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Comment by howunfortunate

1 day ago

This is simply untrue. I tried to think of an animal example so I could give a concession, and there just...aren't any.

Smarter just means smarter.

7 comments

howunfortunate

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hennell  1 day ago

As anyone who's needed to provide IT support to a doctor, lawyer, lauded academic or host of otherwise "smart professionals", can assert, you can be very very smart in one area and very stupid in another.

See for example Paul Framton https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/30/physicist-mode...

  • howunfortunate  1 day ago

    Ah I see.

    This is the classic error in mixing up knowledge / experience and intelligence.

    Intelligence is the ability to quickly process, understand, learn, and use information. It does not imply having already been exposed to any given information.

    A smart doctor may have terrible computer skills. But this is from lack of experience and interest, not lack of ability to learn how to use computers.

    But take that smart doctor, and a relatively dumb person who is equally inexperienced with computers. Now give them a month and incentive to learn computers. The doctor will learn much more; that's intelligence.

    • oblio  16 hours ago

      There is IQ, EQ, and even purely intellectual aspects have a million facets. So you're wrong even on that front.

      Someone can be really good at physics and suck completely at biology, due to factors we don't even understand (motivation probably being the main one we do understand).

      We even see this in practice with super bright tech people, especially programmers, failing at launching businesses or at adapting in other lines of work such as management, finance, etc.

      1 reply →

dragontamer  1 day ago

Cats famously have more brainpower than dogs. But dogs understand us humans far better than any cat.

Someone who actually works with real animals (farmers? Ranchers??) would come up with better examples. But I'm just city boy over here who only meets cats and dogs on a regular basis.