OK, finally got through reading all the 200+ e-mails on my “Talking to the Plumber” piece. Impossible to reply to more than a fraction, but I thank everyone for writing. Some notes jotted while reading:

• My remark that: “It’s a pity there isn’t some way to forcibly mix them with their fellow citizens at some point in their cosseted young adulthood, so that they might at least have a shot at learning how to talk across the I.Q. gap; but in a free society, there is no way to do that …” inspired several people to tell me that there is a way to do that — the draft.
I certainly agree that the structure and comradeship of military life is just the ticket for getting different sorts of people to know & communicate with each other.
I just can’t see how a draft is compatible with a free society. Of course, we trade off bits of our personal liberty for all sorts of higher goods (national survival in wartime, for instance), and maybe there’s a case for doing that here. I just don’t see it happening. Among the strongest in opposition would be the Joint Chiefs …
Worth noting too, in this context, that the military is now the only organization in our society permitted to screen applicants by IQ. They call it the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), but results correlate with IQ at some high level. The military does not want dumb soldiers. Why would they? I believe the current cutoff is around IQ 90.• Many other readers offered the following as good training for getting along with anyone at all: small country towns, and churches. I’d go some way with both, though noting that (1) the great meritocratic vacuum cleaner sucks up smart people from small towns as fast as it can, so the civilizing effect has less time to work its magic, and (2) if church membership is effective in giving cognitive elites the common touch, how come it didn’t work for the Obamas?• Amazing to see that IQ deniers are still among us in force. “IQ measures nothing but the ability to score well on IQ tests …” etc. etc. Nope: IQ is a good predictor (better than parental income, location, sex, race, or religion) of success in life. Though probably not as good as The Bell Curve says — there’s a recent discussion on Gene Expression.
And I did not, as several readers mis-read, rest all on IQ. Nobody would do that. I said: “Of the deciding factors, by far the largest is intelligence.” That’s a true statement. Here is a set of numbers: 0.017, 0.033, 0.002, 0.094, 0.025, 0.000, 0.031. By far the largest is 0.094, even though it’s less than one-tenth.
You folk should at least try to read The Bell Curve.• I write (several readers grumble) as if I were myself not a member of the cognitive elite. Yet obviously I’m a terrifically smart guy, writing books about math and stuff. Shouldn’t I include myself among them?
All I can say to that is I definitely don’t feel myself to be one of them. I don’t share any cog-elite tastes or have any close friends up there. I live in a 3-bedroom house on a sixth of an acre, own two cars registered in 1993 and 1997 respectively, and … well …
Definitely more gate than castle, anyway. Probably the key here is just age. The real cognitive stratification didn’t get going till I was an adult, so I feel sort of hors de combat. (Is that an elite-type expression? Sorry. Means “out of the combat.”) Though I guess I was part of the early meritocracy-building stage. Of all my extended-family members I know, which is several dozen people, some plainly smarter than me, I was only the second (by a couple of years) to go to college.• Numerous readers reminded me of Bill Buckley’s famous remark that: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” So would I. What we want in our rulers is wisdom, which is not the same thing as smarts. Extremely smart people can be very foolish, it’s a well-known fact. I’ve written about it: “First let me note that as well as being too dumb to vote, you can also be too smart to vote. People of very high intelligence are especially susceptible to large abstract theories about society. They live lives, and think thoughts, that put a wide gulf between themselves and the generality of citizens. Carry out the following thought experiment. Suppose that in, say, 1920 the U.S. franchise had been limited to citizens holding a Ph.D. What would the consequences have been? Is there any doubt that we should have had a Soviet America in very short order, and that we should right now be digging ourselves out of the same pit the poor Russians find themselves in? “It seems to me, in fact, that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with other kinds. At the very highest levels of intelligence, the correlation may actually be inverse: the more brilliant you are, the dumber your politics. Albert Einstein seems to have thought well of Stalin; Hitlerism got its first mass following in the highly-selective German universities. And think — without smiling, if you can — of the barmy political programs that issued forth, with such confidence, from Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Norman Mailer and other members of the mid-20th-century preposterentsia, as exposed in withering detail in Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals.”The converse does not seem to me to be true, though. Dumb people are never wise.
In fact, the correlation between intelligence and wisdom is an interesting topic. My own guess is that the greatest reservoir of wisdom is in the +1 to +2 standard deviation range, which would be IQ scores 115-130. Much above that, various kinds of personality weirdness start to kick in, along of course with the kind of insensitive arrogance I was writing about. Much below that, you can’t cope with the quantity of information you need to take in if you want to make wise decisions nowadays. (Though I think that’s a feature of this complicated modern world — 100 years or so ago, effective wisdom probably pooled somewhat lower, perhaps even around the IQ-100 mean.)• Several readers referred to Mr. Deresiewicz (the guy who couldn’t talk to his plumber) as a friend of mine. I don’t know why they thought that. Funny how people read things. I never heard of Mr. Deresiewicz until reading his article on Arts & Letters Daily, have never met him, don’t particularly want to meet him, and have no difficulty talking to my plumber. Who drives a much nicer car than mine.