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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

I've often observed that people mistake "intelligence" for

- "knowing the things that I know"

- "coming to the same conclusions as me"

You can see the "knowing the things that I know" most often in professional settings. "If this guy were smart, he'd know how to do XYZ." Knowledge and intelligence are not the same, but I encounter this bias on a very regular basis.

You can see the "coming to the same conclusions as me" most often in the moral and political sphere. Clearly if someone were intelligent, they would draw the "right" conclusion, as I have.

Real intelligence is the capacity for complexity, pattern recognition, and speed of cognition; none of these guarantee either of the two above conditions.

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The converse fallacy is also, I believe, true. "This person knows how to do XYZ, therefore they're smart" (in a more general sense; good at "other games", as it were), is something that took me time to understand to be false.

And I think your last paragraph reflects this fallacy:

> Real intelligence is the capacity for complexity, pattern recognition, and speed of cognition; none of these guarantee either of the two above conditions.

These are criteria I would give to be good at mathematics, not necessarily a kind person, or cultured person, or good team member.

Of course, I may be hair-splitting at what you mean by "smart" (and I'm sorry for that), but I think this is the angle the article is also taking.

You also need the same capacity for complexity, pattern recognition, and speed of cognition to be a good salesman, diplomat, or journalist: reading body language, picking up subtle cues and immediately changing your course of action during a conversation requires that same real intelligence.

So to me, it's not so much hair-splitting as having a narrow focus of what those capacities can be used for.

>Of course, I may be hair-splitting at what you mean by "smart" (and I'm sorry for that), but I think this is the angle the article is also taking.

That is not what I meant to convey, but there's also no need to be sorry. This is a pretty nuanced topic, and I only offered a few sentences. I would agree with you: it is very easy for people to misjudge the intelligence of others, especially when that intelligence falls in other "realms." (eg: mathematics vs. managerial skill, etc.)

To that extent, I am simply agreeing with the article, and adding my own observations.

intelligence := ability to build models [only exists relative to $domain, but training the brain to perform well in one domain translates to enhanced capability in others; see link between iq and affinity to music etc.]. the speed of cognition is basically a symptom of how well your brain is trained to perform a task in some domain; someone deeply versed in theoretical physics, doing objectively hard mathematical work in his daily life, may be very slow at other cognitive tasks, if the neuro-pathways of the different tasks/domains are not aligned. It's complicated, mashing the entire concept of "cognitive ability" into a single, one-dimensional term is not really doing the topic justice.

We're just used to it, because groups need to converge on the simplest, most accessible abstraction of the idea (of cognitive ability, in this case). Truth is, "intelligence" as a broad term doesn't make that much sense.

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