Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Intellectual Elite

So, today at the "round-table" my associates and I talked about intelligence and normal society. After a couple hours into the discussion we realized our definition of intelligence was completely different. Therefore, for the sake of this post I used Webster's definition.
intelligence-capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude ingrasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

Most of our discussion centered around ignorance which people tend to confuse with intelligence. Personally, I have an issue with the confusion between intelligence and ignorance. I say this because we are all ignorant about some topic. Also, being well informed about many topics does not necessarily mean that said person has a higher level of intelligence. 

We then began to discuss the correlation between a good college and intelligence. This argument does not take into account the topic being studied or the work ethic of the person. Basically, assumptions are irresponsible. I can not concede to the notion that a person is "smarter" because they went to Harvard. This is a dangerous over generalization. 

http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-college-major/

The above is a link showing the correlation between IQ level and college majors. I find it humorous that this point gets left out often in discussions. Going to Harvard for Public Administration does not make a person more intelligent than a PITT engineering student.

The point that I am trying to make is that it is difficult to generalize our intellectual elite by any one factor.