If they laugh out loud at anything said on any current non-animated network sitcom, they probably aren’t too bright. 
As a purely practical matter, I judge a person based on their ability to reason and problem solve. A monkey can be trained to regurgitate facts. In my profession, I generally require people who can solve problems without having to be spoon fed everything. If I have to lay everything out for you, I might as well do it myself in half the time.
You can just tell when someone “get’s it” and when they don’t have a clue. I work with a lot of people who are of the later variety. They unfortunately are unable to do much of the work I do because while I can teach them the tools, they are unable to do anything with them except follow specific tasks.
I buy in to the theory of multiple intelligences–pro athletes are intelligent, and people who can do advanced mathematics are intelligent. These are two intelligences I don’t have, so I respect them. I am not, however, very interested in them. What I really like is a blended social/literary intelligence. People who have it are quick on the uptake, to get jokes, innuendos, and alternate lines of meaning. I also really, really appreciate people who can “talk fluent nonsense”–that is, one person begins saying something that makes sense in a convoluted way, and other people pick up on it and run with it. It takes an awful lot of imagination and intellectual daring to do it really well.
I also respect people who can put things eloquently. You have to be smart, to do that.
My (prejudiced) criteria for assessing people’s intelligence:
Not talking, most of the time.
When talking, doing so articulately, correctly, reasonably rapidly and clearly *) **), then shutting up again.
In written communication, writing correctly and precisely. **)
Avoiding common fallacies, like not distinguishing the negation of a statement from its opposite.
*) A source of my always underestimating other people in the last decade - I am a North German living in South Germany, and people where I live now enunciate in a manner that I still instinctively classify as “longtime alcoholic or other brain damage”.
**) with allowances for people not using their mother tongue.
I’d daresay that there is *almost * no form of entertainment so stupid that a smart person can’t derive some enjoyment from it. After all, you get out of things what you put into them, so a person with considerable cultural acumen will almost always find something to enjoy, think about, or at least mock in anything you put in front of them.
I think there are so many kinds of intelligence that I’m always hesitant to label anyone stupid. But like **Sattua ** and **msmith ** said, there are sorts of intelligence that I value above others. I may admire someone’s genius with numbers, but that doesn’t mean I want to hang out with them. I’d prefer the company of someone who is well informed, witty, and can’t add a column of single numbers without a calculator. (Which I freely admit describes me. 
)
You know, this kinda irritated me but perusing your past history, I see you’re pretty young and will hopefully grow out of immediately dismissing people who have interests that don’t match your own.
Unfortunately, that’s also the formula for American talk radio, a forum wherein knowledgeable, albeit obnoxiously polemical, nut cases rule.
Without the shaping forces of superior analysis, wisdom, balance, perspective, general life experience, etc., knowledge alone is a crude tool with little utlity.
I didn’t read everyones responses yet because I was excited to put in my two cent’s worth. My ex-wife was an idiot. She was/is ‘educated’, i.e. she has a college degree and is almost done with her Master’s. However, I could NEVER hold an intelligent conversation with her, EVER. So in my opinion, education is definitely not a form of intelligence.
However, my current wife is college educated and I can hold a good one-on-one with her, she listens, and responds back. And if she does not understand something (English is her third language), she is not ashamed to say something so I can explain it in a different way.
I work at Mercedes and deal with assholes who makes millions a year. I have seen the biggest idiots, who happen to be CEO’s of major companies some of you have stock in, probably. I have made thousands of dollars on them, and they thought they got the best deal. All they could do is sit here and tell me how smart they are and how much they know, etc. (In my mind I am laughing my ass off and telling everyone to NEVER buy into their company).
On the other hand, I have known people who have very little formal education who were the smartest people I have ever met. When I was a recruiter for the Marines, I met this kid who had a 7th Grade education, that’s it. He wanted to join so he took a few semesters at the local college, and passed the ASVAB with flying colors (perfect, not a damn question wrong). I could sit there and hold the deepest conversations with this kid.
It goes to show you, our societies standards of an ‘education’ really mean nothing. I have always found that people who are well-travelled, self-educated, self-learned, and self-made tend to be the most intelligent. And to top it off, the really intelligent ones NEVER say it.
So basically, you gauge people’s intelligence by how well suited they are for your line of work.
Hey Eleusis, I breathe through my mouth and have difficulty shutting it because of my facial construction (big teeth, small lips-people think I have a permanent smile) and I also attend an ivy league university. I guess that doesn’t count for anything though.
What about people that read men’s magazines- are they automatically out, too? I’m pretty intelligent, and I occasionally read women’s magazines. I read them because they can be entertaining (and not always in a “isn’t that stupid, hawhaw!” kind of way), and they can be informative about fashion, makeup, hair, women’s issues, and politics. The fact that I read them sometimes doesn’t make me any less intelligent or worthy of holding a conversation with.
Of course men’s magazines are smarter. They’re for men. :rolleyes:
By how tall they are. Obviously. Doesn’t everyone?
The women’s magazine comment is a sneaky way of implying that anyone who has any interest in fashion must be an idiot. Truly intelligent people spend so much time thinking, they don’t have time to concern themselves with wordly things like clothes. :rolleyes:
It bugs me because fashion is just a hobby similar to things such as model trains, anime, video games, baseball cards, interior decorating, etc. yet mere mention of it causes this ridiculous knee jerk reaction. I suspect lingering high school trauma…
That’s okay, I find your condescension irritating too so I guess that makes us even.
For the record, I don’t “immediately dismiss” people based on their reading material. When was the last time someone introduced themselves to you with “Hi, I’m Rachel, and I like Woman’s Day!”? Never? Yeah, me neither. I learn which people I find boring long before I learn about their every interest. But since people seem to be calling me out for it, I’ll elaborate. There’s readers of women’s magazines, and there’s Readers, and this latter category is made up of the people who buy them regularly and read and believe the celebrity hype and the horoscopes and the face reading and psychic columns, which I think is, well, kind of dumb. And I believe I said in my first post that I don’t think it’s actual intelligence in question here, since I’m pretty sure you can at once read women’s magazines and have a high IQ, but I find people who take the things seriously show a trustfulness and lack of critical thinking and “intelligent mindset” that makes them unintelligent to ME. I mean, I assume I’m parsing the thread title correctly. It’s “how do YOU judge how intelligent someone is”, not “how does one judge (objectively) how intelligent someone is”, right? It’s not as if I refuse to associate with anyone who reads women’s magazines. Hell, I didn’t laugh at TheLoadedDog’s 668 joke; I guess that makes me stupid to him. Why don’t you go jump on him for dismissing people whose sense of humour doesn’t match his? :rolleyes:
Fashion was not even on my mind when I posted that. The only knee-jerk reaction is your own, and frankly I don’t get what’s with your series of assumptions about me either. I dismiss people with different interests? I think anyone who likes fashion is an idiot? Lingering high school trauma? (because I’m a teenager, and probably spend my spare time slitting my wrists, I bet) I have no idea where you’re getting any of this.
In my line of work, everyone’s problem-solving and abstract thinking skills are on nearly constant display, and so it’s easy to judge who’s sharp and who’s not. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference as to whether I have to work with them, though. C’est la vie.
I didn’t see the word intelligence anywhere in msmith357’s post. Did you?
I would’ve said the same thing when I was about your age. Fortunately for everyone around me, I became wiser instead of merely older.
Then again, they could be Jewish
Then yet again, they could be Jewish and understand the joke anyway…
Maybe assuming that he would address the OP’s topic was assuming too much.
Your post flat out says if someone reads womens’ magazines (which usually concern fashion, beauty tips, and sometimes homemaking), you will never have an interesting conversation with them. That’s flat out dismissing an entire (fairly sizable) group of people based on their reading material.
Totally your right to have that opinion but I and others can also disagree.
My second post wasn’t really directed specifically at you but at an overall point of view I often see on this board (and the internet, in general). Somebody posts a thread asking if pleated pants are in for guys and is told, “no, not currently” and immediately a bunch of people jump in the thread to avow that everyone should just wear what’s comfortable. Or if a poster mentions they bought something designer, the very next post will be expressing incredulity that anyone would ever spend money of clothes and Walmart clothes are good enough for them with the implication being anyone who cares about what they wear is shallow and beneath them. If a poster mentioned his latest acqusition of a pricey, collectable mint condition baseball card or asked what the most coveted Lionel train car was , you wouldn’t see the same reaction.
BTW, I wasn’t thinking of you when I made the high school comment (although I can see how you would think it was, I apologize for that) and I don’t think less of your contributions because you’re younger than I am, but a lot of things I whole heatedly believed in my twenties, I have since relaxed my opinion on. The high school comment was a snarky way of articulating why I think many posters have such a knee-jerk reaction.
I’ve hijacked this thread long enough and I’m not interested in rabble rousing or provoking a long debate. I really should think twice before posting.