I know I joked about it above, but I really do have objective metrics that tell me I’m at least a one-in-a-million fast-thinker* - probably faster. I think fast-thinking is often what people mean when they say “smart”. As someone who has had that experience, I wish I could communicate to people that there is no more reason to worry that people have different natural mental abilities than there is to worry that people have differing natural physical abilities. Instead, we need to have a cultural shift away from thinking a person’s intelligence is a proxy for their worth.
It’s what use that things are being put to that matters, and nearly all tasks you need to meet a certain threshold to be adequate, and exceeding that threshold provides little additional value. If a job requires you to be able to carry 50lbs over extended periods, the fact that you can carry 70lbs doesn’t make much difference. Similarly, a job that requires you to be able to do certain mental tasks usually doesn’t allow you use intelligence beyond what is needed. Just like the person who can lift more, it makes the task you are given seem easy, but it doesn’t make you especially better at getting it done.
And just like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt, once you get out of the realm of competition, there just aren’t tasks out there that lend themselves to the limits of human capacity.
Even in areas of pure thought that are highly amenable to innovation, vast intelligence isn’t necessarily that much help. Math professors and great programmers are usually going to be very smart people because those tasks have a high bar for entry, not because there is a huge payoff for exceeding that bar. Innovation is fundamentally a team sport, and the people we credit for great innovations in history are people who were often only months or in some cases days ahead of other people who were working on the exact same thing.
People blame low intelligence on all sorts of things from showing up late to work to voting Republican. But pretty much everything blamed on low intelligence is really showing a lack of another skill. Teach mindfulness, empathy and cognitive behavioural therapy techniques in grade school and 80% of what we call “stupidity” would be vastly improved (especially the stupidity from very smart people). An actual systematic problem with lack of intelligence in society would be something like if we couldn’t find enough people to be rocket scientists or chemical engineers.
This study is telling us that people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own intelligence, but I would bet what we are really seeing is that people who tie intelligence to identity vastly overestimate their intelligence, and vastly overestimate how much intelligence can tell you about a person. Many also probably feel that having a high intelligence entitles them to something, and use the intelligence they have to come up with elaborate justifications for that hypothesis. I can think of a at least one person who is clearly extremely intelligent who doesn’t seem to have anything better to do with their intelligence then make up justifications for white nationalism.
* I won’t share details of evidence for my intelligence because it would require sharing information that could identify me (and if it couldn’t, it probably wouldn’t be evidence of such an lofty claim).
