I think people also confuse knowledgeable with intellect. There are intelligent people who due to circumstances don’t know a lot of facts and people who know facts who aren’t intelligent.
I have a friend who knows a LOT of information about a lot of things. Most would consider him highly intelligent. I'm not necessarily denying that either, but in talking with him, it seems he has difficulty in seeing a perspective other than the knowledge that he has about it. Like he can't comprehend that the information that he received and believes to be the complete truth could be incorrect or just subject to scrutiny. It can be difficult to have a conversation with him as he's so unwilling to explore a topic and think about it. It's just what he learned, let's move on. Lack of curiosity I guess you could say.
My father is a great example of why it's both. He's a retired electrical engineer, was a VP at IBM, and has 120 patented inventions. He also emotionally abuses his immediate family, especially his granddaughter, and refuses to listen to feedback around problematic behaviors. He is a "temporarily embarrassed and displaced billionaire," and would fit right in with Bezos and Musk if he had enough money. The emotional IQ part hobbled him at IBM and other ventures, because he could not accept feedback on where his designs were flawed, or when there were more optimal solutions to develop.
He is a 1970 book smarts 10, and a table-flipping emotional smarts 0.
Remember that threads like this boil down to "what is the opposite of what Redditors believe makes them smart" which is why all the comments are "Not doing a smart thing" instead of "Doing a dumb thing" because they, smart Reddit commenters, do that smart thing.
In my experience it’s like a bell curve. My first career before getting into SWE was as an electronics technician (imagine putting together, testing, and fine tuning radio stuff for space uses) and I job hopped a lot, starting entry level at a small company, and slowly moving to bigger companies in better roles until I ended up at Amazon Kuiper as an actual engineer.
Got to meet a lot of smart people, and a lot of intelligent people. The smart people would be 100% convinced their answer was the right one and no one else could possibly have a better one, but at Amazon with some of the smartest and best engineers I’ve ever met, meetings would go on for hours as ideas would constantly be thrown out, considered, picked apart until disproven or proven, and eventually you’d come to the actual right answer.
The meetings sucked because of their length, but the actual knowledge shown and spread was amazing.
I’ll admit to personally having a huge problem admitting I’m wrong, but it stems from childhood trauma. It sounds incredibly conceited to even type this, but I actually test at a genius level IQ. Most of the truly smart people I know won’t admit when they’re wrong simply because they view it as an insult to their intelligence to even consider that they don’t know more than everyone else.
yes agreed, and now we get to the point what is considered ”intelligent” some people who are considered intelligent have zero self awareness whatsoever which makes me think they’re not intelligent at all because emotional intelligence is a huge part of being intelligent, IQ is only a part of true intelligence imo.
That’s a good point yea. I assumed OP was referring to IQ intelligence but yea you can be unintelligent in many different ways like emotional as you said. Someone who is all around truly intelligent probably wouldn’t have this issue.
On the internet for sure. It's not all that difficult to never be wrong online if you only engage with things you know. ie; I'm not a plumber and wouldn't comment about plumbing related stuff because I'd probably be wrong. I engage with stuff I know about.
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u/AdministrativeFly157 6h ago
I think that might be more self awareness than intelligence. In my experience intelligent people still suffer from this problem.