I've thought being smart means able to retain, recall and use information. Is that the same as being intelligent? It seems that intelligence encompasses something more, something like wisdom. It implies that you behave intelligently, as in keeping your emotions under control.
I've always seen you as very bright. If I remember correctly, you're something marine - a biologist or an engineer or both.
I totally agree that wisdom and emotional self-control are essential to emotional intelligence - the kind that psychologists see as the best predictor of success in life. I think being able to retain, recall and use information is one of the skills that significantly contributes to intelligence, but is not enough just on its own. But I think intelligence can go a step or two further. It can recognise new patterns, work out how they work, and use the information to solve problems in the absence of sufficient information. I think it's a lot more than just academic, intellectual or scientific. It can be mechanical, technical, mathematical-musical, visual-spatial, linguistic, proprioceptive (sportspeople, yogis, martial artists, dancers, good lovers), and it can be emotional-psychosocial. We can be very bright in some areas and totally undeveloped in others. I kind of think that if we accepted more of the variations in kinds of intelligence we (people in general) might judge each other as 'dumb" far less often.
This post was edited by inky at October 26, 2019 7:14 PM MDT
"...work out how they work, and use the information to solve problems in the absence of sufficient information." I would call this intuition and a reasonable addition to "intelligence."
I agree with the rest of your statement. I think I would have learned much more as a boy by being physically active in something and branching out from there to other interests. I have a lot of neuro-muscular energy and found it difficult to sit in a chair for six hours, five days a week when I was seven years old etc. There's a saying among dog lovers, "A tired dog is a good dog." That's true of most young boys and young men I've met.
I feel sad, a little distressed to hear that. I doubt that you could so successfully handle the personnel department of an advertising company if you did not have a high level of emotional intelligence and practical knowledge of what the business needs in order to work well. I'm also guessing that you might now be married, perhaps have adult kids, and you probably made a good job of raising them. In my view, that also takes intelligence.
You must have me confused with someone else on here. I don't have children of my own and have never handled any personnel dept. or been in advertising at all. Yes have learned the skills to give my long-term corporate employers what they want and OK that is a kind of achievement in itself. But If I want to read say philosophy I am not able to make sense of so much of it. Aristotle yes OK. The German romantics no way. I can understand the Myth of Sisyphus but a writer like Martin Buber whose ideas and content when explained to me are so beautiful but reading the translation just seems it is about other things entirely and makes no sense. Because they think at a much more skillful and higher lever than I am capable of doing. That is what I mean.
I didn't know if you had kids - just made a stabbing guess. Don't know how I made the mistake about your work - something I must have been mistaken about from a conversation with another Mugger about three years ago. People who fluently understand the German Romantic philosophers don't achieve it overnight. They work up to it through gradual steps as undergraduates, starting with philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and working through the history of philosophy. But some philosophers like Kant and Heidegger are difficult even for the most trained minds. One has to sit down and spend time translating the ideas into simpler language. This is partly because German academics love complexity. Not many people find it worthwhile to wade through those torturous mazes of thought. But just because one is not attracted to that field, is not, in my view, evidence of not being bright.
I didn't know if you had kids - just made a stabbing guess. Don't know how I made the mistake about your work - something I must have been mistaken about from a conversation with another Mugger about three years ago. People who fluently understand the German Romantic philosophers don't achieve it overnight. They work up to it through gradual steps as undergraduates, starting with philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and working through the history of philosophy. But some philosophers like Kant and Heidegger are difficult even for the most trained minds. One has to sit down and spend time translating the ideas into simpler language. This is partly because German academics love complexity. Not many people find it worthwhile to wade through those torturous mazes of thought. But just because one is not attracted to that field, is not, in my view, evidence of not being bright.
That is right. I love the ideas of philosophy but seems not much as literature. I will never learn German but I did buy a dictionary German - English though I read everything in translation. Heidegger I understood some things I read. Kant was so frustrating like beating my head against the wall and I suppose my brain as well. Some people can get it , everyone else has to be a paying customer.
I can never quite tell if it's a game, an invented persona, or if it's an OCD trait. But he does help me stay on my toes and I definitely don't mind that.
CallMeIshmael 