So yeah, I have pink fuzzy slippers. A lot of them. I've gotten them consistently for the past few years from my mom for Christmas (<3 you mom!), and I wear them whenever I'm not wearing shoes. Is this just for fashion? Do I have some secret story secluded somewhere? Do I know the answers to the universe? No, probably not. I just like pink, fuzzy slippers. They're fun. Sometimes people judge me negatively for them, think I'm gay, all that jazz. It's cool, people are always free to think what they want of me, it doesn't bother me as deeply as some people might imagine. Basically - I'm weird, and that's an important thing to know. I don't exactly know why, but I don't think it really matters. I think it just makes me all the more charming! =)
But I feel compelled to state this here, as I've never stated it anywhere or to anyone before. I don't tell people how smart I am, I don't allude to it, I don't act to show my level of intelligence, I don't live up or down to some intellectual standard, and I don't try to impress people with my knowledge or reasoning skills. It's a simple fact: I don't know how smart I am, or even a good estimate. The best I have is that I'm probably smarter than your average bear, but I couldn't really prove that, and I don't ever care to do so. I don't have a means by which to compare myself that gives me any satisfaction whatsoever, so I place no value in knowing (some people say IQ tests tell you, but how much do they really tell you? Take one, and then practice doing problems similar to the ones you saw, and then take another. Did it go up?). Some people might say that's not being intellectually responsible for a man of education (even said as "higher education"), but I think that's absurd and a way for "smart" people to plug their own intelligences and feel good about themselves. Like I states before, I'm not arrogant, and I want no place in arrogance.
I've long struggled with the idea of my own intelligence, and if I should care or not about it. By others' words, I've come to some conclusions. It appears I have an easier time getting good grades in classes with the same amount of "effort" put into it. There are a few possible explanations for this. One is simply that I care more about classes I do well in - this is true. I love to learn and doing work for a class is one way I can learn and solidify that learned knowledge in my long term memory. Another reason is that I'm more naturally tuned to being receptive of class-related knowledge. Classes are usually all taught similarly with an emphasis on memorization and using connections to strengthen the memories you intake. I seem comparably "good" at memorizing things, such as song lyrics, numbers, names, faces, etc. This is only from my experiences with others telling me their own difficulties in such areas. I'm sure there are those who have better memories than me, so they should be able to exceed me in memory-related work. Is this the case? I unfortunately have little experience of this, as I have not actively sought out people with good memory and asked them for their grades.
Another potential reason is that I am more focused on the work I do than those who get worse grades. I think this is directly related to having a desire to learn the material with which you are working - if you don't like something, how motivated are you to learn it? I believe my natural motivation in my love of learning new things gives me another perceived "edge" in grades. By this logic, it would be easy for anyone to out-score me in subjects they really enjoy, or at least do comparably well, which I find more often than not is the case! This seems to be progress! But is this enough to show that I'm not smarter than everyone else?
The next thing I'd like to look at is the effort put in to getting good grades. And this here is the real killer - almost everything relies on it, and this is a very natural idea. The heart of it is: the harder one works at something, the more comparably well they'll do on it versus anyone else. I will admit that while I may have worked for less total time (still up for debate) on school related matters to get good grades, I put in considerable effort to get good grades when I wanted them. This is why I am of the firm belief that (at least up through high school and seemingly now the beginning of college) almost anyone can get any grades they want, be them good, bad, amazing or terrible. Now what does this say about my intelligence? Well, not too much. It says that I may or may not be smarter than any of my former classmates, but that I put in more effort than most of them. Unfortunately, I can not know for certain how much effort any chosen student at random put in, so I don't actually know how I compare. I assume (with some degree of confidence), that I at least put in more than the *average* student, so that means my base grade level should be above average. It was well above average, among the highest, but without knowing my true comparable effort level, we can't make further conclusions about my intelligence based on grades.
So grades are out, they don't really tell that much about a person except how much effort they were willing to put in to get those grades (some people will argue this more, but to me it's a safe assumption, as to some extent, even a genius can't get A's without actually *doing* the work and taking tests, no matter how easy they may be to him/her). What else can I look at to find out how smart I am? Well, there are many things, and I'm not sure how many I can get through or even think of right now, but I'll try to go over some relevant ones, or at least those that come to mind.
Social interactions! What a good way to tell how smart someone is. Someone can't be an idiot and be charming, can they? (Am I charming? That's a *bit* of a stretch...) Unfortunately I believe that this area only has limited amounts to say about someone's "intelligence." (I should probably give a clear definition of intelligence at some point, but I think anyone who reads this gets the idea - just a general/overarching definition of intelligence will suffice)
Okay, so, social interactions. Someone who is dumb naturally will be clueless and not interact well with people, right? Not necessarily. While it may be true that an unintelligent person may be more prone to say the wrong thing or act "like an idiot," absolutely anyone can say the wrong thing to someone by "reading" him/her incorrectly. This is a fairly tried and tested truth of human kind - it appears in almost every TV show, book, song (less so, but it still stands), etc of pop culture and even classical culture. It seems an unrelenting problem of mankind that we simply don't understand other people as perfectly as we'd like. I feel like this mainly has to do with personal experiences and interpretation/learning from those experiences, and even as basic as differing personalities.
It's hard to relate to someone who has gone through something radically different than we ever have (in fact, it's near impossible). One usually relates through similar emotional feelings - anguish, depression, elation, humility, embarrassment (like I just felt, never knew there were two r's in embarrassment!), etc. While these emotions are universe, people interpret and feel things differently by the fact that people are simply not all uniform. We vary in every way, and especially when it comes to life experiences. No two lives even have *similar* life experiences, AT BEST. If you lived with someone your whole life and constantly did everything together, your actual experiences and interpretations of them would be so radically different it's amazing people could compare them at all. But luckily, we can through analogy and relations.
We obviously have not experienced a particular death of a particular relative, but we probably have experiences A death of A relative, so we can relate through analogy. We assume people feel similarly about similar events and happenings, which isn't a bad assumption, because we all make it. However, it can lead to some disappointing results. People are naturally different from each other in many ways (usually we lump them all together under the title of personality), so people will naturally draw different conclusions from similar or exactly the same events (and feelings, etc). Thus, when we assume we know how someone feels due to certain stimuli, we can easily be wrong, and not just a little wrong (as is probably usually the case), we can be *very* wrong.
This all comes together to basically show that just because someone has bad interpretations of how someone is feeling or what would be a good thing to say, that person isn't necessarily unintelligent (even the most egregious errors can be made by the most intelligent of people, so comfort yourself if you've ever made a fool of yourself). This means that someone who IS good at reading people and saying the right thing may just have had similar experiences, interprets things in the right way, is lucky, or may actually know their stuff. With such an array of options, it would be necessary to specify *how often* someone gets it right or knows what to say. If they always seem to know what to say or do, with many different people, there may be some credit to their intelligence (it seems that probability would limit them always being right, but don't forget, it still IS possible for someone unintelligent to always get it right. Fun, eh?) But, aside from crazy chance, we can safely assume that someone who always knows the right thing to say is smart, right?
Unfortunately we can't say that yet (you're pissed now, aren't you?). There are many books, guides, general knowledge, info, etc that one can find anywhere to help aid them to understanding the signs and emotions of others and what to say/how to act/what to cook them for dinner. These info manuals have accumulated and tried/tested knowledge from many different people/sources to allow any individual to deal with a wide variety of situations, should they so choose to read this. Okay, so now anyone (for convenience we'll say anyone) can be good at speaking and be all charming and suave and persuasive. Great. What does this leave us?
Well for one, it is negatively stigmatized in our society to seek out info like that (some people would say it's "creepy"), so this would probably be in the minority of cases, or at the very least not the majority (although we can't rule that out, only a "safe" assumption). Also, it is important to note that anyone who is *concerned* with their appearance as intelligent or charming/suave would know not to say anything when they don't know the right thing to say, and take educated risks to almost always come out on top. This does not seem like a ridiculous thing to do, as people obviously don't want to be ridiculed for being an idiot or fool, so most people would do this to some degree, but I believe most people would not take it all the way as to make themselves the ultimate melters of hearts. So, we still have a tiny hope that this can tell us something about how intelligent someone is.
Alright, so now how does this part relate to me? Well, we have that I get good grades, so this may show that I'm above average in intelligence. And I'll say that I'm at least decent (hard to judge, but I'm trying hard here!) at knowing what to say/what to do in certain situations. And luckily for this conversation I usually don't restrain myself from sounding like an idiot as I honestly like to help people to the best of my abilities. I will note here that I don't actively give out information or advice as not to sound arrogant (this may really limit me sometimes), as I HATE sounding arrogant that much. This means I may choose my words more carefully than the average person, but again, only a safe assumption.
Okay, so with this thus far I have an accumulated intelligence level of (anticipation is killing me right now!): slightly above average, at best. How exciting. Now you see why I hate it when people tell me I'm arrogant, I've gone to good lengths to describe how smart I am, and I don't even come out on top! Sometimes I amaze myself. (Some cynical people here can note that I may be using reverse psychology to trick you and maybe even myself, but I doubt that ;))
Alright, what else is there to look at? I'm sure there are quite a few things, and I'd appreciate suggestions for future investigations! Right now I'm trying hard and not much is coming to mind. I could talk about my linguistic abilities, my writing abilities, my critical reading abilities, etc but it all seems to relate to the general topic of school work, and most of it is subjective anyways (anyone can construct essays, poems, short stories, literature, and it's all subjective whether or not it's good, great, terrible, bad, etc. Try finding a list agreed upon by everyone what the top 100 books/movies/songs/etc in the world are, and you'll understand.
Okay, so, at my current state I stand at best slightly abover average intelligence. Not a bad place to stand, I say. I hope to revisit this topic often, as it really interests me, being a part of me, I guess. I think quite a few people will be surprised to read this, and tell me I'm severely underestimating myself, but am I being so unreasonable? I'm trying to get at the idea that intelligence is just a flimsy idea at best, and relies mostly on perception/reputation of individuals. It has a lot to do with my stance on judgements/open-mindedness/etc. I just don't like people judging other people on what I believe to be superficial things. I care a lot about ethics/morals/being a good person. So to me, it's easy to be intelligent if you believe in doing what you think is good, and accomplishing it through good means (it's all subjective of course, but it's the INTENT that's really important here).
Alrighty, until next time (which probably won't be until tomorrow, thankfully), have a good time and stay safe. Consider what intelligence means, maybe. Up to you. (I've done my part so far!)
