How Do You Define Intelligence?
Almost every Sunday, we meet with my father and his wife for an afternoon glass of wine. It’s Savennieres or Meursault in the spring and summer and the occasional rosé in the fall. In the winter we abandon the porch for the comforts of the inside because we are from the south and our temperaments are incompatible with any temperature below sixty degrees. With the weather not a consideration, it’s whatever sounds good. Maybe whiskey.
Before any of you Yankees make fun of us for running from the moderate to slightly cold, I challenge you to last an hour or so in an Alabama August day with ninety-plus-degree heat and humidity that makes walking through cheesecake seem breezy. You are inured to what you are used.
The congregation, in addition to my father and I and both of our wives, is a mix and match of my brother, his girlfriend, and our kids. We talk about what the kids are up to, what we’ve been doing over the course of the week, book and tv recommendations, and then we discuss whatever comes to mind.
A recurring subject is the nature of intelligence. What makes a person smart?
It’s not exactly a salon on dad’s porch because we let the nine- and fifteen-year-old chime in but the company – I’ve mentioned my less than credentialed academic career on these pages so count me out – is well educated. Swatting mosquitoes out there is a BA from Princeton and one from Duke, a couple of JDs, a medical doctor, and an MFA.
These are people that consider and argue.
I’ve separated the qualities I think are relevant into three categories, but I should note that I’m not expecting anyone to accept this article as definitive or to believe that I think anything here written to be so. These are musings and thoughts I’ve been tossing around for some time now, bounced off of people I respect, and refined as those people critiqued and offered their own ideas.
First there is knowledge. I consider this the ability to collect and retain information. It has to be paired with curiosity to be effective, but I’m considering the ability more than any driving urge. To a lot of people this is the end-all. It’s the making of a Jeopardy champion, but I’ve known too many absent-minded professor types to let this be the end-all.
After knowledge, I think there’s an understanding of how to properly deploy that knowledge to a useful purpose. This is how I see problem solving. It requires a well of information but also an originality of thought to look at the issue at hand and arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
The last of the three is cleverness. We’ve all met people that take in the mood of a room or the motivations of a person and find a way to turn that impression toward his or her advantage. It’s quite a gift, but like the other two, it can’t stand alone as a definition. I think we’ve all met someone who we’d otherwise consider an idiot but possesses base cunning and can manipulate people in ways that are unexpected.
I’m of the opinion that intelligence is a combination of at least two of the above categories.
I’ve had a friend since eighth grade. She was a terrible student. My school was grades five through twelve, but you couldn’t just pass and graduate to ninth grade. After eighth, you basically had to reapply. The rumor was that she made it on to high school because her dad plunked down a huge pile of cash and intimated to the headmaster that he was considering sending her younger siblings and all that tuition money to a rival school. In high school I wrote a ton of papers for her. She was an academic wreck.
But she was who you went to for advice on all non-academic subjects. Now she’s CEO of a local company that, though a boutique operation, just went national and to judge by her counter tops she’s doing just fine financially. Her husband is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. He’s got a PHD in theoretical mathematics and he’s explained his field to me several times and I’m still not quite certain what he studied. He’s taught at three universities and the two of them discuss the world as equals. Bad at the knowledge collecting, but I consider her extremely smart.
People are going to come to different conclusions. My group of Sunday wine drinkers certainly do. The JDs think it an ability to form a cogent argument and defend it. Why not? That’s their bailiwick. In a similar “this is what I do” vein, the MD goes with a combination of knowledge and understanding and sums it up as diagnosis. There’s a fine case for that. The MFA agrees. She writes and edits, and to her having knowledge and knowing how to use that knowledge is the measuring stick.
I’d nod toward any of those and hand out laurels, but I’ve noticed more and more that smart people are funny people.
This isn’t to say that a guy that makes a really convincing fart noise by squeezing his hands together is an Einstein. I’m talking about people who can hear something and quickly respond with a bon mot or a sharp one liner.
As a consoling lady-that-lunches said on The Simpson’s after a sharp put down was delivered, “Don’t worry, Marge. Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing.” You have to be fast. There is no esprit de l’escalier allowed.
A good sense of humor requires an agility with information, language, an ability to spot absurdity, and the wherewithal to point it out.
I’ve been having this conversation, as I said, for years and my conclusions have been promiscuous. I’d love to hear competing or confirming opinions in the comments.
I think, like, there are a *LOT* more types than just 3.
I mean, if we were talking “fitness”, there’s the ability to lift heavy weights. There’s the ability to lift smaller weights multiple, multiple times. There’s the ability to run really fast. There’s the ability to run really far. There’s the ability to do a cartwheel. Charles McIlvaine famouslywas able to eat mushrooms that others considered poisonous.
And, like, I’m sure I missed a couple dozen more.
If I were to add categories for intelligence, I’d have to include stuff like:
There are two kinds of spatial intelligence. “Rotate a cube in your head” sort of stuff. You are looking at a regular die from Las Vegas. The faces of the 3 and the 5 are showing (the 3 is on the left) and the pips of the 3 are in the upper leftmost and lower rightmost corners. How many pips are on the face of the die that is on top?
Or be able to imagine a map in your head and navigate in your head on this map.
The whole “math” thing in your head. The ability to write clean code. The ability to create a low-res version of another person and have a conversation with him or her or them or whatever.
The ability to notice when something isn’t right with the outcome of a test! Oh my gosh, we had testers who just ran through the numbers and just handed in the form with 0s on every line and we had testers who were able to say “I think the file system permissions were messed up after the update.” Of course, the latter were the ones who got promoted…
And, like, I’m sure I missed a couple dozen more.Report
When we had Bug tested back in September, they tested for 6 or 8 kinds of intelligence and admitted that there was more they could test for, but that would take a lot longer.
The results were interesting and enlightening.Report
What I would add to the essay is to note how much physical ability influences intelligence. For example, there is the famous statue called The Thinker, where a man is seated, intensely focused and concentrating.
This is how many people think of intelligence, that the body and mind are separate and the problem is solved simply by the application of cognitive ability.
The thinker conceptualizes a real life problem into an abstract set of symbols and statements, and furiously grinds the gears of logic to produce some sort of conclusion.
But consider how utterly inadequate this is, what it is missing.
Think of the person who first tied a knot in string, which is the basis of nets and clothing.
Did the invention come about by sitting motionless, intensely thinking? Of course not.
It isn’t possible to conceptualize the tying of a knot unless you have a deeply intimate knowledge of string. How string feels, how it behaves, the way it slips through the fingers, that it is strong in tension and weak in compression.
Our bodies are part of our intelligence. Muscle control and memory, and hand-eye coordination are essential tools that complement and are prerequisites of what we call intelligence.Report
I find I do all of my best thinking while exercising, and running in particular. Many of my employers’ legal questions have been answered on the trail.Report
The best definition of intelligence vs. stupidity I’ve ever seen was from filmmaker Errol Morris (though he’d probably say he didn’t come up with it personally, it’s where I first heard it). He said something along the lines of “a stupid person hears/reads someone who knows more than they do about a subject, and assumes they are stupid because of that”. I believe it’s somewhere in Errol’s blogs on NYT, which are worth a read if you haven’t seen them before.
(this link goes to a blog post that has all five of the blog posts linked in one spot) http://www.caitlinburke.com/blog/2013/01/07/errol-morris-on-dunning-kruger-and-other-blind-spots/Report
This reminds me of someone trying to evaluate a young and rather troublesome me to my parents by breaking down the difference between intelligence and clever, genius and ingenious.Report
There is no doubt intelligence has many factors and what they are is a good debate. Seems like the only people who think intell is simple and one factor are the IQ weirdos who think you can define the whole shebang with one number. There verbal intelligence which is only lightly connected to actually knowing or understanding any damn thing. The best example of this are lawyers who can argue any point well even when everybody knows they don’t have any facts or case. This is partially a stereotype of lawyers but there is something to. The same intell is shown in politics where talking heads can construct an argument without using any facts or with knowingly false facts but fly forward anyway.
Before anything else any halfway smart person will recognize the Dunning Kruger effect coming for them. We are all ignorant of many things. Some of this is just facts/knowledge gaps and some is the inability to think through things in certain subject areas. Intelligence is at least a little bit knowing when you don’t know enough to have an idea so you listen and learn. Shutting up is evidence of intelligence.
A well known theory of multiple intells was by a psych named Gardner. He had seven multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal, and he has since added naturalist intelligence.
There are other ideas like this but i think he covered it well. I also agree very much with Chip. Can’t really separate mind from body. Or even our feelings from our intelligence. We are one mushed together whole thing and are attempts to separate often misrepresent our actual natures.Report
Learning languages is a passion of mine, although definitely not a skill. There are a lot of different intellectual feats involved.
memorizing the word “libro”
reading the word “libro” and thinking “book”
hearing the word “libro” and thinking “book”
seeing a book and thinking “libro”
reading the sentence “Yo quiero 3 libros” and hearing “qu” as a “k” sound
reading the sentence “Yo quiero 3 libros” and seeing the “3” as “tres”
seeing the word “libreria” for the first time, intuiting the connection to “libro” and knowing it means “library”
seeing the word “libreria” for the first time, intuiting the connection to “libro’, remembering that stores have “ia” on the end, and knowing it actually means “bookstore”Report
I applaud the effort to limit it to 3 categories, with I guess humor being one that spans all 3? I wonder, going on your 3 (as limiting the number is always good, and everybody loves a good ‘3’ and for good reason) if creativity could be seen in the same way as your take on humor: overarching, sort of spans all three, and is nebulous. Bravo! (as the smart set say, apparently).Report
I’m looking those three categories, at least for the moment as primary colors you can mix and match to get other aspects of intelligence. Yellow and Blue make green, knowledge and understanding make math adepts, etc. The attempt was to be as elemental as possible but as I said, this is me tossing around ideas and is in no way definitive.Report
One advantage of online is that you can post a funny response much later, and no one can tell whether it took you a long time, or you’d only just read the thing you were responding to.Report