>>11359118It's hard to tell. Knowledge has gotten very specialized to the point that we don't have polymath types who are clearly superior to the rest, e.g. Goethe and many other philosophers and scientists throughout history. This kind of creates an issue because someone might happen to be brilliant at mathematics, despite being an idiot at everything else. Is this man smart? This sort of savantism towards a particular subject is associated with autism, yet autistic people often need lots of social support in order to develop life-skills and to function well. Are they smart? Or is the smartest person going to be someone with a lot of generalized knowledge? We could never identify this person because he almost certainly wouldn't be making breakthroughs in any field. We could go by wisdom. But, though the wise are grateful for and accepting of truth, they don't actually know a lot; and their application of knowledge may also be relatively slow. Memory is sometimes associated with intelligence, but I wouldn't consider someone smart purely because they have a good memory, so I disregard this. There's also IQ, raw analytic ability, this isn't a bad measure. It's the best one modern society has developed. It's still not particularly good though. A high IQ person can reject truths for stupid reasons, e.g. arrogance. They can also not apply their analytic abilities at all.
I think that intelligence is a sort of gestalt that involves knowledge of things, wisdom, and analytic ability. We don't really have measures for this, and it's questionable whether such measurement is even possible. The identification of intelligence is very subjective because of this. So I couldn't quite tell you what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it.
