mantle of intelligence

No, this post will not be about the item from Warcraft III, nor will it be about any Warcraft-related stuff. Instead, I decided to write my thoughts about the concept of “intelligence”, as it’s such a loose term – and yet very describing. The actual meaning of the word itself is to understand, but the way it’s used is so much more.

Firstly, it would seem that Wikipedia shares the line of thought I’ll move towards, in regards to my understanding that there are different kinds of ways to be intelligent. You could be unable to add 2 and 2, but yet be extremely good to communicate with people, while the opposite applies too, logically.

What some people seem not to grasp though, is the meaning of most IQ-tests, that float around the Internet, and various other places (schools, for instance). Primarily, these are focusing too much on logical thinking, which gives “mathematicians” a huge advantage. It wasn’t unusual for those with skills in math to receive an IQ of over 140, if you focused a little. Since the average IQ is ~100, people seemed to be extremely – if not inhumanly – smart, taken their age into consideration. Hardly the case, since it was back in High School. According to some random IQ-test I found, mine is apparently 133. Not too bad, but I’m seemingly not as “intelligent” as I used to be.

As mentioned before, there are many categories of intelligence. I’ll avoid trying sum any of them up though, as I’ll probably some of the vital ones. On top of that, I’d like to admit that I’m likely not a genius in most of the the categories – but, that’s how it should be, in my own opinion. Imagine the scenario where everyone understood everything about everything. Why would people need teachers, if people could just open a book and practically feed in the information, Matrix-style?

The greatest aspect of intelligence is, in my current opinion, the way of understanding intelligence. I realize that this might sound a bit confusing, and lead to a never-ending loop that involves intelligence being said too many times. By that, I mean that I respect the people who are able to judge where a persons focus of intelligence are placed, and thus understand the way of understanding things.

Now, while I promised this wouldn’t take any direction to Warcraft, or the like, I just can’t help myself. Sorry, but that’s me – I’m not forcing you to read further if you want to live under the illusion that I always keep my promises in regards to holding back on certain things. I simply love to relate real things to the “other things”.

Different kinds of intelligence is, in Warcraft-terms, pretty must impossible as there’s only one type of intelligence. But, fittingly enough, it’s not a requirement to have lots of intelligence. Although, to understand intelligence, one could try to figure out which of the following 3 is the best (although only one of them is a skill, and neither are from the same classes): [Arcane Intellect], [Divine Intellect] or [Fel Intellect]? Would it be too confusing if I started getting into details about whether mana resembled mental capacity, and so on? I’d probably confuse more than I amused atleast, so I’ll keep that for some other time, where it would be more appropriate – or more people understood where my lines of thoughts leads.

EDIT: I rewrote the post, as it required more than a capable human mind to understand what I meant – even by myself. I blame the heat.

6 Comments


  1. Could your post be summed up to:

    “I respect the people who are able to judge where a persons focus of intelligence are placed, and thus understand the way of understanding things.”

    … or did I miss something? :-)

    Reply

  2. That's pretty much the point, yes. The reasoning behind it is that some people tend to have a very biased look upon intelligence.

    Besides that, I love taking any opportunity to make something pretty simple sound confusing. :)

    Reply

  3. Shouldn't you do it the other way around – making confusing or complicated
    things sound simple?

    Reply

  4. I don't think it's mainstream, I just think it's common sense to explain
    difficult things instead of obscuring simple stuff ;-)

    Reply

  5. I think we're thinking in different directions here, as this post wasn't about explaining the “intelligence”-word. If I wanted to explain stuff, I'd just posted the fitting link to one of the million of pages out there that already does it.

    The post however is, as stated, my way of looking at the term, and thoughts about it, which logically leads to a semi-confusing text. But, after all, isn't that just a fun side-point of writing about a word that means “to understand”? :)

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Gnub Cancel reply