Ten minutes from now I’ll say, “and that’s all there is to say on the matter.” The matter in question is my understanding of intelligence and a revision, I think, of a longstanding belief that everyone is secretly smart.
You’re probably already saying, ‘no, dude, everyone is decidedly not secretly smart’. I used to disagree with good reason. We quantify and qualify genius through outdated testing and criteria. Genius doesn’t necessarily refer to one’s IQ. I feel like genius is a more situational terminology. For example, no one would ever accuse Iceberg Slim of being an MIT Scholar. He was, on the other hand, an extraordinary pimp much in the way that Mike Tyson was an exemplary boxer and boxing logician. While known for raw power, Tyson understood the nuance of intimidation, ring positioning, punch strategy, and so on. I am talking about scions of specific professions, but my belief was more basic than that. I felt like each of us had some area of expertise in our lives in which we were quite intelligent.
Now I feel like some people are straight dumb.
I’m not trying to be mean-spirited or condescending (though I’ve been recently reminded of my oft occasion to do the latter), I’m just at the point where I recognize the role that effort plays in intelligence. In other words, I realize the people and situational intelligence I credit has far more to do with effort and innovation than it does with actual intelligence. These people merely were not lazy. They decided that they cared so completely about one thing or another that it superseded their natural desire to lay sideways on the couch drooling to the staccato of the Itchy and Scratchy Show. I have recently discovered that this level of drive/effort is in of itself a rare thing, which gave me a new perspective on intelligence. Smart is something nearly anyone can achieve with a baseline intellect and a heck of a lot of hard work. Lazy smart requires a level of intellect that far exceeds average.
Lazy smart means that your raw intellect makes you capable of being very good at a very large number of things with little effort. This is particularly noticeable when seen in contrast with those who don’t have that raw intellect and put in the same amount of work as lazy smart people but with far worse results. Once I watched a student turn in a final paper she’d written in front of me only hours before it was due. I had the fortune of watching her friend do the same thing in the same room for the same teacher. One student walked out with a great paper and one was, well, crap. At first I dismissed this as one student having a better grasp of the basics of language and perhaps more extensive training prior to contact with me. Both of these things may still be true but what I read in those two papers can no longer be dismissed. One student exhibited a considerable depth of critical thinking and the other had all the depth of a rock skipping across water.
In the end it comes down to the ability to think critically. The depth of that capacity seems proportional to the depth of one’s intellect. If you can think enough to consider the important questions and think on the ramifications thereof, you have smarts (street or otherwise). If you can’t think of any questions, you’re just dumb. This semester I encountered some powerful thinkers and some people who were not so powerful. When asked, students tell me that they can’t be bothered with thinking critically about stuff they don’t care about or see the benefit of. I say to them: If you cannot reach the conclusion that coming up with important questions and finding the motivation to succeed in something where the immediate benefits cannot be seen, then I cannot ever call you smart.
And that’s all there is to say on the matter.
Some Thoughts:
- Caribe Devine is a local newscaster who, by name, could easily be mistaken for a stripper.
- On a completely unrelated but far more meaningful note, Charles Babbage began work on his analytical engine back in 1834.