We’re all smart people, so every one of us can Google up a good definition, but how do you personally make the judgment that one person is smart and the next one is not? Since we all come to this conclusion without resorting to a dictionary, what criteria do you use? I am not looking for a post wherein you provide a link and say, “Read this page and they’ll explain what you want to know.” How do you decide every day of your life?

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http://members.elirion.net/~maddad
There are ten kinds of people. Those that understand binary, and those that do not.

creativity is the sign of intelligence.

The ability to solve difficult problems in an efficient and original manner.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

According Frog, I'm smart.

According to Black Cat, I'm a dumbbutt.

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

Yeah, I know a man who has trouble with simple things like logging onto his email, but who also happens to have an exceptional grasp of mechanical processes.

Other people may not have the greatest ability to solve an abstract problem, but boy oh boy are they smart at getting people to work happily together.

In my opinion, "intelligence" is not a single quality and is not well measured by an "intelligence test".

All people are not equal, but all people have some area in which they are particularly "intelligent".

This isn't just a sloppy "feel-good" statement, it's an absolutely pragmatic judgement that comes from working closely with a team of a dozen or so people for quite a long time.

I remember reading something in Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams about an Inuit man who seemed, when Lopez met him in the village, to be unintelligent. He seemed dull. But away from the village, in the bush, the same man became extraordinarily sensitive to his surroundings, an alert and clever hunter. In the right environment he became intelligent.

Or maybe more accurately, in the wrong environment he did not seem intelligent.

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Jim he allowed [the stars] was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could 'a laid them... --Huckleberry Finn

Well, it depends on what you mean there. If the Inuit man didn't know much about urban life, then he was ignorant on Urban Life. This meant he didn't have knowledge. On the other hand, he was knowledgable in a wilderness setting. In the GURPS game setting, the IQ is no different, just the skills. (I know I shouldn't use a game as an example, but it's helped me think out these things. IQ means something different in GURPS than in RL, btw)

This is something that peevs me off, personally: KNOWLEDGE does not mean INTELLIGENCE. Though intelligence can help you gain knowledge. Nonetheless, it's possible to be perceptive but dim-witted. It's also possible to be unknowledgable but wise, or quick-witted.

Intelligence is something that's hard to fully define.

The reason why I get peeved at this is because people assume that because someone happens to know stuff (or pretends to know stuff), he happens to be "smart". It also peevs me off that some people seem to think that the bigger words someone uses (thus, the more knowledge of vocabulary), the more smart he must be.

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

I would say that person A thinks that person B is smart because he uses bigger words than person A does, that is a good indication that person B is in fact smarter than A. Smart enough to fool him, that is.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

It may just be me, but these all seem to fall under my definition. They all involve solving difficult problems in an efficient and original manner. All that is different is the nature of the problem. Different people are more adept at solving different types of problems. The inuit is adept at solving the problem of figuring out what is going on in the natural environment around him. Other people are adept at solving social problems. Others are adept at solving mathematical problems. Still others are adept at solving artistic or dramatic problems. The common feature is that they are all solving problems.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

What about an "idiot savante", then? (I apologize for the rather crude term, but it's the only one I know).

An "idiot savante (sp?)" is very dull in almost all areas but a single one, and then far surpasses everyone else in a single subject. According to you, Black Cat, that Idiot Savante would be a genius, no matter what, because he's able to solve problems almost no one else can in that area.

Unless you mean solve problems in generic areas. In which case, the man that's a whiz at math but stinks at athletics, experiments in science, or programming, isn't very intelligent, since he only is good at one thing.

I think that saying "being good at solving problems" is far too narrow a judgement.

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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor. -- Heinlein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov

No, the savant can only solve one problem. Like what day of the week a date falls on, or cube roots of large numbers. You may give him an endless stream of them, but they aer all the same problem.

I wrote this in another thread here a while back, but I have a personal view of intelligence, but I refer to it as "snart" since I reserve "intelligence" for one aspect. It is a three sided thing. Being smart comprises intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom.

Intelligence is the native brain power to make novel associations and relationships, and to solve problems. Creativity is part of that, I suppose.

Knowledge is the accumulation of information in an accessible form inside.

Wisdom is the ability to put the other two together in useful form, and the ability to make good decisions.

One or two of those is not enough to make you smart. Imbeciles can know a lot of things. And folks with really facile minds can be total ignoramuses or fools. A person can have wisdom but lack the will, interest, or ability to accumulate the knowledge needed.

There is more to it, intelligence or even smartness does not guarantee success. Not financial success, but success as a human being. Genius level intelligence coupled to a lack of motivation or emotional maturity will in general not do as well as someone with lesser abilities but the tenacity and focus to make the efforts needed at the task at hand.

So if by intelligence you mean what I call smart, then there it is.

I agree with the practicality of this three-pronged view. I would say that it can actually be expanded, and something important added. Intelligence involves a complex interplay with all these other concepts, which is somehow related to self-awareness, although no one knows how. I think Star Trek has this right-- to have real intelligence, you will always find self-awareness creeping in. But rather than seek a definition of intelligence, I'll try a linguistic approach, and list a bunch of words that interrelate with the concept of intelligence:
wisdom
knowledge
insight
intuition
creativity
common sense
wit
acumen
And I'll stop there, though we could all go on and on. The fact that all these words have different definitions indicates that we all see differences between them, yet they all overlap in some ways. They interrelate in a very complex way that you could try and lump together and call "smartness" or "intelligence", but the key bit is the self-referential character. I would favor the use of a simple specific definition of intelligence, like Enzp's or theBlackCat's, and reserve a different term for this over-arching concept, perhaps "self-awareness" or "sentience". Like a person lifting herself up by her bootstraps, sentience appears at the same time as all these other things, it does not arise *as a result* of them, it interacts with them. The self-referential aspects can go into sentience, and each of the pieces can have a specific and clear definition. So it's OK if the word "intelligence" does not try to incorporate that complex interplay, it's too hard to define that interplay anyway and so we can use an already poorly understood term for that-- sentience.

If you are just talking about "intelligence" then I would say that it doesn't have to be practical or even come to the right conclusions. It is how you handle ideas and information if it is creative then the person is intelligent. They might be wrong or insane but they are still intelligent.

edit-I mean by creative, that something is created not some rubbish that a woowoo comes up with because they can't understand something.

Sounds like a disagreement on definitions. If someone who can ONLY take cube roots is an idiot savant, then what do you call people who can do all sorts of complex calculations with very large numbers in their head? And such people, while rare, are actually more common than those that fall under YOUR definition.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

that's not true at all. kim peek, the so-called "rain man" not only has eidetic (photographic) memory, he can perform many mathematical calculations in his head without the aid of a calculator and even identify days of the week a date falls on. certainly savants tend to specialize with a type of genius (mathematics, art, music, etc.), but they are in no way limited to one specific "calculation."

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

I read, a couple of years back, that with the aid of a very powerful magnet you could switch off part of your brain( I think that it was on the left side) and make yourself an autistic savant, temporarily.

I think that genius is a little more than just doing the complex calculations that a computer could do.

the term "genius" is rather subjective. in the context of IQ, it is ability to learn. but even there you have the issue of desire, which greatly affects individual abilities. i.e. i have no desire to learn golf, and i suck as a result. i do, however, have a great desire to shoot pool, and i'm rather competent with a stick. the same goes for math abilities or sales abilities, etc.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

I also agree with the three-prong intelligence system. And even within that, there are many different kinds of intelligence--the math brain, the science brain, the lit brain--that overlap in most people.

I also think, however, that this is a good place to thank you all once again for not isolating the intelligent. When I am frustrated by a world that thinks I'm showing off when I share information (I'm not; I just think other people ought to be as interested by it as I am), I can come here and not be left out. I can come here, and sharing information immediately becomes a good thing. (See the righteous glee of To Seeking To Seek!) Not only that, not only am I not "Shares Useless Knowledge With Cashiers," as I've now been dubbed (well, it's better than "Gimpy"), but there are people here who are smart in ways that I am not. I can actually learn more here!

I think a vital part of intelligence, or at least of high intelligence, is the desire to learn. So many of you here know so many things that I don't, and I feel so educated and uplifted, even when the information comes in bizarre ATM threads wherein the OP has never even read a physics text. (Not that I have.) There is a little private pantheon I have of great minds on this board, which I will not share for fear of leaving someone out--actually, it's a not-so-little pantheon--and I am constantly honoured whenever someone tells me (always in PM; I'm not Jay) that I, too, am held in high regard here.

Thank you, all of you, for being smart by whatever definition we're using today.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

To me, intelligence is the practical application of knowledge. However limited or advanced a person's knowledge might be. For example, I know people that 'know' just about everything, but they can't actually do it. But on the other hand, some people can do a lot of things, but they can't tell you how they accomplished it.

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I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time … like tears … in rain. Time … to die.

What would be the point of such judgement?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire