Quote Originally Posted by JMS View Post
There is also the brand of smarts known as good old horse sense. I have known my share of college graduates totally lacking in this most crucial type of intelligence.
I've been doing biomedical basic research field for over 15 years and have worked with, trained, collaborated with etc. a ton of different scientists. Some do have excellent common "horse" sense, in fact the best ones always do. Others do not have good common sense. I think that the ones who took a stint outside of academia for a while and lived in the real world outside of school maybe have a bit more common sense than the others, but its really variable. So I think its hard to generalize about scientists, they are as varied as any other group of people.

Unfortunately a lot of people think of Jerry Lewis as a prototype of what a scientist is like. Laaaady, laaaaaady! Unfortunately, this nerd image (and perhaps having frog dissections as the traditional intro to science in grade school) has really turned off a great many American students who might have made great discoveries had they looked science as a career.

OK done with my rant, and my attempt to steer this thread further off topic.