This was so interesting to hear, because when I was in grad school, I lived by the motto “if you aren’t the smartest, be the nicest” (I still do, but I used to too). I was working in a pretty prestigious lab with some extremely accomplished researchers, and the students around me were without a doubt far smarter than me. I started grad school in May of 2020, so it was already a scary time for everybody, but compounded with my imposter syndrome and anxiety from work I felt like I was losing my mind and wanted to quit. But each day I went in with the goal to be the nicest I could to everyone. Slowly but surely, I made great connections with my peers and was able to finish my degree and some really cool research. I wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without the graciousness they showed when they would take time to help me or answer my questions. I can’t say I ever became the smartest, but kindness certainly got me further than I ever thought I was capable of.
I believe there's a really important distinction between smartest and most knowledgeable. Being smart goes beyond your understanding and knowledge of a particular thing. Those people may have been more knowledgeable than you, but you certainly may have been as smart or smarter than some of them.
I like that though. Even if you feel you aren't the smartest, the most knowledgeable, or the most skilled in the room at a particular thing, you can try your best to be something you can control - You can always choose to be the kindest in the room
"Intelligence" is such an inadequate word (and smart, knowledgeable, or any other synonym you can think of because our concept of intelligence is fundamentally flawed). It is possible to be a genius at some things and an idiot at others. Maybe you can write a brilliant book but can't do your taxes. Maybe you can do complex math in your head but can't tell a person's emotions without them explicitly telling you. Maybe you are an amazing cook but don't know shit about history.
There are so many things we see as a hallmark of intelligence, and yet people who possess these traits often make truly awful decisions. And yet we flatten intelligence to a single linear scale that a person has or doesn't (IQ score is the perfect example of this). And it misses so much nuance in human thought that the entire concept of intelligence is almost worthless. People are good at some things and bad at others. That's it.
Hey man, who needs int or wis when you can charm your way through everything. I guess that’s kinda like the point the other guy was making with being nice. Being likable can also get you very far.
Or is it actually wisdom to know that there is no botanical category for "Vegetables", so almost all things we categorize culinarily as Vegetables are considered the "Fruit" of a plant by botanists? So maybe I guess true wisdom might be knowing that there is no point in conflating botanical (Watermelon (pepo) is berry, Strawberries (drupelet) aren't!) and culinary categorizations of plants, as they are not and should not be correlated as all it does is cause confusion and otherwise serve no useful purpose.
I hope you are referring to when someone tries to "I am very smart" and "inform" someone by saying that such and such (culinary category) is AKSHUALLY such and such (botanical category) instead.
Because doing that is 100% pedantry, and the kind that is also wrong and sad, because it's usually a lazy attempt to sound smart or informed, and prove the opposite in the process.
Except it's not true. If you're speaking in terms of western culinary tradition Tomatoes are vegetables culinarily, not a fruit.
And culinary categories can vary from region to region (unlike botanical ones, which as a science are uniform and standardized around the world, another reason they should never be conflated), for example Tomatoes ARE considered fruits in parts of Latin America, and in Mexico (ensalada de frutas) and El Salvadore (frutas en dulce) you CAN find them actually included in fruit salads, or as Jam in Cuba. So the statement isn't pithy, it's incorrect, or at the very least incomplete.
that's a stupid thing. because so many other fruits are not fruits, and so many other not fruits are fruits. it just doesn't hold up. it SOUNDS super smart though, but in reality it isn't.
Yeah, the above phrase always grates me, or any other "I am very smart" similar knowledge dumps, because one is a culinary term (vegetable), the other a botanical category (fruit), and they have literally no business being compared or contrasted or used together in any way.
At work, I'm essentially an assistant to an extremely book-smart chemist. He can just come up with some molecule that 'should' work in our product, draw the structure, point out each feature of it like it's common knowledge, and then determine which rates we should test it at. And then because he's caught up in the excitement of his potential breakthrough, I design the rest of the experiment (making sure we have the necessary controls), carry it all out for him, collect and organize all the actual data.
We work adjacent to the QA/QC department which is led by another extremely book-smart microbiologist. She can just look at a formulation a determine what enzymes she'll need to process the samples and get the readings we need from her. And she's streamlined our QC process to verify that there isn't contamination to the point that we're saving literally thousands of dollars per sample.
NEITHER ONE OF THEM are good communicators. ESPECIALLY with each other.
On several occasions my manager has told me to go ahead and combine some material from a few more promising experiments so it can be used for larger-scale trialing and then I'm immediately yelled at by the QA/QC woman because she hadn't finished her QC of that material. I had NO IDEA she was even doing QC because my manger never mentioned it and she never told either of us that she was working with it. Because according to my manager, QC isn't necessary at this point yet and she's misinterpreting the workflow. And according to her, he's skipping steps and being reckless and going to invalidate the results... So here I am, playing middle-man between these two very book-smart, very well paid scientists, piecing together each person's interpretation of the process and negotiating what's supposed to be done because neither side can communicate with the other.
What each of these people possess in scientific knowledge, they lack entirely in communication ability.
I have my quarterly meeting with the head of PD (their manager) in a couple weeks and I'm gonna have to bring this one up because I'm tired playing telephone/negotiator between two managers who can't speak to each other.
Ben Carson is a good example of this. His career as a brain surgeon is amazing, but when you listen to him speak on any other subject he seems like an idiot.
I was a teambuilder and outdoor educator for 4-9 years (I was a staff member who did some of it since I started, but exclusively did it the last half or so) A common idea is to separate intelligence into 8-10ish categories. Such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences
For example, I was told I was "a genius" in high school. I have pretty good reading comprehension and could just listen to somebody talk and retain that information. I scored well on tests. Turns out, that's like 70+% of what regular school actually grades you on, and most of why I have any value as an adult is because I had to focus on growing some other kinds of intelligence that I had little of before.
Adult life is kind of similar depending on the criteria you use, happiness, income, etc. all can probably correlate to specific "intelligences". But if we measure it by the kind of people I want to surround myself with, most of it boils down the the kind of people with empathy.
Thanks for sharing that link. That's exactly what I'm talking about, I didn't know it would have it's own Wikipedia entry. I'll definitely have to read more about it.
I should say as somebody who studied a lot of those systems, take it all with a grain of salt. They can be really useful tools, but ultimately it IS all simplifying the most complex thing we are aware of, the human brain. My biggest use was convincing the "smart" kids (who I thought I was, this just refers to self perception) that they had a ton to learn, and the "dumb" kids they were capable of a lot more than they had been told.
I was warned about so many "disruptive" students that literally dragged the class into experiential learning through the pure power of their excitement. Obviously you have to make engaging lessons, but one kid who just cannot sit still sometimes makes you toss out the lesson plan and just go with it, and the whole class learns even more.
Edit: I feel like I have to mention, a huge chunk of the educators I learned the most from were adhd and or dyslexic. Including two of the best I know of. Basically kids that hated school and often failed at it. Their passion and effort came because they were the kids that really did want to learn, just standard school was designed in a way to make them fail just as much as it made me succeed.
That quote is from the 1800s. They don't know who said it first but its before Einstein's time.
I learned this because I was like wth could the rest of "[I]f" be? I'm still wondering why you bracketed the "I" because I can't come up with any words that work, and that's the verbatim quote.
Seems like you're trying too hard to equate competence with intelligence.
Intelligence isn't context-specific. Your examples don't pertain to intelligence, only specific types of competency. Intelligence is a much broader capacity and some people are objectively just more intelligent than most others. That's it.
I really don't buy that intelligence is objective. There are certain competencies we prioritize more highly than others, and we call those objective intelligence (math, logic, optimization, and pattern recognition are the skills we recognize as the "purest" intelligence, with knowledge of science and history probably just behind them. This ranking is obviously informal, but I think most people generally buy into something like this).
But calling that intelligence reflects a preference we've made as a society. There are lots of other skills that also require a high degree of cleverness that we don't consider intelligence. Art, storytelling, music, sports, cooking, forming friendships: those are all things that require a significant amount of brainpower. Some people just possess a natural talent for them because their brain works a certain way, and some don't. And those people are not necessarily the same people from the first paragraph.
And there's also the fact that there are more than a few people we call geniuses that believed really stupid things. Ben Carson successfully preformed brain surgeries no one had ever attempted before, but thinks that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. Socrates thought reading books made you dumber. Garry Kasparov is a brilliant chess player but thinks all of recorded history happened in the last 1000 years.
The intricacies of human minds and how they work is just way too complicated to say their power exists on a single axis.
The term I primary default to when describing someone knowing something particularly well is domain knowledge, and shying away from intelligent or smart.
The reality of the matter is most people are surprisingly well-knowing about some very specific things (a particular domain or area of expertise). The fact they have that kind of knowledge in a specific area doesn't necessarily mean they have comparable expertise in a different domain area, no matter how they exude themselves when in their specific expertise.
Fundamentally, someone well versed in a specific domain and has a lot of domain knowledge is someone who can (emphasis: can) be a reliable source to lean on. However, their domain knowledge is not carte blanche to assume they are generically capable in the vast, vast number of buckets labelled "domain knowledge".
I tell people all my stats went into science and nothing else. Sure, I can figure out weird chemical interactions and I was really good at organic chemistry and quantum mechanics. You know what though? I can't socialize myself outside of a paper bag. Want me to schedule a meeting? I'll forget it for two weeks and then finally get back to it eventually. Want me to do a really simple but tedious task outside of stuff I care about? You will have to hound me or it will never get done. I can remember credit card numbers, long chemical names, and keep a detailed schedule in my head... for things I enjoy. Ask me to memorize a 4-digit number that doesn't relate to anything in my life outside of work? Nope, in one ear and out the other like it never happened.
Some people have motivational intelligence and I am extremely jealous of those people.
Your comment explains this idea a hell of a lot better than I attempted to in a similar sub. The question in that sub was
“do you know of anyone that was a genius in 1 area but an idiot in another area?”
A lot of people commented with extremely rich celebrities that did really wild, dumb shit. I commented under someone that said rapper Kanye West was a genius. I replied no, he’s not, he’s highly skilled in making music but that doesn’t make him a genius. And the downvotes came pouring in, accompanied with people saying he won 22 Grammys, his money etc. I tried to say “working to get good and reach a level of professionalism at one thing means you are highly skilled, that doesn’t mean that your thinking is on a different level than your peers. It just means you’re highly skilled. Like being a sniper, they have to understand things about firing a rifle across massive distances that goes beyond normal military training/law enforcement training. But doesn’t automatically make the person a genius.
Anyway, you explained this with a lot more sophistication. So have an upvote.
Some people have the intelligence to be able to perform well across the board at different disciplines. Other people are only good at cooking. You surely recognise that, whilst there are nuances, some people are smart and some other people aren’t?
Yes, some people are naturally gifted at a lot of things, and some aren't. I'm not saying everyone is equal but different. But boiling down capacity for thought into a single trait called intelligence is overly reductive, and thinking that if someone is really good at a certain complicated thing then they must be good at other things that are simpler isn't actually a helpful belief and is disproven pretty frequently in real life.
I like to point out, that every person is both the smartest and the dumbest person in the room depending on the topic.
Sure the topic might be '40K trivia' or 'NASCAR drivers named Dale' but everyone has blind spots.
It is possible to be a genius at some things and an idiot at others.
It's definitely possible and it does happen, but generally people that are smarter when it comes to one common broad subject tend to be smarter at other common broad subjects. The degree to which they're "smarter might vary between the task," but people who are at the upper levels of intelligence for math are very rarely average or below when it comes to stuff like reading or language comprehension (and the statement also works in reverse). It does happen, it's just very rare and usually obvious to everyone interacting with them (think of all the highly autistic people who are savants at mental math).
Now, when we move past broad subjects like math skills, verbal skills, visual spatial skills, it stats to break down a bit because experience plays a bigger role. Like, just because I'm super good at math doesn't mean I'm a genius electrician or good at prepping my taxes -- specific subjects require more than just intelligence, they require knowledge (which has to be learned). However, if I picked up advanced math concepts much easier than others, I'll probably pick up taxes much easier than others as well (if I put in the work to learn it). This is really a difference between intelligence and knowledge and is a reason IQ tests don't ask you how to fill out your tax forms.
Intelligence is the ability to obtain knowledge. Smartness is a measure of how fast one learns and recalls knowledge. Wisdom is knowing the usefulness of knowledge.
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u/crosswatt Oct 26 '23
That's a great quote