People think of intelligence as some sort of magic. They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential.
But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the start line.
If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts. Basically your life is going around meeting people and getting them to either invest or build something or buy something. Is it useful to be smart? Sure. But it isn't as useful as, say, having the right connections from school, or a family with a sensible budget so you can concentrate on building rather than finding food.
Pretty much the only area where being super smart works is pure maths, and even there you really want to be born in the parts of the world where the economy can support a young person on that path.
Then there's the transmission to suit your engine. A super smart person still needs to be mature enough to consume the intellectual royal jelly that develops them towards where they will make the greatest contribution. You won't just know what to do just because you're smart, you need to be shown what the interesting problems are. You need to have motivation, and motivation is often what you actually see when you meet someone impressive.
The way I think of it, the smart and useful people are plenty. Courses are taught so that universities can get a sensible number of people through some amount of content. Being smarter than your average student at a prestigious college is nice, but it mostly buys you some free time. Being at the cutoff is terribly stressful, but that guy is still pretty accomplished and useful for most things that we consider elite.
I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc.
The transmission is another great analogy, IMHO for communication skills. Applying full power to the tarmac from a dead stop is a great way to spin your tires.
> I like the car analogy for IQ. Having an engine with 50% or more horsepower above the people around you is only useful if you know how to handle it, how to steer, etc.
And its not useful at all in a typical traffic situation, you are still limited to the speed of the one in front of you. Intelligence is only useful in environments that allows it to be, but most places are designed for typical people.
In some cases it even comes with similar outcomes on mood and mental health to what I imagine being stuck in traffic all day every day would do to a person
The very notion of IQ reduces the mind to a receptacle for some ineffable thing called 'intelligence'. One may as well have a CQ - Comedy Quotient and start speculating who has a higher GQ - Robin Williams or Dave Chapelle.
> They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential.
By just applying some common sense it is obvious how absurd this statement is (and I thus rather have difficulties understanding how people can come to such a hypothesis):
Just look at your daily life: how much highly intellectual or academic content (for the latter: e.g. lecture recordings of complicated scientific lectures) do you watch on YouTube? If not: which kind of content do you then watch on YouTube?
This should make it insanely obvious which kinds of people are influential and which ones are not.
Most of life is like a 100m race where it's allowed to turn up and start early.
ie anybody can easily beat Usain Bolt by just starting a few seconds before him.
There are some things which are perhaps a bit more like the highjump - where I'm never going to beat the worlds best no matter how many attempts I do - however these kind of things are very much the exception, not the rule.
Most fields which are like highjumps have considerable incentives to develop tools to aid in performance. Even the greatest high jumper can't beat a muggle with a ladder, after all. Nor is any weightlifter a match for a forklift.
I supposedly have an iq of 140+ (I don't believe it though) and there's been two experiences where I've been in the presence of someone that just blew me out of the water. (Fellow graduate students in my program)
I don't think I'm that far away intelligently from my friends and other people, but these far outliers were amazing. Not alien, but almost.
It would be highly surprising if it was any different, given that books have not been around long enough for us to begin to adapt to their existence in an evolutionary manner. They'll be long gone before we could have.
I also doubt that "social smart" and "book smart" are fundamentally different things. Just that different people have different sensors with different sensitivities, and different noise tolerances when operating with different types of information.
consider that books were designed by us, to benefit us. They are inherently optimized to accelerate what we define as book smarts, because that is what we designed them to do. Or another way, book smarts had always existed - its perhaps simply formal knowledge. But the tool (books) has been so effective at doing so that we replace the term knowledge with "books smarts". Books in that sense are perhaps the result of our evolution not the other way around.
This seems like a very flat view of intelligence. In my mind a sufficiently intelligent person isn't just "good at math" and is capable of understanding the landscapes you've laid out above and would also understand how to improve in them and to navigate them, assuming they're sufficiently motivated. Even then, intelligent people are better at parsing themselves, their own drives, knowing what they want and are motivated by and move towards it. I also think many of the most intelligent people I know are (gasp) extremely mature as well, as if those often go hand-in-hand.
This sort of feels like a cope-comment trying to say that smart people aren't ACTUALLY smart, but I'm not sure the motivation for that.
Hear Hear! If you have the Social Intelligence and work hard to cultivate relationships you can become President of the United States, even if you think you have a good idea to stop a respiratory virus by injecting disinfectant.
But why should that be? If you're a scientist, you are dependent on getting funding to do experiments, and the experiment showing something interesting. Neither of these things is very connected to intelligence, beyond that low IQ people will not be likely to get to the start line.
If you're an entrepreneur, you also have to do a bunch of things that are more social than smarts. Basically your life is going around meeting people and getting them to either invest or build something or buy something. Is it useful to be smart? Sure. But it isn't as useful as, say, having the right connections from school, or a family with a sensible budget so you can concentrate on building rather than finding food.
Pretty much the only area where being super smart works is pure maths, and even there you really want to be born in the parts of the world where the economy can support a young person on that path.
Then there's the transmission to suit your engine. A super smart person still needs to be mature enough to consume the intellectual royal jelly that develops them towards where they will make the greatest contribution. You won't just know what to do just because you're smart, you need to be shown what the interesting problems are. You need to have motivation, and motivation is often what you actually see when you meet someone impressive.
The way I think of it, the smart and useful people are plenty. Courses are taught so that universities can get a sensible number of people through some amount of content. Being smarter than your average student at a prestigious college is nice, but it mostly buys you some free time. Being at the cutoff is terribly stressful, but that guy is still pretty accomplished and useful for most things that we consider elite.