What does intelligence mean to you?
Inquisitiveness, the ability to learn from mistakes (including the mistakes of others), and the ability to come up with novel solutions.
Insight. The ability to cut through the crap and evaluate the real problem.
Wisdom: to see implications beyond what others can.
what Sage Rat said.
Can I add the ability to retain and process large amounts of information? I’m not sure that this qualifies under intelligence but it’s a skill I have…so I’m reaching heh
CIA
Ability to analyse and solve a problem.
A student solving a complex calculus equation is intelligent.
A farmer solving flooding problem in his farm by by diverting a small stream to canals to carry the overflow water is also intelligent.
The ability to examine a situation, identify a problem, and come up with a plan to solve it successfully.
Curiousity and inquisitiveness.
To me, an intelligent person is a person who would never fall for a scam.
There is an interesting book by Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence. In it, he defines emotional intelligence as including “self-awareness and impulse control, persistence, zeal and self-motivation, empathy and social deftness”. I like to think of IQ as the (computer) hardware, and emotional intelligence as the software. Having a good balance between the two will usually take someone further than being over weighted in one and deficient in the other.
I think there are lots of different kinds of intelligence and you can have a lot of one type and none of others. Your classic “absent minded professor” is a good example - expert in one field but lacking the average person’s common sense in other areas.
My ex-wife isn’t as smart as me but she is a dancer. I have seen someone show her a complex routine once and she can instantly reel it off. It would take me ages to just memorize the order of the steps.
I think both Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are superb film actors. They know exactly how they come across every moment on screen. But I think Cruise is a nutcase and I think they both seem to be very dull both intellectually and as company.
I know musicians and writers who outside those endeavours aren’t particularly bright but they can string notes and words together in ways that delight me.
Being able to solve a problem or accomplish a task which you could not have conceivably prepared for.
Ah yes I have read that.
Scientifically, I think ‘intelligence’ is the label we give to an organism’s perceived ability to absorb information, form plans, make decisions and take purposeful actions to optimise its survival, success or contentment.
On a more informal and ‘everyday’ level, I think intelligence is, like so many other things (‘beauty’, ‘fairness’ ‘talent’), easier to recognise than to define. One definition I like is this: “Understanding how a computer works, or the history of the novel, or the importance of Picasso: quite intelligent. Realising that no-one at this party wants to listen to you droning on about it any more: very intelligent.”
Being able to take information you’ve received in one situation, and apply it in another, different situation.
Being aware of one’s own behaviors, biases, and appearances. Being able to evaluate oneself with the same rigor that one evaluates others.
The ability to notice information, code it for meaning, and retain it. The ability to use it later is just a byproduct of intelligence, IMO. It’s the easy half of being intelligent. If you’ve already learned, coded, and retained the necessary information, then applying it to the problem is an inevitable result of it.
By “coding”, I mean grasping the true meaning of a piece of information. It’s the ability to sort out the important parts and pack it away in the proper mental category. Take a doctor, for example. He has filed “increased urination” under the categories Diabetes, which is linked to Pancreas.
I’ll use chess as a further example. A dull person that can’t notice information is one that fails to have insight into the task at hand. In a game, they might fail to notice that they’ve lost material. In their studies, they may not realize why one move has to be played before another. A person that can’t code the information would be able to understand it but not able to apply it since they can’t recognize the information that’s necessary to recall. They don’t know what file they’re looking for, in other words, because it’s saved in the wrong spot. A person that can’t retain it simply can’t memorize and remember well enough to save the info for when it’s needed.
The ability to quickly find the root issue in any situation.
One guy who I used to work with was like that. I was puzzling with a colleague about why a judge would make the decision they did in this particular case involving trademarks. The judge was basically saying that these two trademarks (wordmarks) were similar in apperance. But they just weren’t similar at all. For a start, one of them started with the letter A and the other started with the letter S. We just couldn’t work out what the judge was getting at. This guy, who knows nothing about trademarks or law, walks up, looks at the judges’s ruling for all of 5 seconds, and then says - “oh, it’s a typographical error - A and S are right next to eachother on the keyboard”. And he walks off humming to himself.
Me and the colleague, are just silent, thinking about his answer and slowly coming to the conclusion that he’s right. Then we both said, “what a complete arsehole!”;p
Emotional Intelligence (EI) seems to be something which can vary on the same individually widely by the tester and what he has decided to include or not include.
When the IQ test started out, it was flawed because lots of the questions asked for things that were knowledge based, like the capital of France or what-have-you. Over time it has become something that, while still perhaps not perfect, is at least consistent and does seem to match up against real world performance on certain types of things.
Emotional Intelligence may or may not graduate into being something as good as or better than IQ, but at the moment I’d have to say that it is certainly still in its infancy and I’d be wary of putting any stock in anything based on EI, and there’s no guarantee that it will ever get to the next level.
Ability to learn, especially from errors.
In a recent book about Roosevelt’s first 100 days, I discovered that FDR tried many things and quickly abandoned those that didn’t work.
The US has never learned that attempts to regulate access to things (e.g. drugs, gambling, prostitution) people want leads directly to criminal enterprises that do provide those things. But businesses require adherence to contracts (among other things) and, given that the government won’t enforce their contracts, they end up with enforcement arms which means that murder is their main enforcement tool. Although other forms of physical violence have their role.