Feigning Intelligence: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 5 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.8
(Rescuing 5 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.8) |
|||
| (12 intermediate revisions by 6 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"When in doubt, look intelligent!"''
|'''Garrison Keillor'''}}
The opposite of [[Obfuscating Stupidity]]: A stupid character pretends (or tries to pretend) he or she is really smart or otherwise good at something. When done with pure romance in mind, the result is [[Playing Cyrano]]. The stupid characters will either enlist a smart character to feed them lines, or bluff their way through with [[Seemingly-Profound Fool|seemingly profound statements]] ("What is art? Are we Art? Is Art Art?") and [[Techno Babble]].
Line 13 ⟶ 14:
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Ninin ga Shinobuden]]'' has Onsokumaru, who pretends to be an expert ninja, despite obviously being one of the stupidest characters on the show.
Line 20:
== Film ==
* Liz Hurley's character in [[The Film of the Series]] of ''[[My Favorite Martian (film)|My Favorite Martian]]'' is a [[
* Played straight for most of the 2006 remake of ''[[The Pink Panther]]''... mostly. As an example, after hearing a murder victim's last words were "Oh, it's you!", Clouseau orders all people in the city with the name "Yu" to be detained for interrogation. Naturally, he's saddled up with a Chinese woman rattling off in Chinese. After the interrogation, his partner asks if he can even understand Chinese. Clouseau acts all offended and replies something along the lines of "Do you think I would do all this if I didn't understand Chinese?". {{spoiler|Seeing as he's been
** Clousseau doesn't pretend to be intelligent, he actually believes he's this massively skilled badass, though granted, when his beliefs betray him [[I Meant to Do That|he will try to play it off as on purpose.]]
* Otto in ''[[A Fish Called Wanda]]'', who liberally quotes Nietzsche. Wanda manages to see through his pretensions by the midpoint of the movie.
Line 54:
* ''[[The Suite Life of Zack and Cody]]'': London hires Maddie to help her pull [[Playing Cyrano]] on a hot merit scholar, Trevor. The plan backfires when Maddie can't restrain herself from getting into a debate over politics with him, culminating in a [[Slap Slap Kiss]]. Fortunately, London seems more confused than hurt.
* ''[[Drake and Josh]]'': Drake gets Josh to help him cheat on an academic game show to impress an [[Nerds Are Sexy|attractive genius]]. [[Hilarity Ensues]], leading to the good ol' [[Be Yourself]] [[An Aesop|Aesop]]... which, in this case, would mean, "[[Family-Unfriendly Aesop|I don't care about what's inside. I like you because you're cute]]."
* "Aaaaaah, Bach!" In an early episode of ''[[
** Incidentally, the book ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120311193218/http://www.ovalbooks.com/bluff/Music.html The Bluffer's Guide to Music]'' recommends that exact phrase.
* In ''[[The Muppet Show]]'', Sam the Eagle may constantly seek some culture in the show, but considering he thinks [[Ludwig Van Beethoven|Beethoven]] was a playwright, it's obvious he doesn't know the first thing about culture.
* In ''[[Doctor Who]]'', [[The Nth Doctor|the Tenth Doctor stated to his younger incarnation]] that he wore his glasses not because he needed them, but because it made him look clever. Of course, the Doctor is very smart to begin with, [[There Is No Such Thing as Notability|but still.]]
** It has also been theorized that the Tenth Doctor, who frequently claims himself to be clever, is double-
** The Doctor has been getting into trouble by pretending to be more knowledgeable than he actually is since ''The Aztecs'' in 1964.
* Maxwell Smart from the ''[[Get Smart]]'' series did this all the time, to everyone. He didn't always have someone to help him feign competence either, and on those occasions got found out quite quickly.
Line 80:
== Webcomics ==
* [[Subverted Trope|Subverted]] in ''[[Bob and George]]'': Mega Man did this by making up a totally random and [[Techno Babble]]-filled solution to the series' [[Timey-Wimey Ball|major time-line issues]], and, totally by accident, made a discovery worthy of a Nobel prize. He thought everybody else was just making fun of him.
* In ''[[Dilbert]]'' the [[Pointy-Haired Boss]] does this, of course. Usually [http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17 it's not hard to tell].
* ''[[Misfile]]''. Debate continues on whether Rumisiel is genuinely admitting
* [http://xkcd.com/451/ This] ''[[xkcd]]'' comic tries to ''quantify'' this, by the time span during which you can get away with faking competence on different topics.
* ''[[The Noob]]'' had "Sir Darkblade Wolfeyes Orcbane Raislin de Urden von Strudel" from a Roleplayers' Guild explaining what "Deus Ex Machina" is [http://www.thenoobcomic.com/
== Web Original ==
Line 92 ⟶ 93:
'''Simmons:''' Yes. }}
* [http://www.xkcdb.com/?5414 This] ''[[xkcd]]'' chat quote demonstrating what a politician trying to get away with knowing little outside of rehearsed "hot topics" can run into.
* ''Clients From Hell'' have a lot of such folk. For example, [https://web.archive.org/web/20160310232346/http://clientsfromhell.net/post/129564913392/this-story-was-when-i-was-training-in-system this]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160514173548/http://clientsfromhell.net/post/117513069141/me-ive-shared-some-files-with-you-via-google Or this]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20151101120816/http://clientsfromhell.net/post/264965276/internet-expert People] from [https://web.archive.org/web/20160310210205/http://clientsfromhell.net/post/128558566103/i-provided-website-hosting-for-a-client-and-made marketing] seem to be particularly prone to such an act. And [https://web.archive.org/web/20170222083505/http://clientsfromhell.net/post/133004049262/while-putting-together-a-flyer-for-a-local-social sometimes] it's hard to tell whether you see an attempt to cover ignorance, evidence of patchy learning or obliviousness in action.
* Nassim Nicholas Taleb described the self-important variety of [[Know-Nothing Know-It-All|pseudointellectuals]] as ''[https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 The Intellectual Yet Idiot]''.
{{quote| their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. }}
* ''[//fakescience.org/ fakescience.org]'' parodies the "educational" posters. Some of this advice is technically true, but still foolish:
{{quote|With just a ''little'' hard work, you can actually '''train your cats''' to do '''whatever they feel like doing'''. [http://fakescience.org/post/182271795455/training-cats] }}
== Western Animation ==
* In one ''[[Homestar Runner]]'' cartoon, Strong Bad tries to get Homestar to say something intelligent, even dressing him up with a lab coat, glasses, and a test tube. ("Check it out, Strong Bad, I look a-smart!" "You sure do, stupid.") However, Homestar managed to turn it around on him and get Strong Bad to say something stupid.
{{quote|'''Homestar''':"The Grumblecakes will be ''mine!''"}}
* [[The Simpsons (animation)|Homer Simpson]] chooses to wear a pair of nerd glasses that were dropped in the toilet by Henry Kissinger. Unbeknownst to Homer, Mr. Burns then assumes he's an egghead and decides not to fire him during a round of job cuts.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* One of the reasons thought to have contributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates' execution was that he went around pissing off people in power (such as politicians, and, more drastically, religious figures) off by asserting they were doing this.
* There are known garbage texts that can pass as "scientific" in nonsense-rich environments and really made it to the respective journals or conferences... Including automatically generated ones. If you want to hunt impostor "scientists" in comfort using a robot decoy
** ''Social Text'' published ''Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'' article (It claimed to be about using quantum theories of gravity to stick it to The Man) which turned out to be a parody made of statements specifically designed to be a solipsist nonsense and logically disconnected claims.
** WMSCI 2005 accepted an article ''Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy'', which is a pile of robot-generated garbage. Then guys went to that conference, held a "technical" session and with straight faces gave ''several more'' randomly generated garbage speeches. [http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ There's a story, papers, movie]
** [http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ Here] you can get random Postmodernism texts online, and even permanent links <ref>randseed-based, obviously</ref> to the particular essay, if you liked it.
** Gender Studies may be the lowest-hanging fruit of them all, but Boghossian and Lindsay hoax "paper" [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/authors-nonsense-posing-academic-scholarship-published-peer-reviewed-journal-1623027] [http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-penis-is-a-social-construct] in supposedly peer reviewed ''Cogent Social Sciences'' journal (claiming that Penises Cause Global Warming) wasn't even pseudo-philosophical drivel, just gibberish interspersed with bogus "references", produced by Postmodern Generator and manually edited to make it ''more'' nonsensical.
{{quote|After finishing the paper, Boghossian and Lindsay said they both read it "to ensure it didn't say anything meaningful".}}
** For a comparative study, ''Science'' performed e-mail carpet bombing with [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full 304 variations of a spoof paper].
* Any agenda-based statistics study. I.e. if they're paid to prove a causal link exists instead of determine if one does, they will use this.
* There is a psychological term for feigning intelligence. This is called [[wikipedia:Illusory superiority|illusory superiority]] and is a cognitive bias that makes people overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and underestimate their negative ones relative to others.
| |||