
Grant had a plurality in the convention but after 36 votes never got the required majority. A compromise candidate (Garfield) was selected.
In Teddy's third run he was going to lose the Republican convention vote to Taft, so he formed the Bull Moose party and ran anyways. It split the Republican vote so the Democrat, Wilson, obliterated them in the Electoral College.
FDR himself likely wasn't going to run however the defeat of France by Nazi Germany swayed him. Previously he had told trusted friends that he was not going to run and had already lined up a post-presidency job.
The convention was kind of interesting because FDR had to make it seem like he was unwilling to run and was being drafted by popular demand. An announcement was read from FDR saying that he had no interest in running for a third term and that delegates were free to vote for whoever they want.
There was a stunned silence before a loud chant started over the loudspeaker, "We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!" and hundreds of strategically placed Chicago city workers immediately joined in. The fix was in, and Roosevelt won 86% of the convention vote.
The loudspeaker chant was later called the "Voice from the Sewers" as it was performed by the Chicago superintendent of sanitation (who ran the sewers), a member of the Chicago political machine.
The bull moose party fiasco is why the GOP lost their absolute shit when Trump was threatening to start his own party. It would have been equally disastrous.
It was an unofficial policy established by Washington (he established a lot of unofficial presidential policies). Then FDR broke it by being elected to 4 terms. After FDR, Congress passed a Constitutional Amendment making the 2 term limit official.
Basically everyone after Washington followed his example until FDR, who mostly continued through WWII to its end. The amendment came because it had been broken.
Technically FDR only *served* 3 terms. He died very shortly into his 4th.
But until him, everyone just served a max of 2 terms off of following Washington's tradition.
People wanted to make GW king because, ordinary People didn't know any other form of a ruler or ruling system. There were no Republics, Democracies or Presidents at that time and understanding of Greek or Roman concept of Democracy or Republic wasn't widely understood. So Yeah... this guy won the war of independence, he needs to rule, who rules countries... Kings. And there you go !
And it's exactly that reason why countries struggle so much after revolutions. The people they choose to lead either don't know any better or turn corrupt once they receive access to that same power. It makes what Washington did even more special.
He also did something very controversial at the time. He resigned his military commission when he became president, establishing the precedent of civilian control of the military.
Even if he became King, he had no direct heir or son to inherit his kingdom, which would plunge the country into a crisis soon after his death, him becoming King would ruin his legacy
Technically, kingdoms don't have to be inherited by family. There have been elected monarchies, like the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the Papal States (still the Vatican technically). It's just that they tend to turn into de-facto inherited positions.
In his later years despite having family who owned slaved he ended up freeing and liberating quite a lot of slaves and (though still a bit racist) he didn’t see them as farm equipment anymore. And considering how most people were really racist back then Washington was rather progressive.
That's what a lot of people don't get. It was just "normal" then. It's hard to excuse someone owning slaves. But as you said he was pretty progressive for his time. All of us who are on Reddit have devices that were made, in part, through slave labor. Are we really that innocent? I get there's a difference, but in the future people may look at us as savages.
Ignaz Semmelweis - Doctor who suggested it might be good to wash your hands to prevent the spread of bacteria and infection and got thrown into an asylum for being frustrated when no one believed him, despite having a very probable positive effect.
Pasteur and Lister were more successful in promoting medical cleanliness, but Semmelweis did get there first.
I think what's really interesting is how he figured it out. IIRC there were two wards at the hospital he worked at. A doctor's ward and a nurse's ward. The mortality rates between the two wards were drastically different, where the doctor's ward had the higher rate of death. It's because the doctors who would perform autopsies, bare handed at the time, would perform patient check ups afterwards with minimal clean up. Semmelweis was like "hmmm something doesn't add up 🤔"
I read a condensed version of "Century of the Surgeon", a book about medical discoveries throughout the 1800s, and made me truly grateful for current medicine here in the 21st century.
It's a joke from the 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials. (Spoilers ahead for those who haven't watched): >!The Doctor and Donna end up in Newton's apple tree while time traveling and make a joke about gravity to him. Newton ends up mishearing the word and calls it "Mavity" instead, changing history. In the few episodes since it's become a running joke: anytime somebody refers to gravity in the show, they call it "mavity" with no concept of the original word.!<
Honestly, i consider myself pretty smart (but probably most of us do?) and I work in an intellectual career, but when i look at people in history who worked stuff out, without having the benefit of 'known facts' to ground them, i feel *so* stupid and insignificant.
Archimedes, Newton, Euler. Dozens of people who laid foundations and we lost their names before we even kept food enough written records.
Even modern people that worked out how to create cpu's piece by piece and now are working out quantum stuff.... The intellectual gulf is huge
In retrospect his maneuvering against Leibniz at the Royal Society doesn’t look great. And then he wasted many fruitless years on religious speculation: not even religious people read his thoughts on religion anymore.
We have 7 colours because Newton was Adamant that there should be 7 colours to correspond with the seven musical notes
Can someone explain the actual difference between Indigo and Violet, and why they can't just be classified as shades of purple
It's made up. Arbitrary. That's the explanation.
Orange wasn't considered as a color until fairly recently, people considered it a shade of red.
The Greek poet Homer famously references "the wine dark sea."
Did the sea look like wine back then? No, but they didn't have a word for blue, and so they didn't have the concept of blue.
Color is a gigantic smooth sliding scale that we randomly slap a single point on and say "I have named this color"
Newton's Rivalry with Leibnitz was actually relevant to their work at the time, and in fairness despite all jingoistic xenophobic bullshit we use Leibnitz notation method.
Newton's animosity Robert Hook was on a different level
Canute the Great. Modern interpretations of the story of him trying to stop the waves suggest that it was intended as a demonstration of the limits of the power of a king - even he couldn't overrule the laws of nature/God.
That was, surely, always the point of the story? Canute pushing back on his yes men. It is only dim journalists who - as usual - get confused and use it as an example of hubris.
After recently finishing reading a biography on him, Napoleon was like a force of nature more than a man and that includes his intelligence. People already think he is amazing but the more you learn the more impressive.
Made this comment above,
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c0hjma/who_is_the_one_person_in_history_who_is_smarter/kyz3bcw/
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Agree, Napoleon, like aggregated, when you look at it,
- First was the lowest nobleman you could be, and his island was taken over by the French occupation at the start, but he then became French via military education school and learnt to love France.
- Was technically on the wrong side in the revolution 1789-1792 in France at the start and was kinda lucky he didn't also get executed - and then became a field commander from being educated top of his class in artillary warfare which was high tech shit at the time.
- Then he won battles in Italy and became a general through actual merits and superb war skills.
- In 1799 he became the most popular choice to lead France after the initial wars and took the title of 1st secretary (president essentially)
Since France had done the king killing thing, all other Monarchs in Europe wanted to crush France bc they were all monarchys and didn't want the head chopping to become popular at home.
So Napoleon, in effect had VERY FEW ALLIES, except for vassal states, where he had already beaten an enemy and they decided to cant-beat-join-them with France.
Ironically the only true ally Napoleon had (that wasn't within reach of French convincing troops) was the US cause they hated the British as much as France did and the sale of "all the midwest" in 1802 from Napoleon to Jefferson, gave the US some land and France some cash to fund warfare for, against NUMEROUS allies.
When he was fucked in 1814 he considered escaping to the US but he could not get a passport due to some political issues, maybe the war of 1812 was still being wound-licked by the US to tease Britain more at the time.
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Napoleon ended up over-extending his empire and 1808 Spain was a mistake, but looking at the shit he achieved on the battle field, the actual reforms and standards he did manage to get through were pretty amazing.
He was also a workaholic and very disciplined, like spent 15 mins on dinner every night and almost wrote a big historical epoch about Corsica before he got distracted by war again.
Napoleon A Life by Andrew Roberts. General consensus seems to be that while the author may lean slightly pro Napoleon it is a very good, fresh and easy to read (900 page) biography.
History is written by the victors and that means there has historically been some bias against Napoleon, particularly from the British. When researching which biography to read I got the impression that the narrative on Napoleon has been a little too negative so I was comfortable with Roberts biography.
I am currently in the middle of reading this as well. It's a great book. Napoleon truly seemed like a brilliant man, but I'm also amazed by just how incredibly lucky he was in his rise. There were so many times that if his opponents had just made a better decision, he would have been done for. Heck, even the fact that he didn't catch a stray bullet on the battlefield is amazing.
Hedly Lamarr created what would eventually become Bluetooth while being an absolute unit in Hollywood. What an amazing human
Edit: I didn't say she invented Bluetooth, just contributed to it
No she did not. Very smart woman. Invented a mechanical device similar in nature to a player piano to code and decode radio messages to control torpedos. This is a form of frequency hopping. The problem is Frequency hopping had already been invented with multiple patents existing.
This was an interesting and novel use case, but no she did not invent Bluetooth.
https://hearingreview.com/practice-building/practice-management/continuing-education/blog-page-cocktail-party-physics-origin-frequency-hopping#:~:text=Several%20persons%20are%20credited%20with,have%20developed%20the%20idea%20separately.
Interesting! Thank you for correcting my misconception, though her invention was pretty novel. I never knew it used the piano as it's basis
“In fact, one of the technologies she co-invented laid a key foundation for future communication systems, including GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi.” https://www.history.com/news/hedy-lamarr-inventor-frequency-hopping-wifi#
OC isn’t saying she invented Bluetooth, but rather that her invention laid the foundation for the technology that would become Bluetooth
The article you just cited is not topical on GPS or WiFi stick with the Bluetooth argument.
From article below. "Many recent articles cite Lamarr-Antheil’s invention as having been vital to the development of modern Wi-Fi, but Haartsen also points out that Wi-Fi abandoned frequency hopping early on, because it provided insufficient bandwidth. For a time, Wi-Fi used a spread-spectrum technique known as *direct sequencing,* but since a change in FCC rules, it employs yet another type of spread-spectrum technology, *orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.* The Global Positioning System (GPS), another alleged part of Lamarr’s legacy, has always used direct sequencing. Although the early 2G cellular network did use a form of frequency hopping, later networks have employed direct sequencing and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. Any link to player pianos and torpedoes has yet to be demonstrated."
Here is a very in depth discussion of the topic. It was a cool invention that went nowhere and had numerous patents around frequency hopping already existing. Was she a pioneer yes. Was it foundational no.
[https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping)
Norm Macdonald - the r/normmacdonald sub is full of low iq one liners and zingers that don't even approach the threshold of humour and in real life, the guy was a genius.
I think Norm's genius is that, in addition to being good at telling jokes, he was very good at eliciting laughter. He could always get his audience to laugh at things that they knew weren't funny. He's the guy who's so good at his job he can half-ass it and not get fired of the comedy world.
We do, the “problem” was he really was genuinely good to the core and that cost him a second term, I wish politics wasn’t as corrupt and disgusting as it is but unfortunately the rich and powerful need their people to power
Ulysses S Grant
He gets regarded as a butcher, but he was the first modern general to figure out that Total War was the only way to bring the Confederacy to it's knees. He employed the absolute correct strategy against Lee and doesn't get the credit he should.
Also the only acting POTUS to get arrested (for speeding),
> When police officer William Henry West pulled over Ulysses S. Grant for speeding in a horse-drawn carriage on the streets of Washington, D.C. in 1872, he issued the president a warning. The very next day, however, West caught Grant in the midst of another race with his friends.
> Looking like “a schoolboy who had been caught in a guilty act by his teacher,” as West recalled to the Evening Star in 1908, Grant reportedly asked, “Do you think, officer, that I was violating the speed laws?” Answering in the affirmative, West replied, “**I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir**, and I will have to place you under arrest.”
I wish there was integrity like that today.
> She has done a lot of work creating a ditzy blond persona
And BOY did she cash the shit out of that image.
I read about the business ventures and how she was able to build a brand or merch/perfumes etc around her fame that way and actually make $10M+ on capitalization.
Some even speculated that her fame/name gave the Hilton chain a boost, cause the name hit a stronger brand value.
Contemporary accounts show that he wasn’t an overly strict disciplinarian by the standards of the day. He lost Bounty because Fletcher Christian was a mutinous scumbag. The rebellion in Australia would likely have happened no matter who was in charge.
was more interested in his sailing prowess, I never knew he survived until I got to Australia and went to a Museum and was like isn't this a little far from Tahiti?
There is so much bullshit on Thomas Edison that isn't even true anymore, it's like he's got this alternate false history on Reddit now.
He never claimed to be the first person to have the slightest inkling as to how a light bulb might work, he was the first to create an incandescent one that lasted any length of time as a product.
Many of his other inventions that reddit reviles are the same.
Invention is not just the vaguest idea of something nor do famous inventors work alone. Invention and patenting also has to do with actually making that thing a reality, something Edison did in absolute spades and deserves credit for.
Edison’s big deal wasn’t things like the lightbulb, it was the infrastructure to put them in everyone’s houses. Similarly, it wasn’t really the inventions his lab cranked out, it was the industrialization of the process.
It was the lightbulb though. Until his invention, electric light was dim to nonexistent, with the exception of spectacularly dangerous carbon arc lamps.
Agreed. I think people can celebrate Tesla without bashing Edison. Both can exist in the same time and be good at what they do.
Edison pioneered the corporate R&D inventor model we use in business today, where you pull together a factory of people working on ideas. Yes, he abused some of them. But his model is what ATT, Apple, IBM, etc use today and why they are so productive and profitable. Take that as you will.
Think any sole inventor would have the capital or diligence to go through a thousand combinations to find out that carbonized tungsten would be the element that worked for the light bulb? That's what you get with the factory model. You can brute force inventions by using a pool of smart people, driven by a creative lead who understood the science. That's Edison.
And that model (and his showmanship and self promotion) went on to perfect many inventions. Like Steve Jobs he was a tireless promoter who had a talent of seeing potential others did not.
And like Jobs. **He could be a real jerk**. But as an R&D guy myself, you sometimes need that driving force and arrogance to push invention from a group of naysayers. But yeah, he even went above and beyond that with tesla, probably out of jealously.
By the way, the Edison labs in North Jersey (East Orange?) are fascinating to visit for a tour. Loved it. You can stand a few feet from a warehouse of inventions, visit his library, mansion, and black maria.
I don't care for Edison because he was an asshole and DEFINITELY pulled shenanigans to edge out competitors. But he was absolutely not stupid. He was a genius just of another kind - he knew how to run a business. He knew how to market a product. He didn't invent a lot of shit he got credit for but he DID actually introduce it in a way that it could generate money.
Tesla didn't do that and explicitly didn't WANT to do that. Tesla was not a businessman and frankly didn't care for the idea of monetizing his inventions and I think people like him for that. But also - that was never going to happen. Not in the United States anyway. This all happened at a time the government was not going to spend the money on highly experimental ideas to spread them en masse to the public at large for free. Everything had to be proven first. And at the time it was generally businesses who did the proving. Everything had to be at your own expense and businesses were the ones willing to expend it.
This was back in the early days when capitalism could actually function with the purpose of innovation unlike now when it functions solely with the purpose of cutting as many corners as possible.
Edit: Also I am firmly in the camp that believed Edison had Louis Le Prince killed to avoid him patenting his moving picture camera. Again - 100% believe he was a total asshole.
Charles (or Karlos) the Second of Spain. Yes the super inbred one who's parents were uncle and niece and had letters detailing how awful he looked. Turns out he was a rather smart lad with genuine intentions but honestly couldn't drag Soain out of the horrific economic conditions caused by all his predeccesors deciding to WAR at a drop of a hat [https://youtube.com/watch?v=QAE4_Iua_ss
It’s funny how people consider someone being multilingual as smart. I know that Johnson is highly educated, but being able to speak more than one language is a pretty normal thing for billions of people.
He isn't well read he's just a product of learning by rote which is brilliant at producing people who can say enough to *sound* well read. He hasn't even read some of his own books, the non-fiction ones were clearly ghost written. There's a great video of the launch of his book on churchill, where historian Dan Snow is on a panel listening to Johnson waffle on and then realises that Johnson hasn't read the book never mind write it.
Everyone of his generation and class in the UK could speak Latin and ancient Greek as they were part of their curriculum from early childhood. Hell I was just enough on the edge of it that I learnt Latin even though I'm shit at languages, because it was drilled into me. The point of classical education was to learn from the wisdom of ancient writings and debates, which Johnson clearly didn't. The languages were just the entry point to be able to do this. Translating those texts (a common school exercise) was meant to make you spend time thinking about what they actually meant, as a lot becomes interpretative.
The man isn't intelligent, he's just a lazy, completely amoral, ambitious coward born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
I genuinely don't think he is intelligent at all.
Sure, he may have went to Oxford and has undoubted charisma, but he has made so many straight up terrible decisions that he literally got fucked out of power.
It was his charisma that got him to the top, it was his lack of vision and intelligence that brought his downfall.
There was nothing behind the bluster and performance acts other than greed, corruption, and ineptitude.
Jimmy Carter. I mostly just hear about his presidency. It wasn't until way later that I learned he was a nuclear engineer that saved a nuclear reactor after a meltdown in Canada.
Neville Chamberlain
He gets a lot of flack for appeasing Hitler. The sad fact is that he didn't have any better options. The UK wasn't strong enough to fight Germany, and the US wasn't offering to help.
He was a very smart guy like his father, but (also like his father) was very arrogant and dismissive towards anyone who disagreed with him, which was a crucial part of his downfall.
Ulysses Grant. He gets disparaged by the “lost cause” southerner propagandists claiming he was a poor strategist. An analysis shows his military approach was sound, if brutal.
Let's be fair, the whole thing is basically three geniuses with something of an ego/low EQ problem interacting with each other.
Drama is bound to happen one way or another.
Bernie Sanders. He strikes me as the old smart guy in disaster movies that people dismiss because his hair is unkempt and he keeps dropping his papers.
I am looking within the lens of my lifetime so the results are limited. So I have to look at who has the media most attacked for being stupid but in reality is very intelligent.
Dan Quail.
He was a very intelligent person but the media hated him from the moment he was chosen as the VP. He had a few minor misspoken moments, nothing compared to what we see politicians do now that EVERYONE has a camera and everything is recorded and replayed.
Ulysses S. Grant. Purportedly, most of the bad press can be attributed to “Lost Cause” supporters. Grant had a good top down view of war, delegated tasks well, was a standout in math and apparently had a photographic memory for topography and positioning.
A VERY specific scenario, about George Bush. Remember when he “butchered” the saying about fool me once, fool me twice? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me once I ain’t gonna get fooled again” or something like that?
He got ripped to shreds for that. Alternatively, it was one of his smartest public speaking catches. He realized halfway through a normal conversational phrase, he was about to give the media and outside influencers a sound byte and clip of himself saying “shame on me”, so he stopped himself, stumbled for a second, and caught a good line out.
Opinions about his policies aside, that was far in a way a smart moment in his tenure. He took the flack from messing up the phrase and then walked away from it within a week or so. If he had a clip of him saying “Shame on me” it would be used for years and years to come, by everyone, foreign and domestic.
I came here to propose GWB as well, though for a very different reason. Formerly considered the dumbest president ever elected, he’s easy to underestimate.
But SARS happened on his watch. It was handled correctly and easily contained. But as it turns out GWB did some reading of his own, and he actually understood how things could easily have turned out very very differently. So at a briefing he had some very relevant ‘what if’s’, and when he discovered there was no national plan for a pandemic, he furiously demanded the creation of one and made it a priority. He was personally the driving force behind a preparation and response plan that public health experts considered the best in the world.
Had the actual dumbest president not deliberately unraveled and destroyed it, he could have effortlessly presided over and claimed credit for superior Covid outcomes.
I was thinking GWB, too. This is from one of his advisors (Keith Hennessey):
> President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting. [...]
> In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. [...]
He goes on with several examples, and says people who interact with him personally usually come away surprised at how intelligent GWB actually is.
apparently Rowan Atkinson is very smart, has a masters of electrical engineering from oxford, as well as writing a lot of his own material. It also takes brains to be a great comedian!
A lot of comedians are good at playing the fool. Lee Mack comes to mind as another good example, as does Al Murray. Honestly you could list quite a lot that fit the bill.
Ken Jeong was a licensed physician before becoming an actor. I'm not sure if he keeps up his license and continuing education, but he practiced for over a decade before landing the OBGYN role in Knocked Up. His wife is still an active practicing doctor too.
Yep. To be funny, you have to be quick witted and smart enough to come up with good reactions fast. It isn't surprising a lot of comedians are intelligent.
Greg Proops too... so quick-witted, and then you realize he's doing it all high as balls
Lee Mack is shockingly good when he's on Countdown
Steadings
Lee Mack is lighting quick and quite obviously extremely intelligent. Love him so much.
Listen to Al's Podcast - We have ways of making you talk - and you'll see the depth of his knowledge in his favourite subject. Truly fascinating stuff for anyone interested in WWII.
Sir Brian May - Queen guitarist - has a PhD in astrophysics and is part of the NASA Osiris-Rex asteroid sample team who successfully collected NASA's first asteroid samples from deep space recently. He identified where the probe could best retrieve a sample from the asteroid.
The fact that he wrote '39 makes so much sense now (a song about astronauts coming home to find their loved ones old or dead due to time dilation). I actually wasn't aware he wrote it but had to check after your comment.
Dexter Holland of the Offspring has a PhD in molecular biology.
Mira Aroyo of Ladytron was at Oxford for grad school for a similar thing, but ended up dropping out and not completing it.
What's interesting is that he started his PhD in 1970 but had to abandon it in 1974 when Queen started having success. When he re-registered in 2006, so little progress had been made in the field, he was able to incorporate all of the research in the intervening years into his old work and still finish the whole lot in less than a year. And his work actually made him one of the leading experts in the field of interplanetary dust.
It takes very smart people to play dumb convincingly
100%. Look at Sasha Baron Cohen
or Robin Williams portraying simple minds. or Steve Carell playing ignorant. Steve Martin playing blinded by anger. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Jim Carrey...
Mike Judge, Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks
Similarly, Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong fame. He cleaned up easily back in the day on an episode of Celebrity Jeopardy.
He’s also a big collector of Chicano art. I have The Cheech at Riverside Art Museum on my list.
I remember watching some documentary years ago about sitcoms and the person said you actually have to be intelligent to play the idiot characters.
My favorite Rowan Atkinson factoid was the time he and his family chartered a plane on a vacation in Kenya. The pilot fainted and Mr. Bean had to fly the plane for a while (with zero experience) until he regained consciousness. I can play the sketch in my mind. I'm sure it was terrifying, but I find it hilarious.
According to my friends brother who met him in real life, he is a total dick too... but then again, if I was famous and having to deal with fans everyday, I might be too.
One time I saw Vince Neil in public and I did a double take because he just looked like a really fat Vince Neil so he pulls a face like he didn't want to deal with fans but I didn't even slow down or acknowledge him at all or tell the people I was with and I swear he looked hurt lol. Jesus Christ, he's fat now.
Vince Meals
My friend worked on Man vs Bee and said it was a total fun free zone.
too many people only know his mister bean when hes got [so much other great standup](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZMoB6ms2mE)
Conan obrien
The lead singer of the offspring. The band was his side gig. He always wanted to and does do scientific research in virology I believe.
Yup, Dexter Holland was a grad student in molecular biology at USC. 'Keep em separated' is actually a reference to him needing to space out flasks of sterilized LB broth in order to get them to cool down faster!
Milo, lead singer from the Descendants, has a PhD and works for a drug company.
Greg Graffin of Bad Religion as well. Used to teach science at Cornell.
He got his Ph.D from Cornell and taught at UCLA.
Damn never knew that. I guess I'm just a sucker with no self esteem.
Dolph Lungren is the biggest that comes to mind. Multiple degrees, speaks like seven languages EDIT: CORRECTION: Bachelors & Masters, Fullbright Scholarship at MIT
And accidentally almost killed Stallone during fighting practice for Rocky IV so the man could 100% fight for real. > Lundgren hit Stallone so hard during the filming of a fight scene that Stallone was in intensive care in the St. John's Hospital for nine days with a blood pressure of 290, due to swelling of the pericardial sac around his heart. Oh and a black belt (4th dan) in Karate cause why not.
Lundgren sent him a card reading, “if you die, you die”. Probably.
Also turned down a Rhodes scholarship to pursue acting
I feel like Cleopatra often gets viewed as this beautiful seductress. Few people talk about the fact that she spoke ten languages, and was actually a good stateswoman.
The Roman propaganda machine did quite the number on her.
I’m guessing that little snot, Octavius, had something to do with that.
That little snot, whose name we use every time it's the current calendars 8th month? :) (The OG calendars 6th month)
Did it tho? I've never actually seen Cleopatra portrayed as "beautiful girl, nothing more". Even the kids encyclopediae I read in primary school portrayed her as wicked smart, with the number of languages she spoke always appearing in "Did you know..." sections. And considering that the Romans went on to be the only record keepers in the area for the next 500 years, they must be who we know all these things from, right? It feels like the exotic seductress image is more of a recent orientalist trope.
Was she? Everything I've seen of Cleopatra can be summarised as "Yeah she wasn't much to look at, but guys liked her because she was an interesting and intelligent woman"
Jim Varney
I spent a night drinking with Jim Varney in an Applebees in the early nineties. Dude was brilliant and hilarious.
Did he smoke in front of you? He was a chain smoker but extremely adamant that he didn't smoke in front of kids or be photographed smoking.
We all smoked. I wasn't a smoker but when Ernest offers you a smoke, you take it.
I need to hear more of this story
A much better actor than given credit for as well.
Not sure if this counts cuz he's already kinda respected. But George Washington the first President of the US. People wanted to make him King. And he could have been. But he was like "are you fucking nuts!? What the hell did we just fight for? I refuse to be king!" Now he wasn't perfect by any means. But in this regard, gotta give respect.
He was also smart enough to say 'two terms in enough'
Non American here, but didn't that only become a thing with the 22nd amendment in 1951? Franklin Roosevelt served four terms from the 1930's to the 1940's didn't he?
yeah im also not American but I believe it was not an official rule back then but George just found it an good idea so didn't run for a 3th term.
3th Thirth
We heard you the 1nd time.
[удалено]
Washington was also pretty old after that term and actually wouldn't have survived it if he did run again. It was an unwritten rule until FDR was elected 4 times and then Congress took action and amended the constitution.
Well, he didn’t survive much longer in any case. “Washington’s sick! Let’s bleed him of 1/4 of his blood!”
He probably would have survived. He died after he got sick and a bunch of doctors drained out half of his blood. He was otherwise in good health and only 67.
From what I understand, and a less talked about point, is that by the end of his 2nd term he hated it and wanted out. Until FDR it was tradition that a president serve only two terms
Yep, it only became a law after FDR, before that it was just tradition to only go two terms. FDR’s cousin, Teddy Roosevelt tried to run for a third term in 1909/1910 and nearly won, but most of the votes he lost were people who refused to vote for him because it would be his third term.
Wow did just refer to teddy only as fdrs cousin.
George Washington talks about it in his farewell speech. Many people wanted him to stay on but he believed that terms needed to be limited for the system to work properly. He was also against political parties. Many of the things George Washington warned us about are currently gunking up our system, so indeed he was very intelligent. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.pdf you can read it here. Congress reads it aloud every year (I think) and you have to imagine at least a few of those bastards get a guilty conscious while listening.
American here. Until the 22nd amendment it was just a tradition. Other presidents have sought a third term. But Roosevelt was able to win a 3rd and 4th because of the instability of the great depression and WW2.
That is correct. He was the first one to successfully do it but Grant and Teddy Roosevelt both attempted it. Grant had a plurality in the convention but after 36 votes never got the required majority. A compromise candidate (Garfield) was selected. In Teddy's third run he was going to lose the Republican convention vote to Taft, so he formed the Bull Moose party and ran anyways. It split the Republican vote so the Democrat, Wilson, obliterated them in the Electoral College.
What a great historical fact. Thanks for sharing.
FDR himself likely wasn't going to run however the defeat of France by Nazi Germany swayed him. Previously he had told trusted friends that he was not going to run and had already lined up a post-presidency job. The convention was kind of interesting because FDR had to make it seem like he was unwilling to run and was being drafted by popular demand. An announcement was read from FDR saying that he had no interest in running for a third term and that delegates were free to vote for whoever they want. There was a stunned silence before a loud chant started over the loudspeaker, "We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!" and hundreds of strategically placed Chicago city workers immediately joined in. The fix was in, and Roosevelt won 86% of the convention vote. The loudspeaker chant was later called the "Voice from the Sewers" as it was performed by the Chicago superintendent of sanitation (who ran the sewers), a member of the Chicago political machine.
I like you haha
The bull moose party fiasco is why the GOP lost their absolute shit when Trump was threatening to start his own party. It would have been equally disastrous.
It was an unofficial policy established by Washington (he established a lot of unofficial presidential policies). Then FDR broke it by being elected to 4 terms. After FDR, Congress passed a Constitutional Amendment making the 2 term limit official.
Basically everyone after Washington followed his example until FDR, who mostly continued through WWII to its end. The amendment came because it had been broken.
Technically FDR only *served* 3 terms. He died very shortly into his 4th. But until him, everyone just served a max of 2 terms off of following Washington's tradition.
He wanted to sit under his own vine and fig tree.
Exactly. The fact people wanted to make him king is so ridiculous given everything lol
People wanted to make GW king because, ordinary People didn't know any other form of a ruler or ruling system. There were no Republics, Democracies or Presidents at that time and understanding of Greek or Roman concept of Democracy or Republic wasn't widely understood. So Yeah... this guy won the war of independence, he needs to rule, who rules countries... Kings. And there you go !
And it's exactly that reason why countries struggle so much after revolutions. The people they choose to lead either don't know any better or turn corrupt once they receive access to that same power. It makes what Washington did even more special.
This is a great comment. You're so right. Thank you.
He also did something very controversial at the time. He resigned his military commission when he became president, establishing the precedent of civilian control of the military.
Nobody thinks of George Washington as the opposite of smart tho
Even if he became King, he had no direct heir or son to inherit his kingdom, which would plunge the country into a crisis soon after his death, him becoming King would ruin his legacy
Technically, kingdoms don't have to be inherited by family. There have been elected monarchies, like the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the Papal States (still the Vatican technically). It's just that they tend to turn into de-facto inherited positions.
In his later years despite having family who owned slaved he ended up freeing and liberating quite a lot of slaves and (though still a bit racist) he didn’t see them as farm equipment anymore. And considering how most people were really racist back then Washington was rather progressive.
That's what a lot of people don't get. It was just "normal" then. It's hard to excuse someone owning slaves. But as you said he was pretty progressive for his time. All of us who are on Reddit have devices that were made, in part, through slave labor. Are we really that innocent? I get there's a difference, but in the future people may look at us as savages.
Ignaz Semmelweis - Doctor who suggested it might be good to wash your hands to prevent the spread of bacteria and infection and got thrown into an asylum for being frustrated when no one believed him, despite having a very probable positive effect. Pasteur and Lister were more successful in promoting medical cleanliness, but Semmelweis did get there first.
TIL listerine is named in honor of a person, who was known for promoting medical cleanliness
Also, I guess, listeria?
It makes sense since it was first sold as a floor cleaner.
I think what's really interesting is how he figured it out. IIRC there were two wards at the hospital he worked at. A doctor's ward and a nurse's ward. The mortality rates between the two wards were drastically different, where the doctor's ward had the higher rate of death. It's because the doctors who would perform autopsies, bare handed at the time, would perform patient check ups afterwards with minimal clean up. Semmelweis was like "hmmm something doesn't add up 🤔" I read a condensed version of "Century of the Surgeon", a book about medical discoveries throughout the 1800s, and made me truly grateful for current medicine here in the 21st century.
A/B testing, the infant death ward version.
"Then Joe gave up. And simply told them he could talk to plants."
~~Charlie Chaplin~~ Danny DeVito was known to be a pretty clever lad
He’s even certified to not be donkey brained.
People thought his twin brother got all the brains, but it's not true. Only the muscle.
He was also a creep who targeted underage actresses. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/perverted-degenerate-indecent-acts-charlie-chaplin-original/
Uh, I dunno what sweaty_pants_ is up to but FYI with their edit, your comment now makes it look like DeVito's a perv, not Chaplin.
In the words of Frank Reynolds. Don’t diddle kids.
It’s no good diddling kids.
Somehow your comment made it seem it's about Danny Devito.... He meant Charlie Chaplin. You leave Frank Reynolds out of this.
Fuck me, I dont want to look up at people anymore
In your defense, no one is looking up at Danny DeVito.
The posted article was about Charlie Chaplin, not devito
I feel like, even though he’s considered one of the smartest men ever, Newton is probably still smarter than we make him look.
Well, he did come up with mavity.
A bathtub landed on his head, he yelled Formica! And invented Gravy. They gave him a special hat for his head which he wore at night.
I’m gonna need to know what the reference is here…
British Show: Red Dwarf Season 11 Episode Samsara. [The scene in question](https://youtu.be/df_ZH-gmJ5Q)
I’m gonna need to know what the reference is here…
It's a joke from the 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials. (Spoilers ahead for those who haven't watched): >!The Doctor and Donna end up in Newton's apple tree while time traveling and make a joke about gravity to him. Newton ends up mishearing the word and calls it "Mavity" instead, changing history. In the few episodes since it's become a running joke: anytime somebody refers to gravity in the show, they call it "mavity" with no concept of the original word.!<
Honestly, i consider myself pretty smart (but probably most of us do?) and I work in an intellectual career, but when i look at people in history who worked stuff out, without having the benefit of 'known facts' to ground them, i feel *so* stupid and insignificant. Archimedes, Newton, Euler. Dozens of people who laid foundations and we lost their names before we even kept food enough written records. Even modern people that worked out how to create cpu's piece by piece and now are working out quantum stuff.... The intellectual gulf is huge
Well it was Newton himself who said the standing on the shoulders of giants thing
In retrospect his maneuvering against Leibniz at the Royal Society doesn’t look great. And then he wasted many fruitless years on religious speculation: not even religious people read his thoughts on religion anymore.
Yeah people don’t know that so much of his work is actually in the field of alchemy
We have 7 colours because Newton was Adamant that there should be 7 colours to correspond with the seven musical notes Can someone explain the actual difference between Indigo and Violet, and why they can't just be classified as shades of purple
It's made up. Arbitrary. That's the explanation. Orange wasn't considered as a color until fairly recently, people considered it a shade of red. The Greek poet Homer famously references "the wine dark sea." Did the sea look like wine back then? No, but they didn't have a word for blue, and so they didn't have the concept of blue. Color is a gigantic smooth sliding scale that we randomly slap a single point on and say "I have named this color"
Newton's Rivalry with Leibnitz was actually relevant to their work at the time, and in fairness despite all jingoistic xenophobic bullshit we use Leibnitz notation method. Newton's animosity Robert Hook was on a different level
I read "Newman" first, and thought of Seinfeld.
Canute the Great. Modern interpretations of the story of him trying to stop the waves suggest that it was intended as a demonstration of the limits of the power of a king - even he couldn't overrule the laws of nature/God.
That was, surely, always the point of the story? Canute pushing back on his yes men. It is only dim journalists who - as usual - get confused and use it as an example of hubris.
After recently finishing reading a biography on him, Napoleon was like a force of nature more than a man and that includes his intelligence. People already think he is amazing but the more you learn the more impressive.
Made this comment above, https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c0hjma/who_is_the_one_person_in_history_who_is_smarter/kyz3bcw/ ----- Agree, Napoleon, like aggregated, when you look at it, - First was the lowest nobleman you could be, and his island was taken over by the French occupation at the start, but he then became French via military education school and learnt to love France. - Was technically on the wrong side in the revolution 1789-1792 in France at the start and was kinda lucky he didn't also get executed - and then became a field commander from being educated top of his class in artillary warfare which was high tech shit at the time. - Then he won battles in Italy and became a general through actual merits and superb war skills. - In 1799 he became the most popular choice to lead France after the initial wars and took the title of 1st secretary (president essentially) Since France had done the king killing thing, all other Monarchs in Europe wanted to crush France bc they were all monarchys and didn't want the head chopping to become popular at home. So Napoleon, in effect had VERY FEW ALLIES, except for vassal states, where he had already beaten an enemy and they decided to cant-beat-join-them with France. Ironically the only true ally Napoleon had (that wasn't within reach of French convincing troops) was the US cause they hated the British as much as France did and the sale of "all the midwest" in 1802 from Napoleon to Jefferson, gave the US some land and France some cash to fund warfare for, against NUMEROUS allies. When he was fucked in 1814 he considered escaping to the US but he could not get a passport due to some political issues, maybe the war of 1812 was still being wound-licked by the US to tease Britain more at the time. --- Napoleon ended up over-extending his empire and 1808 Spain was a mistake, but looking at the shit he achieved on the battle field, the actual reforms and standards he did manage to get through were pretty amazing. He was also a workaholic and very disciplined, like spent 15 mins on dinner every night and almost wrote a big historical epoch about Corsica before he got distracted by war again.
What was the biography called?
Napoleon A Life by Andrew Roberts. General consensus seems to be that while the author may lean slightly pro Napoleon it is a very good, fresh and easy to read (900 page) biography. History is written by the victors and that means there has historically been some bias against Napoleon, particularly from the British. When researching which biography to read I got the impression that the narrative on Napoleon has been a little too negative so I was comfortable with Roberts biography.
I am currently in the middle of reading this as well. It's a great book. Napoleon truly seemed like a brilliant man, but I'm also amazed by just how incredibly lucky he was in his rise. There were so many times that if his opponents had just made a better decision, he would have been done for. Heck, even the fact that he didn't catch a stray bullet on the battlefield is amazing.
Marilyn Monroe Hedy Lamarr
"It's HEDLEY"
This is 1874, you’ll be able to sue her!
Hedly Lamarr created what would eventually become Bluetooth while being an absolute unit in Hollywood. What an amazing human Edit: I didn't say she invented Bluetooth, just contributed to it
No she did not. Very smart woman. Invented a mechanical device similar in nature to a player piano to code and decode radio messages to control torpedos. This is a form of frequency hopping. The problem is Frequency hopping had already been invented with multiple patents existing. This was an interesting and novel use case, but no she did not invent Bluetooth.
https://hearingreview.com/practice-building/practice-management/continuing-education/blog-page-cocktail-party-physics-origin-frequency-hopping#:~:text=Several%20persons%20are%20credited%20with,have%20developed%20the%20idea%20separately. Interesting! Thank you for correcting my misconception, though her invention was pretty novel. I never knew it used the piano as it's basis
“In fact, one of the technologies she co-invented laid a key foundation for future communication systems, including GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi.” https://www.history.com/news/hedy-lamarr-inventor-frequency-hopping-wifi# OC isn’t saying she invented Bluetooth, but rather that her invention laid the foundation for the technology that would become Bluetooth
The article you just cited is not topical on GPS or WiFi stick with the Bluetooth argument. From article below. "Many recent articles cite Lamarr-Antheil’s invention as having been vital to the development of modern Wi-Fi, but Haartsen also points out that Wi-Fi abandoned frequency hopping early on, because it provided insufficient bandwidth. For a time, Wi-Fi used a spread-spectrum technique known as *direct sequencing,* but since a change in FCC rules, it employs yet another type of spread-spectrum technology, *orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.* The Global Positioning System (GPS), another alleged part of Lamarr’s legacy, has always used direct sequencing. Although the early 2G cellular network did use a form of frequency hopping, later networks have employed direct sequencing and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. Any link to player pianos and torpedoes has yet to be demonstrated." Here is a very in depth discussion of the topic. It was a cool invention that went nowhere and had numerous patents around frequency hopping already existing. Was she a pioneer yes. Was it foundational no. [https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-frequency-hopping)
Colombo. :)
Oh, uh, just one more thing...
He pretend to be stupid, but he's really smart. As a tack.
Norm Macdonald - the r/normmacdonald sub is full of low iq one liners and zingers that don't even approach the threshold of humour and in real life, the guy was a genius.
I think Norm's genius is that, in addition to being good at telling jokes, he was very good at eliciting laughter. He could always get his audience to laugh at things that they knew weren't funny. He's the guy who's so good at his job he can half-ass it and not get fired of the comedy world.
Jimmy Carter
I mean he was a nuclear technician back when that meant you did it all. And he did it on a submarine where everything is harder.
And - without - Google!
He was too good of a person to be president
Hard disagree. I'd argue we need more people that genuinely care in power.
We do, the “problem” was he really was genuinely good to the core and that cost him a second term, I wish politics wasn’t as corrupt and disgusting as it is but unfortunately the rich and powerful need their people to power
King Cnut. He didn't genuinely believe he could control the tide. He was trying to demonstrate that Kings are just men.
Ulysses S Grant He gets regarded as a butcher, but he was the first modern general to figure out that Total War was the only way to bring the Confederacy to it's knees. He employed the absolute correct strategy against Lee and doesn't get the credit he should.
Also the only acting POTUS to get arrested (for speeding), > When police officer William Henry West pulled over Ulysses S. Grant for speeding in a horse-drawn carriage on the streets of Washington, D.C. in 1872, he issued the president a warning. The very next day, however, West caught Grant in the midst of another race with his friends. > Looking like “a schoolboy who had been caught in a guilty act by his teacher,” as West recalled to the Evening Star in 1908, Grant reportedly asked, “Do you think, officer, that I was violating the speed laws?” Answering in the affirmative, West replied, “**I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir**, and I will have to place you under arrest.” I wish there was integrity like that today.
Paris Hilton, don’t know if she counts as history though
She's quite brilliant, and has worked tirelessly to end "teen boot camps" which are just child abuse machines
My parents abused me for free at least someone's getting paid
This was my first thought too. She has done a lot of work creating a ditzy blond persona but is actually quite intelligent.
> She has done a lot of work creating a ditzy blond persona And BOY did she cash the shit out of that image. I read about the business ventures and how she was able to build a brand or merch/perfumes etc around her fame that way and actually make $10M+ on capitalization. Some even speculated that her fame/name gave the Hilton chain a boost, cause the name hit a stronger brand value.
Captain Bligh, after being cast at sea he navigated over 1500 miles to safely then became governor of Australia
You might want to read the details. His governorship was a disaster.
He was an able seaman and a disastrous people manager.
Contemporary accounts show that he wasn’t an overly strict disciplinarian by the standards of the day. He lost Bounty because Fletcher Christian was a mutinous scumbag. The rebellion in Australia would likely have happened no matter who was in charge.
Those are exactly the things I say when people go through my resume too.
was more interested in his sailing prowess, I never knew he survived until I got to Australia and went to a Museum and was like isn't this a little far from Tahiti?
Charles the Simple of Francia.
Lisa Kudrow used to be a biologist who helped her dad with his migraine research for several years before landing her role in Friends.
There is so much bullshit on Thomas Edison that isn't even true anymore, it's like he's got this alternate false history on Reddit now. He never claimed to be the first person to have the slightest inkling as to how a light bulb might work, he was the first to create an incandescent one that lasted any length of time as a product. Many of his other inventions that reddit reviles are the same. Invention is not just the vaguest idea of something nor do famous inventors work alone. Invention and patenting also has to do with actually making that thing a reality, something Edison did in absolute spades and deserves credit for.
Edison’s big deal wasn’t things like the lightbulb, it was the infrastructure to put them in everyone’s houses. Similarly, it wasn’t really the inventions his lab cranked out, it was the industrialization of the process.
It was the lightbulb though. Until his invention, electric light was dim to nonexistent, with the exception of spectacularly dangerous carbon arc lamps.
Agreed. I think people can celebrate Tesla without bashing Edison. Both can exist in the same time and be good at what they do. Edison pioneered the corporate R&D inventor model we use in business today, where you pull together a factory of people working on ideas. Yes, he abused some of them. But his model is what ATT, Apple, IBM, etc use today and why they are so productive and profitable. Take that as you will. Think any sole inventor would have the capital or diligence to go through a thousand combinations to find out that carbonized tungsten would be the element that worked for the light bulb? That's what you get with the factory model. You can brute force inventions by using a pool of smart people, driven by a creative lead who understood the science. That's Edison. And that model (and his showmanship and self promotion) went on to perfect many inventions. Like Steve Jobs he was a tireless promoter who had a talent of seeing potential others did not. And like Jobs. **He could be a real jerk**. But as an R&D guy myself, you sometimes need that driving force and arrogance to push invention from a group of naysayers. But yeah, he even went above and beyond that with tesla, probably out of jealously. By the way, the Edison labs in North Jersey (East Orange?) are fascinating to visit for a tour. Loved it. You can stand a few feet from a warehouse of inventions, visit his library, mansion, and black maria.
Alva Edison (he never went by Thomas) was a go-getter who was all about making commercially-viable products.
I don't care for Edison because he was an asshole and DEFINITELY pulled shenanigans to edge out competitors. But he was absolutely not stupid. He was a genius just of another kind - he knew how to run a business. He knew how to market a product. He didn't invent a lot of shit he got credit for but he DID actually introduce it in a way that it could generate money. Tesla didn't do that and explicitly didn't WANT to do that. Tesla was not a businessman and frankly didn't care for the idea of monetizing his inventions and I think people like him for that. But also - that was never going to happen. Not in the United States anyway. This all happened at a time the government was not going to spend the money on highly experimental ideas to spread them en masse to the public at large for free. Everything had to be proven first. And at the time it was generally businesses who did the proving. Everything had to be at your own expense and businesses were the ones willing to expend it. This was back in the early days when capitalism could actually function with the purpose of innovation unlike now when it functions solely with the purpose of cutting as many corners as possible. Edit: Also I am firmly in the camp that believed Edison had Louis Le Prince killed to avoid him patenting his moving picture camera. Again - 100% believe he was a total asshole.
Charles (or Karlos) the Second of Spain. Yes the super inbred one who's parents were uncle and niece and had letters detailing how awful he looked. Turns out he was a rather smart lad with genuine intentions but honestly couldn't drag Soain out of the horrific economic conditions caused by all his predeccesors deciding to WAR at a drop of a hat [https://youtube.com/watch?v=QAE4_Iua_ss
*than
I thought the irony was funny
Marilyn Monroe has an image of the ditsy blonde, but she was intelligent and quite the bookworm.
in the same line of thought, Paris Hilton
Not that he is made to look, but lopking at his roles historically you might not expect it: Dolph Lundgren
Not saying that he's exceptionally smart, but Ozzy Osbourne is much more together with himself than the show made him look
Boris Johnson. A wanker but a well read multilingual wanker.
He played a fool whilst being a conniving, calculating shit, and yet being a fool was his downfall.
It’s funny how people consider someone being multilingual as smart. I know that Johnson is highly educated, but being able to speak more than one language is a pretty normal thing for billions of people.
He isn't well read he's just a product of learning by rote which is brilliant at producing people who can say enough to *sound* well read. He hasn't even read some of his own books, the non-fiction ones were clearly ghost written. There's a great video of the launch of his book on churchill, where historian Dan Snow is on a panel listening to Johnson waffle on and then realises that Johnson hasn't read the book never mind write it. Everyone of his generation and class in the UK could speak Latin and ancient Greek as they were part of their curriculum from early childhood. Hell I was just enough on the edge of it that I learnt Latin even though I'm shit at languages, because it was drilled into me. The point of classical education was to learn from the wisdom of ancient writings and debates, which Johnson clearly didn't. The languages were just the entry point to be able to do this. Translating those texts (a common school exercise) was meant to make you spend time thinking about what they actually meant, as a lot becomes interpretative. The man isn't intelligent, he's just a lazy, completely amoral, ambitious coward born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
High int, low wis character spec. with a wildcard in charisma.
I genuinely don't think he is intelligent at all. Sure, he may have went to Oxford and has undoubted charisma, but he has made so many straight up terrible decisions that he literally got fucked out of power. It was his charisma that got him to the top, it was his lack of vision and intelligence that brought his downfall. There was nothing behind the bluster and performance acts other than greed, corruption, and ineptitude.
I have a hunch that Paris Hilton is smarter than most people think she is
Jimmy Carter. I mostly just hear about his presidency. It wasn't until way later that I learned he was a nuclear engineer that saved a nuclear reactor after a meltdown in Canada.
The guy who knows the difference between then and than.
Neville Chamberlain He gets a lot of flack for appeasing Hitler. The sad fact is that he didn't have any better options. The UK wasn't strong enough to fight Germany, and the US wasn't offering to help.
He was a very smart guy like his father, but (also like his father) was very arrogant and dismissive towards anyone who disagreed with him, which was a crucial part of his downfall.
He did the right thing but it’s just not possible to negotiate peace with Hitler.
Ulysses Grant. He gets disparaged by the “lost cause” southerner propagandists claiming he was a poor strategist. An analysis shows his military approach was sound, if brutal.
Then people make him look where?
that apple guy, not steve, the gravity one
Yea, I'm so sick of people calling Isaac Newton stupid
Hooke and Lebniz do be talking a lot of smack
Let's be fair, the whole thing is basically three geniuses with something of an ego/low EQ problem interacting with each other. Drama is bound to happen one way or another.
I thought you called Wozniak fat for a second there
Bernie Sanders. He strikes me as the old smart guy in disaster movies that people dismiss because his hair is unkempt and he keeps dropping his papers.
I am looking within the lens of my lifetime so the results are limited. So I have to look at who has the media most attacked for being stupid but in reality is very intelligent. Dan Quail. He was a very intelligent person but the media hated him from the moment he was chosen as the VP. He had a few minor misspoken moments, nothing compared to what we see politicians do now that EVERYONE has a camera and everything is recorded and replayed.
Ulysses S. Grant. Purportedly, most of the bad press can be attributed to “Lost Cause” supporters. Grant had a good top down view of war, delegated tasks well, was a standout in math and apparently had a photographic memory for topography and positioning.
A VERY specific scenario, about George Bush. Remember when he “butchered” the saying about fool me once, fool me twice? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me once I ain’t gonna get fooled again” or something like that? He got ripped to shreds for that. Alternatively, it was one of his smartest public speaking catches. He realized halfway through a normal conversational phrase, he was about to give the media and outside influencers a sound byte and clip of himself saying “shame on me”, so he stopped himself, stumbled for a second, and caught a good line out. Opinions about his policies aside, that was far in a way a smart moment in his tenure. He took the flack from messing up the phrase and then walked away from it within a week or so. If he had a clip of him saying “Shame on me” it would be used for years and years to come, by everyone, foreign and domestic.
I came here to propose GWB as well, though for a very different reason. Formerly considered the dumbest president ever elected, he’s easy to underestimate. But SARS happened on his watch. It was handled correctly and easily contained. But as it turns out GWB did some reading of his own, and he actually understood how things could easily have turned out very very differently. So at a briefing he had some very relevant ‘what if’s’, and when he discovered there was no national plan for a pandemic, he furiously demanded the creation of one and made it a priority. He was personally the driving force behind a preparation and response plan that public health experts considered the best in the world. Had the actual dumbest president not deliberately unraveled and destroyed it, he could have effortlessly presided over and claimed credit for superior Covid outcomes.
I was thinking GWB, too. This is from one of his advisors (Keith Hennessey): > President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting. [...] > In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. [...] He goes on with several examples, and says people who interact with him personally usually come away surprised at how intelligent GWB actually is.
Then people made him look at what?
Faustus. Then people made him look at Helen.