Intelligence tests seem to miss the point of smartness. True smartness should be defined as the ability to leverage one’s thoughts to achieve one’s desires. “Successful smart person” should be redundant, and “unsuccessful smart person” should be a contradiction. If Dilbert is such a genius, why does his life suck so badly? Dilbert is an example of a person very good at engineering things, but very bad at leveraging his thoughts to his advantage. A really smart person is someone who uses their tools to get what they want out of life.
One necessary component of True Intelligence, then, is actually knowing what one wants out of life. It’s pretty difficult to use your thoughts to achieve a goal when you don’t know what that goal is. A lot of people who might otherwise be very intelligent seem to be kind of blindly using their thoughts to accumulate “stuff”, be it money or education or career position or whatever, stuff which could potentially be used to accomplish some deeper goals but isn’t.
Some people have “Intelligent” ingrained as part of their personality. I was always one of these people, though I’m trying to escape from that. From experience I can say, these types are the ones in greatest danger of misusing their thoughts and applying them in ways which don’t make them happier at all. Think Dilbert again: if the brain is a muscle then he’s benching 300, but he never leaves the gym. A mind un-applied toward achieving deeper desires is a wasted mind.
Look at vocabulary. There are certain words, especially long words, which are considered “smart”. But according to my definition, it doesn’t make sense for words to be smart, since words don’t have desires, nor do they have minds to use in pursuit thereof. These words serve purposes, they allow very precise speech, or they evoke subtle feelings, shades of meaning. If a person desires to stir peoples’ thoughts with poetry, that person can use these words very intelligently, turn them into tools in the hands of the mind, tools which accomplish goals. But whipping out the thesaurus at a party or even in a casual conversation is probably a bad idea if one’s goal is to make friends and influence people. So depending on the context, the words we call “brainy” may be used intelligently or stupidly, and really, the latter use is a lot more common.
When I was younger I was a little bitter because I didn’t fit in socially, I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t get invited out a lot. At the time, I usually thought of myself as very smart, and I blamed those woes on people around me just not being as smart as me. Now I realize I was blundering around like an imbecile, I had these desires (friends, girlfriends, going out) lying in front of me in one direction and my brain was running around randomly, I wasn’t actually using it at all to achieve those desires.
Consider the following hypothetical (and stereotypical) “jock”. On Friday, he sleeps in late, then skips his gen ed class to play volleyball instead. After this he hits the gym with some friends, then they watch some reality TV and pre-game before going out and getting wasted at the campus bars. He brings a skanky girl home and they have a good time. Now, traditionally, the gatekeepers of “smart” would waggle their fingers furiously, this is not a smart young man! But (and I’m speaking from experience here, sad lonely experience) those activities he did are ones which some very “brainy” peers envy quite a bit: playing with friends; hanging out with friends; partying with friends; meeting girls; doing nasty things with girls. When I was in the position of envying these stereotypical constructs, I would never have admitted to wanting these things (“Hmmmph, I’m more interested in intelligent girls!”) or I would have denied I wasn’t up to speed (“Friends? I go to a Starcraft LAN party almost every week!”) But in my heart of hearts I really did want them, very deeply. I was utterly failing to use my mind to get these desires, and so by my own definition, I wasn’t very smart back then.
True Intelligence is not something you can detect. Because to detect it in a person, you would need to know his true desires first. Traditionally we measure intelligence as though everybody’s deepest desire is to solve Rubiks cubes and see patterns in bathroom tiles. If somebody truly does want those things, then traditional techniques provide a great estimation of their intelligence. But the heart of a man is no trivial thing, and a person’s desires are far more complex than the most complicated intelligence test.
FURTHER READING
Is Society Biased Against Smart People?
Using Words Effectively
Become More Intelligent by Doing New Things
You Might Be A Grammar Nazi If…