Pattern recognition is somewhat frowned upon....

The interesting thing is that most of the people who exhibit high level pattern recognition skills in school tend to be moved out of gen pop and into a separate class.

Pattern recognition is somewhat frowned upon…. The interesting thing is that most of the people who exhibit high level pattern recognition skills tend to be moved out of gen pop and into a separate class. There are entire programs and funding surrounding this. Most say it's so they don't get bored. But that's not really why.

If you're looking for recruits, you have to keep the potential recruits away from the rest so their thought processes aren't tainted with the ability to abstract. (Abstracting very young is a sign of a very high IQ - and IQ is the metric attached to identifying who needs to be separated from the other children.)

After that, the ones who respond well to carrot/stick enticement surrounding ego attachment, namely accolades, are boosted up and told how intelligent they are... while the ones who do their own thing are systematically shunned because they are more difficult to control.

Caveat: This doesn't mean they're more intelligent than the others who are able to abstract at a young age - it means they are more apt to be led about by the nose if you give them money or an embossed official-looking piece of paper or a paperweight in the form of a trophy that tells them how impressive they are.

They like to know from outside of themselves exactly how impressive they are... to the point where not hearing how impressive they are maybe makes them feel just a little bit empty until the next time they hear it. Few learn that the way to fix that emptiness is to supply self-love from the inside.

They become addicted to the five second dopamine rush "earning" a glorified paperweight provides. They chase the next accomplishment fix.

The ones who aren't so easily swayed are less useful if you're trying to assemble a group of people who will do what you tell them.

Who moves forward? The ones who set a path to chomping up accolades like so many little dopamine-inducing Pac pellets. Their chomping is reinforced by the offering of additional paper and paperweights.

Stop playing along? No more accolades.

Want to keep the person playing along whether they agree or not, whether they notice the patterns or not? Withhold the accolades until they capitulate.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And everyone else follows along with them - they must be the brightest because they're the ones receiving the accolades. Must be. That's how it works, right? Who decides who is the best? Who decides who receives the accolades? Who decides whose research is notable, who is worthy of being published, whose ideas are the right kinds of ideas to promote and whose are wrong? Who gets to choose who gets the special pieces of paper and the paperweights?

Who are the people who unquestioningly push whatever doctrine comes down from the people who hand out the accolades?

The ones receiving the accolades.

How do cult leaders choose their targets? They target the ones who identify themselves by their intelligence who are also ambitious and led by praise. These people more easily get other people to follow them like lemmings. Like the Pied Piper. Right off a cliff.

Are you noticing a pattern yet?

I know. That's difficult when you've been taught it's not your job to look for patterns. Just trust the experts. They'll see the patterns for you and tell you exactly what you should do. If you see a pattern, just ignore it - you're not bright enough to do that for yourself. How dare you think you can think.... What's wrong with you? I'm not listening to you until you show me your accolades.........

Want to find the real smartest person in the room? It's the autodidact, if for no other reason than that the autodidact didn't have to rail against indoctrination. No one was offering this person accolades for what they did. They just kept learning because they were interested and thought it was what they ought to do. There was no up hill battle. Just the raw joy of learning, understanding, accomplishing, tackling challenges... from a place of self-motivation. Not from a need to feed the accolade addiction.