Personally, I think this is a very difficult question to answer. Part of it is that it is such a loaded question, and it always makes me wonder if someone would consider me to be intelligent, and if they did, would it make any difference? I’m myself whether or not someone else places some kind of value judgment on me. So would they think I’m not intelligent as a way of justifying not liking me?
I guess one thing the answers to this question have shown me is that the idea that someone is intelligent is a very personal thing. It isn’t very objective at all. After all, it’s not as if we walk around with IQ scores pinned on our foreheads. I guess some people do announce their IQ score at every conceivable moment, but my feeling has always been that if someone feels a need to prove they are intelligent, then they must be missing something. Scores aren’t that important.
What is important is how someone relates to the world. What is important is how complex their understanding of things is. But if they don’t understand things the way I do, then it’s harder to see their intelligence. I have to wonder where they went wrong. How could you be really good at analyzing the world and end up in the wrong place? I guess either they are getting bad data or they are bad a processing the data. It can be very difficult to figure out which is happening.
For me, intelligence is also about creativity and an ability to have fun. Do you know how to play? Can you play with words? Stories? Physicality? Music? I think that word play is what a lot of people would call humor, and I guess it’s hard to be funny without also being intelligent. You have to think quickly to be funny.
And you also need to know a lot. You need facts at your beck and call. This is important because you can’t support your ideas without facts. Although, it probably takes a pretty intelligent person to make up stuff from nothing and have people believe them. Although those people usually fall under the category of people called “politicians.” But some of them are also business people, and probably we’ll find wonderful fabulists in all walks of life. Or maybe they aren’t so wonderful.
If I like someone, I will, no doubt, consider them intelligent. If I don’t like them, I’ll probably fault their intelligence. Maybe intelligence is really just a proxy for whether a person is a friend or not?