I often listen to people fire off facts, be it about the economy, geopolitics, nature etc, and always thought they were extremely intelligent. It occurred to me recently that it could just be that they have phenomenal memories.
Of course, there are genuinely intelligent people out there who solve hard problems – medical researchers, rocket scientists etc. But I think your average “intelligent” just has great recall.
Am I wrong??
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No. It is how well you apply limited knowledge to navigate new problems that you haven’t previously encountered.
I think intelligence is more than just memorizing. It’s understanding and connecting the information you have. Like….people can memorize the dates of important ww2 events but truly understanding why they happened the way they did, and how they affected the war, are completely different.
I do think memorization makes people seem more intelligent at first.
Most measures of general intelligence are not about recall but speed of processing. How quickly can someone pick up new abstract concepts and then make use of them, how fast can they solve problems and how creative they are about synthesising new ideas from an understanding of existing situations. This is different from the ability to recall facts.
However, people who understand things quickly are able to process more information and as a result often have read more widely than those who do not, so they may also have more recall available to them.
I think it’s a different type of intelligence. I can apply bits of knowledge (like processes and rules etc) well to new situations but struggle to remember raw facts. I’d be bad at a quiz show but I like to think I’m useful in other scenarios. I do think school seems to test memory quite a lot and I struggled with that.
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
No. Odds are to be able to remember something clearly in a state that it is useful requires being able to understand it properly and that takes the ability to understand new ideas.
Anyone can go online and look up some quotes or facts, but that doesn’t mean everyone can write intelligent posts etc. Usually people half quote things out of context and just throw things vaguely at the wall and its transparent as hell and means the conversation goes nowhere and they don’t learn anything.
That said, memory is very useful, there’s no such things as “raw and general intelligence”, people who are experts in their field might learn new fields quickly, but without all the bits of knowledge in other fields they aren’t much use initially.
While the discussion of what constitutes “intelligence” can be long… a good starting point would be “The level and speed at which someone correctly processes information”.
To answer your direct question, they are intertwined. I cannot really imagine how it would be to have intelligence while having poor memory. Not sure if that person would be regarded as “intelligent”. Likewise, just because someone can recite things because they have really good memory… it does not mean that they understand it (which requires intelligence).
There’s different kinds of intelligence. There are people that absorb and understand information quickly utilize it and then forget it over time.
Meanwhile other people that take longer to absorb and understand information but never forget it and can utilize it even if they haven’t used that information for years.
For example I can watch a YouTube tutorial on something and quickly apply that knowledge but in three months I’ll have to look it up again if it’s not something I use on a day to day basis. Meanwhile my best friend takes longer to learn things but once he’s got it down he never forgets it. He’d be able to do the same task 5 years later as if it’s the first day he learned it.
No. Good memory tells you tomato is a fruit. Intelligence is not putting it in the fruit salad.
There are two main facets of intelligence, crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence.
Crystallized intelligence is similar to what you noted, the ability to retain and recall information. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason and solve problems using abstract thinking rather than prior knowledge.
AI isn’t intelligent, it’s just able to source vast amounts of data and parse it quickly. Intelligence is thinking outside the box to solve problems.
Only to dumb people.
Comprehension and application is a necessary component of intelligence.
It is using memory to solve new problems. To apply what you and keep expanding knowledge.
It is a bit more complex.
But I like the question..what is intelligence.
At work we have very intelligent people. They have great knowledge. Yet they can not deal with simple things, without discuss6 it 30 minutes