Intelligence
The question of how to characterize intelligence has always been of interest, perhaps never more so than now with things like AI coming to the fore. I cannot prove that I am intelligent - in fact most of the evidence so far points the other way - but as a professor I find myself constantly required to gauge other people's intelligence.
For example, I have to figure out how intelligent the student or postdoc I am talking to is so I can decide what level to teach or guide them at. I have to figure out the intelligence of my colleagues and peers so I know when my understanding has run out and I can use help from them. I have to figure out the intelligence of the top professionals in my field - some of them Nobel laureates! - so I can learn from their way of thinking as best as I can.
Intelligence and Information
In this post I will consider a restricted aspect of intelligence, which has to do with information. In conducting my daily business, I find intelligence often to be correlated with the possession of information. I don't mean this in a trivial way - as in concluding that one who has more information is necessarily more intelligent.
Even awareness of ignorance is a kind of information, and intelligent people seem to possess this awareness in an acute way (they are not only aware of what they themselves don't know, but by talking to other people can quickly figure out the limitations of their knowledge).
This kind of awareness seems to be very important in the type of scientific research I perform. For example, since the aim of such research is find new (and interesting and/or useful) things, it is first of all very important to distinguish between what is known and what is not known.
This is because there is no publication benefit in replicating what has already been done (though there can be a learning benefit). Going even further, much of the scientific research I do is in fact about locating interesting questions the answers to which are not known, but which are now ripe to be investigated with some existing box of tools.
When I write grant proposals, they address exactly such questions. As any researcher with experience knows, the identification of such questions is an art, in which skill can be acquired over time with study, thought and application.
Below I will list a couple of other instances of how information and intelligence play out with each other.
Examples mundane and exotic
i) Ignoring other peoples' knowledge - bad idea : We often make the very human mistake of assuming that our personal experience is universal, especially if it is intense. I often have people in my office saying such and such result cannot be proved (I happen to know the paper where it has been) because they tried and failed, or a certain calculation can only be performed to so many places of accuracy (I know graduate students who could do better). I am sure I make similar claims myself, on occasion.
In this case we are not aware of others' knowledge, and perhaps just as (if not more) importantly, of our own ignorance. In either case, this is not intelligent behavior, and can in fact be harmful when we send people away with a wrong impression of what is possible, e.g. telling them 'you can't do this'.
The culprit is often our 'common sense', which Einstein used to call 'a layer of prejudices', and which in scientific research translates into the dogma of the particular individual, group, lab, or field. Amusing anecdote: Einstein apparently complained to Eddington that English astronomers were slow to accept relativity. 'Yes,' said Eddington, 'They have too much common sense.'
ii) Ignoring other peoples' knowledge - good idea: This example comes from another story, though the punchline is probably apocryphal. Lev Landau, one of the all-time great theoretical physicists, had predicted that a certain type of material (antiferromagnets) should not exist. Louis Neel still looked for it and found it.
When they asked him why he had kept looking, though Landau had declared against its existence, Neel said, 'Thank God I am not that smart.' A subtle example of when disregarding others' knowledge can be an intelligent move.
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