In the USA it is considered a good thing to find where your talents are and to pursue that as a goal. This can be misleading. For example lets us say you notice that you are not very good in mathematics. But in other of subjects you are a lot better. So you find yourself in a group of people following a course load in some soft subject. The tendency will be to think you simply have found yourself with group of people that have a different set of talents. You do not immediately suspect the truth that that whole group has a low IQ and that the reason you are better in that than in math is because you found yourself with bunch of dumbbells.
The issue of self deception comes into play here. Just take for a hypothetical example. You are in a Physics class in university and notice that everyone else in class in doing better than you. So you get discouraged and switch to psychology and immediately notice than you are doing better than anyone else in class. Does that mean that now you have found your real calling and talents? Or does it mean that psychology students have the lowest IQ of anyone else in universities and Physics students have the highest? [The answer we already know. But the point is that this example can be applied to other areas.]
You can use this example to explain why in the religious world a lot of people like to consider themselves as being particularly smart. And like to convince others of this "fact". This comes from a certain degree of self deception. Even being able to memorize a lot of things in the Talmud does not make one smart. Smartness at least as understood as being able to figure out complicated stuff has nothing to do with how much work you put into something nor with memory.
The issue of self deception comes into play here. Just take for a hypothetical example. You are in a Physics class in university and notice that everyone else in class in doing better than you. So you get discouraged and switch to psychology and immediately notice than you are doing better than anyone else in class. Does that mean that now you have found your real calling and talents? Or does it mean that psychology students have the lowest IQ of anyone else in universities and Physics students have the highest? [The answer we already know. But the point is that this example can be applied to other areas.]
You can use this example to explain why in the religious world a lot of people like to consider themselves as being particularly smart. And like to convince others of this "fact". This comes from a certain degree of self deception. Even being able to memorize a lot of things in the Talmud does not make one smart. Smartness at least as understood as being able to figure out complicated stuff has nothing to do with how much work you put into something nor with memory.
