What Makes a Person 'Smart'?

Smart is when you agree with me. Intelligent is when you disagree with me but your reasoning is sound even though you’re wrong. :D

On a serious note though, that’s a real issue. A lot of people simply drop anyone who comes to a different conclusion than they do into the ‘dumb’ category. Great example- buying a plane is dumb if all you care about is financial stability or amassing/retaining wealth. However if you’re an actual human being and it brings you happiness maybe it’s not so dumb. It all depends on your goals in life. That’s where wisdom kicks in- understanding not everyone has the same needs, wants, desires, and experiences as you.
 
A "C" student with common sense will go much further than an "A" student with no common sense. I've seen this displayed many times in business where common sense trumps smarts every time.
 
SoCal RV Flyer said:
Most truly intelligent people also have a good dose of humility.
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I feel like this is true into their mid-40s or so, then some of the genius-level folks I know turn raging ultradouche almost overnight. It's eerie. It's like long-suppressed ego comes flooding all at once once the mortality bit gets flipped in their consciousness and they do their best to channel some mix of Kanye and Simon Cowell.
 
SoCal RV Flyer said:
Someone who tells you he's a genius probably isn't. Most truly intelligent people also have a good dose of humility.
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Most smart people have realized that the more they learn, the more they are aware of that they still don’t know.

But you still find some narrow gauge experts who think their specific skillet somehow translates to everything else in life.
 
Brad Smith said:
A "C" student with common sense will go much further than an "A" student with no common sense. I've seen this displayed many times in business where common sense trumps smarts every time.
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In the end, a diploma is a pass/fail. Nobody cares about your GPA. The guy I'm interviewing that has the required certs and can convince me he can get the job done with minimal effort is who gets the job. The guy that will blow my project budgets by trying to hone things to perfection has no place in my organization.
 
Sac Arrow said:
An airplane that loses a prop is a glider. A helicopter that loses a prop is a brick.
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Depends, if losing the prop throws the CG too far aft, the airplane isn’t any better off.
 
Bill Jennings said:
Depends, if losing the prop throws the CG too far aft, the airplane isn’t any better off.
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Tru dat, but I believe one of our own recently lost a prop on his Pitts and was able to land. And there is a YouTube video of a 172 landing without a prop. So, I suppose a modification to the POH is, if the prop departs the aircraft, have the passengers jump to the front.
 
Smart people I know acknowledge that they don't know everything, but are curious enough about things that interest them that they educate themselves by researching the subjects. Today, everything is available on the web but critical thinking is necessary to separate reality from snake oil. Many smart people aren't college graduates.

Some people think they know everything, but don't know what they don't know because they are incurious and don't read.
 
SkyChaser said:
Enjoy!

Please refrain from judging intelligence (or lack thereof) by such methods as political leanings or amount of toilet paper a person bought about four weeks ago.

And yes, I totally stole this idea and title from denverpilot...I'm not smart enough to come up with it on my own. ;)
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Dunno. Just know I always seemed to be in trouble when I was kid for being ‘smart.’
 
"Smart" is a composite of several things.

- Ability to learn new things

- The ability to retain information

- Ability to reason, understand abstract concepts, and think critically

- Common sense

In terms of being "smart" you are pretty much only going to be as "smart" as the weakest of those areas.

Stan Cooper said:
Smart people I know acknowledge that they don't know everything, but are curious enough about things that interest them that they educate themselves by researching the subjects. Today, everything is available on the web but critical thinking is necessary to separate reality from snake oil. Many smart people aren't college graduates.

Some people think they know everything, but don't know what they don't know because they are incurious and don't read.
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I'm in agreement with Stan.

There are four major ways that people come to "know" something:

1) Authority

This is where you know something because someone you respect and regard as an authority told you, or you read it somewhere from a source you trust.

It is BY FAR the least effective way of knowing something for several reasons:
- It is tainted from the start by the judgement the person puts on the source.
- We've all seen stuff spread on the internet that is total BS, where people don't even check the source or consider whether the person who originated it had any credibility and or had an agenda.
- People tend to seek information that confirms what they already think or believe. That confirmation bias is a potential trap for anyone, but the smarter you are the more aware you generally are of that bias and the more likely you will be to verify the facts you encounter.
- People also fall prey to logical fallacies such as ad populum reasoning - "If lots of people say it or believe it, it must be true". Again, the smarter you are the less likely you are to fall into this trap.

2) Personal observation / the scientific method

This doesn't have to be a formal experiment, but it sure helps if someone understands the key components of what makes a good experiment - and what does not. People who come to know things this way, will also use the "authority" method, the difference is that they'll consider what they hear and balance it against their own experience and observations, and if there is a conflict between the new information and the old, they'll test the new and old theories to see to what extent each of them is valid. There is still a risk of confirmation bias in terms of testing the new information in a manner that sets it up to succeed or fail based on what the person want's to the true, and smarter someone is, the more likely the person is to at least be aware of what he or she is doing.

3) Logic

Logic comes into play when you need to make connections between things and make conclusions based on multiple facts, which might include facts that are obviously related as well as facts that are less obviously related. It also helps in terms of guiding your personal observations and experimentation to test the facts you "know" or learn through experience. Logic helps you contextualize what you know and put parameters on it's validity - the conditions under which something is true, and the limits of what it actually tells you, which helps you learn, define and understand the variables that may be affecting what you think you "know".

4) Philosophy

This is the highest level of "knowing" something - and the one the most people scoff at - by definition the ones that are not really smart.

Philosophy helps someone put all the pieces together into a coherent big picture. More importantly it helps them reconcile facts and information that are in disagreement and to resolve problems where there is no perfect answer, which is what the entire field of ethics is based upon and I think most "smart" people will agree that there is a lot of unethical behavior out there. The dumb ones won't recognize that unethical behavior, and there are a lot of everyday examples.

When I was in college, I worked during the winter months as a police officer and in the summer months for the state Game Fish & Parks as a park ranger. I noted during a fishing tournament fisherman putting the first six walleyes into their live wells and then releasing the smallest as soon as they caught a larger one. After the tournament I went diving in some of the more popular bays and found the bottom littered with hundreds of dead walleye as once a walleye ends up in a livewell (with it's warmer temps, reduced, O2, higher stress levels and increased abrasion) he odds of it surviving if released are very low. A live well keeps a fish fresh until you get back to the dock to clean it. Period. Ethically, if you put a fish in your livewell or on a stringer, you own it and it's part of your daily limit. Unfortunately, some fisherman are just not smart enough to get that, while others morally just don't care, and think their "right" to be competitive or keep fishing after they have reached their limits trumps the need to protect a public resource. All of our rights come with a commensurate amount of personal responsibility in wielding those rights in a manner that does not infringe on the rights of others. That's a philosophical concept.

If I spoke with fisherman about the imp[act of their practices or suggested it was unethical, I'd hear justifications such as "if it's not illegal, then it is ethical" - a sure indication that the person didn't even understand the concept of ethics. The end result was a law specifically stating the practice was illegal (even though it was difficult to enforce).

I'm not just picking fisherman either. That lack of understanding is widespread. I've see high level bureaucrats and political appointees in government earning $150K to $200K make basically similar statements, viewing "ethics training" as just learning the "rules" and not understanding ethics as an essential part of problem solving when one or more tenets or concepts are in conflict.

It also cuts the other direction in terms of over enforcing a rule without considering the bigger picture. For example, the Red Arrow Bar held a fishing tournament every year and surprisingly enough it usually ended up with a lot of fisherman getting drunk on the boat ramp after the evening weigh in. They'd stay on the boat ramp, and when they got tired they'd wander back to their campers and tents in one and two's more or less quietly, and we'd politely remind those who weren't about the need to keep it down and they'd comply. However, at one tournament our district manager rolled in about midnight and pitched a fit that they were on the boat ramp at 1am and the ramp closed at 10 pm. We explained the reality to him that it was far less disruptive to everyone else in the campground to have 200 drunks in one spot at the boat ramp, well away from the tents and campers, than to have 200 drunks drinking in groups of various sizes all through the campground. He disagrees. He was not very smart, but he was the entitled son of the Department Secretary, which explained how he got the job. He went down and told them to cease and desist and they basically told him to get stuffed (another reality we fully understood). He got mad and decided that he'd just turn out the lights on the boat ramp. Unfortunately, all the lights in the campground were on the same circuit so a few minutes later we had 200 angry drunks wandering through the campground on a dark, overcast moonless night stumbling over tents or into the wrong tents, disturbing everyone, etc. Chaos reigned and our fearless leader's response was to get back in his truck, taking the key to the lights with him, and going off to wreak havoc somewhere else. There's are words for him that go way beyond "idiot" that I can't use on this forum.

In short, ethics is about making the least bad decision when all of the alternatives have a downside, violate a rule or tenet, and/or you have to balance the needs of one group with another. That's a very real need in government and I don't have to get political to point out the need for that kind of decision making, especially in a time of crisis, or the need for really smart people who understand philosophy and things like ethics to either be making those decisions or assisting those decision makers - who need to be smart enough to listen.

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As for wisdom? I think that has a lot more to do with knowing your limitations and knowing when to do or say something - and when not to. It's separate from being smart, but just as important.
 
He who thinks he has “arrived” has a long way to go.
 
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