smart (smärt) adj. smart·er, smart·est
quick or prompt in action, as persons.
having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capability: a smart student.
shrewd or sharp, as a person in dealing with others or as in business dealings: a smart businessman.
Slang Intelligence; expertise
I have this question with people sometimes, usually after a few cocktails. What is ‘smart’?
Is it knowledge? IQ Score? Grades? Salary? SAT Scores? Vocabulary? Creativity? Rationality? Awareness? Wit? Patience? People skills? Is it a combination of many aspects? And maybe more importantly, is it necessary in order to be successful?
I gravitate toward people that fascinate me. When I sense someone is really sharp, I pay attention, and I’m usually impressed. Then I tell them how much they interest me. This probably isn’t the best social strategy but the amount of people that have said ‘Thanks’ outweighs the fear of admitting admiration.
But is the notion of a universal objective intelligence scale even possible?
Humans have been measuring each other’s intelligence for a long time. In China during the Xi Zhou dynasty (1046 to 771 BCE), candidates for official positions were formally tested on a range of criteria including the “six skills”: arithmetic, archery, horsemanship, music, writing and the performance of rituals and ceremonies.
Searching for genius in 1884, Englishman Francis Galton set up an “anthropometric laboratory” and measured, among other things, the reaction times, eyesight, color sensitivity and steadiness of hand of more than 9,000 men and women as he looked for links between their physical and mental characteristics. He failed to develop a working intelligence test.
Intelligence testing has proved contentious ever since.
In the United States, where more than nine million men had to take IQ and ability tests during WWII, the enthusiasm for testing is still everywhere. IQ tests for children, Regents for NYS High Schoolers, the SAT for college applicants, Wonderlic tests for NFL prospects, psychometric testing by companies – all designed with the goal of identifying individual talent, but often the bigger question has been justifying the accuracy of these tests. Variations between the sexes and ethnic groups have led to inevitable arguments about bias and inequality and power: who gets to define intelligence? Who designs the tests?
The general standard, the IQ, is essentially bullshit. I have never taken an IQ test and don’t care to. There is a huge gap between what IQ tests can measure and what we want to them to show. Yet in the absence of anything better than IQ tests, people continue to see something in these IQ scores that, while not meaningless, do not hold “the answer”. Once someone gets a ‘good’ score, they remember it forever, cling to it with the utmost superiority complex, and probably will refuse to ever take another test because they’re already “smart”.
To paraphrase Malcolm Gladwell, intelligence tends to help people be successful the way height tends to help people play basketball. The more you have is useful but not absolute. There are many talented short basketball players and many successful people who aren’t too bright. Case in point, do a search for Chris Langan or Rick Rosner and look how they’re living their lives.
I’ve met some of the dumbest geniuses and some of the smartest “dumb” people. The truth is a great IQ test score doesn’t make you intelligent; it makes you someone who performs really well on IQ tests.
Intelligence has also been defined as the ability to recognize relationships between things and manipulate those relationships advantageously. So is being an opportunist and someone with great people skills make you ‘smart’? I think that’d be a fair argument.
I’d take being an outgoing person who has pretty solid intelligence, excellent communication skills, tons of friends and acquaintances, and having good common sense over a pompous genius who thinks they are so intelligent that they can’t communicate with such heathens as someone that doesn’t understand quantum physics. This is not to say all “geniuses” are like that. But those that define themselves as a “genius” typically do. A real genius would realize how much knowledge they don’t actually have, and realize there is so much to learn even from people that aren’t scoring 160 on an IQ test.
There isn’t an answer to the question, because if there was, someone a helluva lot smarter than myself would have come up with it. But we do agree as a society that ‘smart’ is a desired quality and being perceived as ‘intelligent’ is usually an attribute we attain for.
I think intelligence is, most simply, the ability to think quickly. To be consistently semi-correct on the first go-around. To trust your rationality and instinct quickly. Also with that, I think ‘smart’ calls for being constantly aware of the surroundings of your environment. Where are you? What people are here? What actions can I have in this situation to be most favorable? What do these people want to hear? What are these persons pasts? What do they expect me to say? Should I say what they want or say what I think?
Often people don’t pay attention to their environment and it shows. And sometimes people think slowly, you can see it on their face. Do they get a joke quick? Do they look up or down a lot needlessly?
I know this isn’t ‘smart’ but I think it is two of the more showing signs. If anyone has any thoughts on ‘smart’ or ‘intelligence’ leave a comment or send me an email, I’d love to further this conversation.
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” -Ernest Hemingway
