A fine line between smart and smart-ass

I was at WiP last week (shameless plug, check), and had one of those "Tony goes off on a rant because his brain is too full of new and useless knowledge" scenes. I whipped off a rant about Monk being an anarthrous noun (look it up), something I only recently learned the definition of- thank you, Language Log (another "strong" noun), in the midst of a diatribe about extrasolar planets. Too much Discovery Channel. Now I fear our ozone being burnt off by errant gamma ray bursts. Not really, but you see where I'm comin' from.

Anyhow, this prompted another WiP'er to comment, "he's smart..." to someone there. Now, being the precise brand of prick I am, I'll never turn down a compliment on my intelligence. But my first thought was, "that's no measure of my intelligence- I only just barely know what it means." The fact that I'd only recently learned it made me think that it was somehow "lesser" intelligence than other aspects of my brainpower.

But it got me to thinking about intelligence, talent, creativity, and memory.

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I recently read a story about a man who could remember very nearly every moment in his life.

I can't imagine what that's like. The closest I can think of to feeling like that is that I have (or rather, had- seems to have slipped away, the less textbooks I read) a near-photographic memory. It's not an eidetic memory, but when I was in school, I'd read pages of text, and could picture, on recall, where specific paragraphs of text were located on the page. It was especially easy when there were photos on the page, for some reason. It was odd, is all. Now, closest I have to that skill is an uncanny ability to recall faces (though names... sheesh, horrible).

Now, is Brad Williams smart than me because he can remember more?

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I used to bandy about the idea that we use only 10% of our brain capacity, a concept that none other than Stephen Jay Gould personally disabused me of (I once wrote, but never sent, a long letter to him, detailing how I thought aliens of the Communion variety looked oddly like they could be our ancestors. Glad I never sent it. What a moron you were, Younger Me.). This was something explored in the good-on-the-cover/lame-on-the-inside tome Neanderthal as an interesting (but poorly written) manner in which Neanderthals could have developed telepathy. And I've seen more than one sci-fi movie/tv show use it as the basis for some forced-evolution nonsense in which a principle character suddenly gains either massive intellect or ESP or telepathy or telekinesis, or what have you. I believe it was the premise behind The 4400 (one of my favorites), and John Doe (one I desperately wanted to be awesome).

Regardless, that percentage is bunk, like so many well-known "facts", like Eskimo language, and women speaking 20 times more than men, or brain size differences in men and women (men do, on average, have larger brains, by the by- but as a ratio of brain::body mass, it's almost identical). Al Gore never said he invented the internet. I'm sure I can think of some more, but I'd digress (which can be seen as a serious lack of my intellect).

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How do you quantify intelligence? Neurons firing? Capacity for language? Immense vocabulary? Memory recall?

Hell, chimpss can beat us in memory recall. If you haven't seen the video by now...

But that's eidetic memory. We get language. We traded off instant recall for the ability to say stuff to each other, build roads, and Taco Bell.

Of course, Koko can say stuff as fluently as Helen Keller could. Who's smarter?

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And then there's the "intelligence" of computers. They have perfect recall, and AI's are getting better and better. So... will they ever be smarter than humans?

Is the Turing test even an accurate gauge?

Moore 's law shows that we'll probably get increasingly complex computer in an increasingly short period of time- and this applies to most technology. In my lifetime, we went from tape to disc to MP3, from Beta to VHS to DVD to BlueRay. I'm not even 32. Things that were science fiction in my parent's generation are science fact in mine. Will there be androids roaming the streets of Chicago in 20 years? Would I even know?

God, when did this blog become a techno-geek link-fest?

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Since we are the arbiters of what constitutes intellect, we can make our own definitions.

I know plenty of "smart" people. Not someone who could hold their own against Big Blue, or converse with Stephen Hawking about quarks... but people I respect, who have certain abilities, often ones I do not.

I consider them intelligent. Or intellectuals (which, to me, is little more than what we brainy-types like to call ourselves to locate more of our ilk or spotlight the fact that we're so much smarter than you- we're very insecure. I blame home school).

I once dated a woman who, in addition to being extraordinarily intelligent, she had this intelligence/skill/ability to make everyone around her perfectly at ease. Everyone absolutely loved her (though it was sometimes mistaken for flirting; c'est la vie). It wasn't that she was always sunshine and roses- that gets obnoxious quick- but she just fit in well under lots of circumstances, and made friends easily. To me, that's a type of intelligence.

Don Hall, who coaches WiP, has a specific outlook/skill set/knack for taking in the rambling discussions we go through in a workshop, and turning them into a workable longform. Even on my best days, I don't yet have that skill, try as I might. And it's particular to him and a handful of others. Is that intelligence? Is it creativity? Is it merely experience, and I, too, will, with cynical aplomb, hold the same ability, ten years down the line?

My best friend from Cincy was one of those people who, were he not such a nice guy, you'd absolutely hate. He taught himself piano, and composes his own beautiful new age music. He picked up a camera one day and decided he wanted to learn, and 6 months later was working for a prominent wedding photographer. He has an excellent voice, an eye for graphic design, taught himself how to draft architectural drawings (he's finally going to school for it), and can build models so well that he worked in LA for about two years, making quite a good buck at it. Suffice it to say, he's talented, and his brain works in ways that most people's don't. So... is he smart? Smarter than me, or Don, or my ex?

I read Lolita a few years ago, and though the language wasn't lost on me (yet again, another arbitrary measure of intellect: vocabulary. Sheesh.), a decent number of the literary references were. Since I wanted to enjoy the book rather than constantly put it down to search for some obscure reference, I took what I could and gleaned what I could from the context (much as I used to gain new vocabulary, a practice that's not always so successful). While I'd not argue that Nabokov is considerably smarter than me, what makes it so? Language? Reference? Experience? These are all things I can pick up, given the desire. Talent? Not so much something you can pick up, though something you can hone.

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I have no idea. Alls I know is I know nothing. I think Socrates said that. :)

And getting into a complicated discussion of it is certainly beyond the scope of this blog (I'm no scientist, and this is already overlong). But it does make me realize that, like playing with people who are better at billiards than you strengthens your own game, it's always a good idea to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. Be that in person, on TV, in books, in movies, on the radio. Surround yourself with brilliance, stand on the shoulders of giants, keep your feet on the ground but keep reaching for the stars.