Intelligence != Education
I have been reading this my whole life, and it never made any sense, but questioning it is becoming increasingly hard, if not downright illegal.
It shouldn't be a shock to you that metrics of intelligence usually rank higher amongst richer families, that's because they can actually afford the quality education necessary.
Do you see it? it’s a fast trick, you blink and you miss, but it’s right there.
It’s the default assumption, but never proven or explained, that education is a synonym of intelligence and its corollary that money buys education, which means money can make you more intelligent! 🤯
It’s also the reverse, that becoming or staying rich has little to do with being intelligent.
Making my point
So what is intelligence and what is education? Put it simply, education is the accumulation of knowledge (facts, figures and processes) intelligence is understanding when and how to use those facts, figures and processes.
If you know the above, you are educated, if you understand it, you are intelligent.
First, instinctively, it doesn’t make any sense to equate the two three, you know of affluent people that are as dumb as a rock, you know of people with degrees that can’t get a joke even if you explain it to them trice, you know of kids from rough backgrounds achieving way more than society ever expected them to.
Second, if you spend the time to research 1, you will find an uncomfortable truth, and painfully obvious one: intelligence has a lot to do with luck and traits, and studying hard doesn’t move the needle all that much.
The good news is that, the normal distribution of intelligence makes it fairly unimportant for the vast majority of people: we are all more or less as intelligent, or as dumb, as everyone else; it’s only at the extremes that real impact can be seen.
The other good news for us middle of the pack is that raw intelligence is only one of many factors that make a successful and meaningful life, you could argue that extreme intelligence is actually working against that very outcome as many stories of geniuses dying alone and in poverty will remind us.
Another good news is that there are plenty of intelligences under the umbrella of intelligence, you might be bad at one kind, and superb at another, this is actually the default scenario, as we evolved to complement each other in our social group.
Why is this misnomer so pervasive?
I think there are few reasons, on the top of my head at least three:
- It gives us hope
- It conforms to liberal values
- It prevents social unrest (kinda)
It gives us hope
Confusing education with intelligence tells us we can escape the limitations of our physical bodies, like gym rats developing massive biceps for a simulacra of a healthy body, we collect academic achievements in the safe assumption we are getting smarter.
Doesn’t hope feel wonderful? We surely need it in our lives to push away the dark nights.
It conforms to liberal values
Isn’t it funny? Irony has always her say in writing history, and this is not different, the revolution that launched liberal values across the West, and with it the world, had to remove any divine from our bodies to make us all equal (Liberté, égalité, fraternité), had to enforce an idea that we are all the same, and if not, that we can all become the same. This struggle is very real to this day with DEI being the latest rebranding of century old ideas.
It prevents social unrest (kinda)
It follows that by adhering to the default set of cultural values, conflating education with intelligence reinforces the status quo, it anchors us into the zeitgeist, it doesn’t makes us subconsciously question if our entire system of belief is after all… wrong?
The kinda is because, of course you are intelligent, and your intelligent brain notices things, things your education has tried very hard to make you reject with disgust, and this creates the modern schizophrenic mind, where we can keep as true two opposite views without breaking the illusion of coherence.
Looking outward
You can find this schizophrenic attitude in the news almost daily, in the conversations you have with friends, family or colleagues, it permeates a lot of our culture, and I suspect it’s one of the main reasons why we are falling apart as a community, incapable of rallying behind a common cultural flag.
The internet with its instant dissemination of infinite education knowledge has only accelerated and brought to the masses what the avant-garde were struggling with already: the dissolution of truth, the cracking of the liberal dogma.
The way you stay sane is by telling the truth as you see it, knowing that what you know is not who you are, and being ready to flip-flop what you know if it passes your internal logical and coherence checks. It gets easier with experience.
Update: xtoblog (x?) has touched on this subject
Someone might make a mental link to The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and yes you can count that into your readings, but no, that is not where the research ends.↩