I’m a lawyer at a major law firm, which is usually thought to be a good indication of intelligence - but I’m the dunce in my family.
My father was a research scientist specializing in neurology (he’s retired now).
My oldest brother is a scientist, in high-energy physics.
The middle brother is in engineering science; he’s working at analysing metals.
My mother was a professional artist (retired now), ran her own studeo for decades.
All of them are, I think, smarter than I.
I’m the smartest, funniest, and most talented. Did I mention I’m the most modest too?
I’ve always thought my older brother was brilliant. He loves reading all kinds of philosophy, physics, mathematics, anything. He’ll understand and debate on the meaning of things that I can barely keep up with.
My younger brother can fix ANYTHING. He fixes cars, installed my parents entire sprinkler system, wired our house for some internet thing, did all the electricity for his in-laws place, it’s amazing. If something breaks, I call him. And he’s only 22, he’s been like this for years.
My dad has an advanced degree and has always been defined to our family as the extremely smart person with few social skills. We joke that he could not survive without my mom, but I fear it’s actually true. He’s a genius about law and business, but can’t heat soup.
My mom is artistic. She throws pottery and creates beautiful mosaics that cover our kitchen, bathrooms and various other areas in the house. And she has all the social and survival skills that my dad lacks.
I’m not sure where I fit in with them. I’ve achieved more than my brothers in many ways, but I always feel like I’m the dumb one of the family.
My father and grandfather are both far more intelligent than I am. I believe I have more horsepower than my sister, but she’s a much better driver, if you take my meaning.
It’s not intelligence my family lacks, but wisdom.
Of the intelligent people in my family, I am the academic, the one whose intelligence has always been reflected by her grades in school. Most of the smart folks in my family either did well or average in school, but my academic performance has been superior. I’m not necessarily convinced, though, that this makes me the smartest. I have always been the black sheep intellectually because I am highly creative, an excellent writer, a fairly talented musician, and into poetry and fiction and philosophic literature. The rest of my family is gifted in the field of math, science, business management, and a number of things that give me a headache to think about. They regard the arts as worthless and impractical. I’m not saying my family was unsupported in my intellectual pursuits… just that they were rather bemused and teased me a lot for doing silly things like reading dusty old books. It’s really hard to compare our respective abilities in such strikingly different fields, since my intelligence is predominantly verbal and theirs is predominantly mathematic and spatial. It is arguable that I am the most intellectually well-rounded, since I have a wider variety of interests and have had a broader education. But again, that is not the same as being smarter.
My mother has a degree in mechanical engineering from a large state school. She has an excellent understanding of mathematics and physics, she successfully operated a business for 12 years and is an organizational/efficiency genius. She is hands-down the most dysfunctional person in my family (which is saying a looooooot.) The vast disparity between her academic intelligence and her emotional/social intelligence is mystifying.
My biological father has a verbal intelligence to rival mine, as the only person in my family who gives me a run for my money when we play Scrabble. It is really difficult to tell how intelligent he actually is because his brain cells have been completely obliterated by years and years of alcoholism. He barely graduated high school, doesn’t have a driver’s license and has worked the same factory job for over a decade. But there is absolutely no question that he is intelligent.
My uncle may in fact be the smartest person in my family, said to possess a superior understanding of mathematics and physics, (he supposedly, according to my mother, derived calculus from one of his lower-level mathematics textbooks, and was disappointed to learn that his new idea was already an existing field of study.) But he’s also paranoid schizoaffective and frankly I can’t tell the difference between his insane rambling and actual tenable scientific ideas. He is probably the only one of us who would test with a genius IQ, but that genius is tragically not accessible in any practical way due to his severe mental illness.
My grandfather is yet another engineering smarty. He has little formal education but for a very long time as I kid I always assumed he had a Ph.D. because he exudes a refined intelligence. He wears a pocket protector. He is razor sharp, worked in an upper-level management position at a power company (now retired) and can fix just about anything broken on a car. His home life is a dysfunctional mess.
Then there’s my Aunt, who made average marks in school but possesses such a unique blending of organizational and creative abilities that she has her own kind of genius. She does some crazy Martha Stewart home project shit that will just blow you away. She also excels in biology and is a talented musician, photographer, and artist. I think of her as the most gifted in our family, since she’s quite smart AND quite creative AND quite wise, independent, socially adept, etc., so I view her as generally the best all-around person. (I’m a close second, but not nearly as interesting socially.)
I’m guessing all of our IQs would test at about the same, with the exception of my uncle who would probably trounce us all. So I’ve never really had to wonder where I got my intelligence from. My family is full of smarties. The issue though, is that with the exception of my Aunt, most of these people are so dysfunctional and self-destructive that it renders their intellectual ability almost completely meaningless. Of everyone in the family, I am far and away the one who has done the most with my gifts to improve the quality of my own life and the lives of others, and that’s gotta count for something.
More intelligent than me?
My eldest daughter.
Now, if she can only acquire a little wisdom, maybe she’ll get a little more traction in life.
Intelligence is vastly overrated, and I’m speaking as one who has tested very highly on multiple “intelligence” tests. My brains never made me happy. Wising up (which I began to do in my 30’s) finally helped me achieve that goal.
Between my parents, my father is more educated but I’d consider them roughly equally intelligent.
I think that my sister and I started with the same raw material as far as capacity for intelligence. She dealt with our ridiculous childhood by keeping her head down and getting straight As, excelling in music, and never giving anyone any trouble. She got a full scolarship and completed her undergraduate degree in three years. She holds 3 advanced degrees.
I never tried at school. I got As without trying in a few classes that interested me, and Bs in the rest. I fumbled slowly through 2 different colleges over the course of 10 years to finish my degree, and that was enough for me. Ever.
We both read voraciously, and quickly. We both retain information well. She tends to be drawn to “smarter” subjects than I am. If you turned us loose in the library with the directive to pick out 2 non-fiction books to read she’d grab a volume on the history of the Episcopal church in the US, and perhaps something about the lives of women in the border states during the Civil War. I’d grab a cookbook and Steve Martin’s autobiography.
I’d say we’re equally intelligent, but she makes more use of it. Great…now I’m depressed over my own non-acheivement…
OM4th is onto the crux of the matter.
It’s not the smarts, but what you do with it. There’s all kinds of factors that come into play, and perceptions are a big part of it too. Knowledge is indeed power, but to wield it is another thing entirely.
Being a storehouse of facts and trivia is completely useless if you can’t make interesting, and even novel connections. Becoming an expert in some esoteric field, for some reason, is the appearance of intelligence, but really is nothing more than memorization, experience, skill, and practice. Any of those, on their own, is not intelligence; merely a facet thereof.
I believe intelligence is taking those things described above and combining them in ways that create and construct solutions that move yourself, if not those around you, to a better state of either understanding or lifestyle. The areas where one can practice intelligence is vast. It’s unfortunate that typically only the “booksmart” get most of the accolades.
Theres only the two of us left alive and I’m the bright one.
Worrying isn’t it…
It all depends on what you mean. I’ve always been able not just to pick up information, but to be able to explain it – which made me appear to be really smart. My father had the same ability, and he was far better at math than I, so he appeared to be even smarter.
But my father paled against his older sister (a genuine mathematician) and his baby brother (a physicist) so he looked like the underachiever in his family.
On the other hand, both my mother and my wife had to work longer and harder to learn their professions. As a result, their depth of knowledge in their fields was far more impressive than anything my father or I, with our “mile wide, inch deep” style of learning could ever hope to match.
For better or worse, I’m seeing the same pattern in my children. My daughter is an amazingly fast learner, one son seems to have been born smart, and the other son wants to mine deeply in a specialized field.
I’m pretty sure my uncle “Ted” used to be. He graduated high school two years early (which no one in the family bothered to notice until they got around to asking him what he was still doing at home the following September), got hired a year later by a contracting company to manage some sort of electrical installation projects in California, and invented new techniques that led to him making six figures (in 1970’s dollars) by the time he was twenty.
Of course, that was before the stress and drugs that came with that lifestyle caused his paranoid schizophrenia to progress to a state where the treatments now leave him too doped up to concentrate on anything. He’s still no simpering idiot, but he’s barely a shadow of what I’m told he once was.
Now, it’d fall to me, which isn’t as boastful a claim as you might think; the only real competition is my dad, and he’s too complacent to be bothered to keep up nowadays. The family tells me that I remind them of uncle Ted, but without the ambition (and the drugs). Seeing where Ted’s ambition landed him, I take all parts of it as a compliment, but still, I’d have loved to meet him back in his heyday.
On preview: by “smart”, I’m referring to the ability to process and make connections between facts and abstract ideas. I keep forgetting there’s a contingent that thinks memory capacity equals intelligence. If that were the case, I’d put my dad about a half-step above me; he’s the only one in my circle that can regularly defeat me on Trivial Pursuit night.
I choose to define intelligence in as simple a way as possible. I.e. how intelligent you are is how short a time it takes for you to solve a typical problem. And how novel your solution is.
Again, sounding arrogant here. But when myself and another ‘brain’ are simultaneously thinking about a problem. It tends to be my solution that gets picked. And my solution tends to arrive first.
My lack of arithmetic abilities is not down to intelligence, it’s down to laziness now, and laziness back when my classmates were learning their times-tables. If such a think exists, I have a kind of number-dyslexia.
I can damn sure make an SQL query do sums for me. Why would I do them in my head? Why would I use a washboard when I have a washing machine?
Hmm, that’s an interesting definition. By purely academic standards I am therefore one of the stupidest people in my family. I am the last person to solve for x – I’ll be right, but in the most traditional and probably inefficient way possible.
On a practical level, though, creative problem solving is where I excel. My capacity for personal growth is enormous, and I attribute that to the systematic and creative way I approach everyday life problems.
Even though I completely understand Qadgop’s point, I personally don’t think intelligence is overrated. I think it’s entirely devoid of merit, but those lucky enough to be intelligent usually get a lot of breaks in life. I know I did.
Everybody, including the cats.
My mother is something of a math genius. She just…*gets *numbers. She does not, however, understand people, or want much of anything to do with them. She’s also a hardcore fundamentalist Baptist and the most conservative person I have ever met. She is not open to new ideas. She is math smart.
My older sister is a big book fan and very clever with words. She reads all the time, loves grammar and the structure of sentences, and expresses herself in odd ways. Watching her with children is like watching some bizarre sociology experiment - she’s deliberately condescending and acts strangely toward them as if to see if they’ll call her out on it. But she has no confidence in herself, and doesn’t believe she can accomplish much.
My younger sister is smart enough to do well in school - she’s a hard worker. Her talent is that she can read people as they enter a room, and make them remember her. She has a lot of social connections this way, and will likely be the most successful of us all.
I enjoy science and math (though not like my mother) and I’m the most artistic of the family. But, like my older sister, I often doubt my abilities and end up shorting myself out of accomplishments.
My father is practical, hard working, and a good organizer. He doesn’t really shine in one subject, but he keeps everything moving forward, which is a kind of brilliance in and of itself.
So there really can’t be an answer.
My uncle is chairman of the physics department at a fairly major university.
Or I should say, “was”. He’s since retired.
My maternal grandfather. He was brilliant, but if you’d ever called him that he would have thought you were nuts - as far as he was concerned, he was just a small town mechanic. When he was 16, he built his own race car from scratch, and when he was 19 he and two friends built an airplane and flew it. I repeat: at 19, with no formal training, he built a freaking airplane and flew it. As an adult he was the chief of the volunteer fire department and built the town’s fire truck. He also had some inventions he sold.
Dyscalculia. Wikipedia has an article, if you’re interested: Yum.
I’m about on par with my mom and dad, who were both quite intelligent. I’m smarter than all of my blood siblings and about in the middle of the pack in my Family of Choice.
Growing up we kids figured both our parents knew everything, butt Mom’s answer would always be safer, accident-wise. As teens we learned Mom would do the math for the family finances, balance the checkbook and pay the bills, etc. And she was always sharper about book facts.
Dad was sharper about how the world worked.
I wasn’t until my third house that I stopped asking for their advice on that sort of major purchase.
On politics, I used to think Mom was the detail person, because she was an avowed independent, who would always vote for the person, not the party. But once I realized she and I always picked the Democrat, and approved of the platform, and knew the Republican would vote with his party, it was hard for me to figure why would even consider the Republicans any more. She still does, and always rejects them, but can’t see the pattern.