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About This Author
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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
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A few days ago, I shared an article about how to tell if someone is rich. This one's like that, only it's about smart. From Upworthy:
It's probably a lot easier to tell if someone's stupid. That's easy: they are. Everyone is stupid; even, sometimes, very smart people.
A Redditor named Occyz wanted to know how people tell the difference by asking them to share the “subtle” signs that someone is very intelligent.
Oh, great, an article that summarizes a Reddit thread. In other words, don't believe a word of it. (See? I is smart.)
A big takeaway is people think highly intelligent people are mentally flexible. They are always interested in learning more about a topic, open to changing their minds when they learn new information, and they're acutely aware of what they don’t know.
So, people of questionable intelligence, plus a bunch of AI bots,  offering their opinions (or regurgitated AI training) about something that even scientists have a hard time quantifying.
In fact, according to the psychological principle known as the Dunning-Krueger effect, there is a big confidence chasm between highly intelligent people and those who are not. Low-IQ people often overestimate what they know about topics they need to familiarize themselves with. Conversely, people with high IQs underestimate their knowledge of subjects in which they are well-versed.
In fact, starting a paragraph with the words "in fact" does not, in fact, mean that what follows is fact.
Here are 15 “subtle” signs that someone is highly intelligent.
"They don't tell everyone how smart they are" seems to be missing from the list.
Incidentally, the article opens with a big picture of Steve Jobs. Now, there's no denying that Jobs was intelligent. He started a company with a couple of friends in a garage, and by the time he died, it was the most valuable company in the world (based on market capitalization). But he also eschewed evidence-based medicine, leading to quite possibly an early death. I'd argue that's not very smart. On the other hand, had he held out a little longer, Apple wouldn't have been the most valuable company in the world anymore, so maybe he was playing n-dimensional chess and winning? I don't know.
Point is, smart isn't everything, just like money isn't everything. You can be smart and still a raging asshole, like Jobs reportedly was.
I won't bore everyone with comments on every single item in the article. Hopefully, the ones I mention here will be enough to get my point across.
1. They admit their mistakes
"When someone can admit a mistake and they know they don’t know everything."
This sounds more like learned behavior. It is a good trait to have in most situations, I think, but I can't say it correlates with general intelligence. There are a few on the list like this.
2. Great problem-solvers
On the other hand, this one strikes me as the actual definition of intelligence.
3. They appreciate nuance
"'I can hold two opposing ideas in my head at the same time.' Anyone who is willing to do that is intriguing to me.
I'd agree with that. I've said many times that life isn't binary; it's not all good/bad, black/white, whatever. I'm just not sure one has to be a genius to do it.
5. They have self-doubt
The great American poet and novelist Charles Bukowski once wrote, “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence,” and according to science, he’s correct.
Yeah, well, Yeats wrote it first (I think): "The best lack all conviction, and the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."
9. They can simplify big ideas
Okay, but to me, that's less a marker of intelligence and more a sign of... I don't know. Empathy? What do you call wanting other people to understand something? And also of being so well-versed in the "big idea" that they can explain it to the uninitiated.
Richard Feynman, who gets my vote for smartest dude of the 20th century (edging out the perennial icon Einstein), reportedly once said, "If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize." And yet, he spent a lot of time explaining stuff.
I wish I could find out who said something like "If you really want to learn something, figure out how to explain it to a fourth-grader." I thought it was Feynman, but I'm having trouble finding the quote. If indeed it exists.
11. They're humble
"They don't continually need to tell people how intelligent they are."
Okay, so up there, where I said, '"They don't tell everyone how smart they are" seems to be missing from the list.'? I was wrong.
See what I did there?
There are more in the article, as you might have inferred based on the number-skipping (and the fact that I told you I was going to skip some), because you're smart.
Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying these are bad things. Everything on that list is what I'd consider a desirable character trait, to one degree or another. I just question their correlation with what we call intelligence, which, as I noted above, is notoriously hard to quantify in general. Sure, there are IQ tests, but I don't think such tests measure all possible forms of intelligence.
And, just to reiterate something I've said before, it's best not to conflate intelligence with knowledge. Someone who does well on trivia questions has a lot of stuff memorized, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can figure something out that's unfamiliar to them. It's like, I don't know, if you have the dictionary memorized, you'll be able to make more Scrabble words, but will you be able to place them on the optimal score-enhancing spaces? The former is knowledge; the latter may be intelligence.
In conclusion, there's a whole lot of other dimensions to a person than just "smart." Or how much money they have. Which also aren't necessarily correlated. I mean, everyone knows, or should know, that the only thing that matters is how attractive you are. |
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