krazykidd said:
Realitycrash said:
I'm getting rather sick of the "Do you think you are more intelligent than the average?"-topics that pop up every now and then. How do you people measure intelligence? Is it IQ tests? I doubt it, especially since IQ-tests seem to point more at "you're good at IQ-tests" than "You're intelligent!".
No, what people assume is "intelligence", and what they mean when they say so, is most often education.
That's right. We have very few ways of effectively measuring how smart someone is, especially when you've only encountered them a few times, so education, or how "smart" they sound, is what we say when we mean "He's intelligent".
Or, that's how I see it.
What do you think? Do you really think you're more "intelligent" than the average, or are you just better educated? And if you are more "intelligent" than average, what proof do you have of it? Do you even know how to empirically test such a thing?
Wait wait wait . You are saying a person with more education is NOT more intelligent than a person without education? I don't know how to respond to that. Yes? They are . The whole point OF education is to gain knowledge. Now there is a difference between two people with different kind of education and two people where one has education and the another doesn't .
A doctor must be more intelligent than the guy that dropped out of highschool by definition . He has more knowledge( about a lot of things not just medecin , because he has gone to school) thus is more educated and more intelligent . You COULD argue that there are different types of intelligence, but in my opinion thats just grasping at straws .
Not to say that you HAVE to have a degree to be educated . A person could easily educate themselves from the comfort of their own home , it doesn't
make that person less educated . But in general an educated person is in general more intelligent . I really don't see why they wouldn't . Maybe if your explained you OP better i could understand.
Very simple, my friend. "Intellect" does not mean "education". Knowledge is not the same as intellect. Being a doctor and knowing much usually requires that you are intelligent, but it doesn't per se imply that you are intelligent. You seem to think that just because someone dropped out of highschool, that makes him unintelligent. Well, it doesn't. It makes his interest deviate from the norm. There are no standard tests for what makes a person "intelligent", even if IQ-tests are sometimes supposed to be this. Still, let's we assume that Iq-tests are the norm. Let a highly educated doctor perform one, and then let a hobo perform one. Most likely, the doctor will have the higher score, but not necessary. Why? Because intellect is not the sum of aquired information, but more of how you use that information, how good you are at adapting it, and many other things that people still debate about. So why does the doctor most likely have a higher score? Because intelligent people
tend to do things with their life, and tend to be drawn to the academia, or similar. This does
NOT mean that because you are educated, you are intelligent.
As you said yourself, "in general, an educated person is in general more intelligent". Indeed, but it goes Intelligent = Educated. Not Educated = Intelligent.
My aim with this topic was to point out that most people seem to think they are "intelligent" or that other people are "intelligent", when in reality, they mean (most of the time) "I am/this person is educated, and know more than the average person".
Edit: Think of it as your computer. It was RAM, CPU-Speed and Storage Capacity (Harddrive-size). Now, just because your harddrive is full, does it make your comptuer faster, or better at completing tasks? No, it does not. Your RAM or CPU-Speed is the computers "intelligence", while the storage-capacity is its "knowledge".
This is a very loose analogy, but it works to explain the general idea.
