Intelligence

Things I believe about intelligence, in no particular order, based on what I've observed in the world:

• Intelligence is multiple, possibly overlapping, innate talents or aptitudes. However, intelligence is not isomorphic to individual skills a person might have. The kinds of intelligence instead grant aptitude for generally broad fields of endeavor, such as:

  • Communication
  • Theory of Mind
  • Visual-Spacial Reasoning
  • Planning
  • Linguistic Reasoning
  • Mathematical Reasoning
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Working Memory
• The last two can generally enhance the speed at which the other forms of intelligence operate, since they allow someone to work faster, or hold more in their head at once, but many very intelligent people have horrible, or just average, memories, and must suppliment them with personal information management systems of various sorts. Likewise, pattern recognition can be as much of a hindrance as a help, and some very intelligent people prefer to manually reason out what a pattern must be instead of jumping to it immediately, to make sure they got it right.
• Intelligence is aptitude, not skill: it means you can learn faster, and have a greater capacity to do complex or novel things with what you learn. But it does not automatically make you good at whatever you try your hand at, or automatically right on first blush about whatever you think about. Don't fall into the trap of armchair reasoning or hubris about fields you know nothing about: intelligence does not absolve you of spending the time to actually properly read, research, and listen to other people to gather information, and understand their perspectives and arguments.
• IQ tests, insofar as they test anything other than being good at tests, being educated, being in good health, etc, test maybe two or three kinds of intelligence (visual-spacial reasoning, pattern recognition and working memory). There are many other aspects which they don't even begin to cover.

• Intelligence is as much about personality as it is about mental capacities/aptitudes:

  • someone who is too prideful or insecure to listen to what others say, revise their ideas when they're wrong, consider alternative ideas or reasons that they might be wrong, or relentlessly pursue possible counter arguments, is likely to be forever locked in a mental prison of their own creation – their stupidity will have a much higher level of complexity, but they will remain stupid, although occasionally have moments of brilliance.
  • someone who is too myopic, who gets so caught up in the technical complexities and details of whatever they're working on that they lose sight of whether their ideas are actually practical to put to use, will actually achieve the overarching goals in the most effective way, or whether their goals are even worth reaching in the first place, is likely to just get stuck digging a rut for their whole lives, missing the larger picture. See also.
  • someone who is too impressed with the beauty of theoretical abstracts which their intelligence allows them to see, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, are really falling into a sub-category of the same failure as the previous point – myopic, useless, missing the forest for the trees, just in a different direction.
  • Someone who has, for whatever reason, become anti-intellectual, who refuses to use their mind, will never gain the benefit of whatever intelligence they may have. Again, their stupidity may be more baroque, but that doesn't change what it is.
  • The most important personality component of intelligence is wanting to think, and being motivated to think and improve one's thinking and learn.
• I don't really know if intelligence can be taught or not. It seems to me that it's probably locked in sometime in early childhood, based on how someone was raised and what they were exposed to, as well as natal or even genetic aptitude factors. But who knows, really. We should try to give everyone the best environment, exposure, education, and support we can, even if they don't seem smart, to see what they can do with it. Doing so will enhance the achievements and lives of even those who aren't notibly intelligent in some way.
• Intelligence isn't a hard requirement for going into any field. It just makes things easier, and makes you more likely to do something really interesting or novel. That's all.
• Intelligence is not an indicator of human worth. We are not equal in intelligence, but there are many other reasons that a human might be worth a lot of things. You can be wise, loyal, have a ton of experience or knowledge on a subject, hardworking, athletic, kind, funny, observant, and any number of other things.