"The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people."
Attributed to Stephen Hawking.
This suggests a triangular relation in the form of "The thing about X is that they seem like Y to Z", where X, Y, and Z are smart, dumb, and crazy people respectively.
- The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.
- The thing about crazy people is that they seem like smart people to dumb people.
- The thing about smart people is that they seem like dumb people to crazy people.
- The thing about dumb people is that they seem like smart peoople to crazy people.
- The thing about dumb people is that they seem like crazy people to smart people.
- The thing about crazy people is that they seem like dumb people to smart people.
Mind: other than being symmetric, this probably isn't very useful or particularly accurate.
It presumes that members of one class will always misattribute the members of another class as the third. (And not their own.) There's really no reason to believe this. And that there are only three operative classes of people. (Everyone knows that there are in fact 10 types of people. ...)
Though i think there's a certain poetic truth:
Dumb people tend to view intelligence as insanity, and are often persuaded by the insane (or manipulative).
Crazy people have a tendency to rail against the stupidity of the intelligent, and see intelligence in the stupid.
And smart people may mistake stupidity for insanity and vice versa.
There's a deeper question of just what divisions around intelligence are. Etymology is not dispositive, but it is insightful, and one finds that "smart" relates to rapid and effective execution, "crazy" from "crazed" meaning cracked or broken, and various terms for a lack of intelligence being "slow" or "dull".
There's the distinction between smart (or synonyms intelligent, wise, or genius) with informed or educated. "Stupid" is not the same as "ignorant" (the latter is cured by information and education, the former is insensitive to both). And there's a distinction between being insensitive to instruction vs. interpreting it irrationally (crazy).
