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Intelligence and Internet browsers

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Curt:
It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers • The Register

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers - DonationCoder.com
--- End quote ---

I was reading the test, and was thinking this is a classic example of poor thinking. I don't question the test result, but the criteria for "intelligence". We need as humans to remind each others that intelligence is not just academic intelligence (if you can solve some mathematical or advanced logical questions), but that intelligence is so much more.

Academic intelligence was all the test was able to refer to. The users of Internet Explorer may actually be the group with the higher intelligence, if it was about genuine intelligence, because the users of Opera (etcetera) are more likely to be without connection to Real Life = non-academically unintelligent.

Intelligence is first and foremost if you at all time know how to help the one next to you. "Love thy neighbor/neighbour", as the Bible puts it. Intelligence is also if you can make piece, raise a family, feed the hungry, make fair decisions, strengthen the weak, protect the vulnerable, etcetera, etcetera. All this is genuine intelligence, because it is the form for intelligence that is necessary for life! Lack of this kind of intelligence will literally lead to death, and that is by itself a fatal lack of intelligence.


The guy who sits behind his desk all time, browsing the Net, loosing his head to unimportant pseudo matters and virtual situations, is really not intelligent, no matter what browser he is using  and no matter how high his academic intelligence may be. In Real Life he is unintelligent (And I should know...). His IQ may be 200, but he is a fool. Do we call fools  clever people?

There are several forms of intelligence. I don't care to go into how many forms or what they are, but I do want to stop the academics from lying! Academics are far too often trying to make (themselves and) non-academics think that academic intelligence is the only intelligence that matters, that academic intelligence must be superior. Well, it isn't, it is inferior!

It is time to dismiss the use of the phrase intelligence, without referring to what kind of intelligence is in mention. Academic intelligence is actually one of the minor and more unimportant intelligences in Real Life!

 :tellme:

Stoic Joker:
Me thinks ^that^ needed said ... Good man!

 :Thmbsup:

J-Mac:
Also well stated here:

Jim

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
Isaac Asimov

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them." Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you." "Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

kyrathaba:
+1 to what you said, Curt, though I think it can more accurately be called "wisdom".  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Many of the things you said allude to this:

helping your neighbor
making fair decisions
etc. 

Good thoughts!

kyrathaba:
There is also emotional-intelligence which, as a licensed psychotherapist, I feel qualified to mention.  Women, as you might guess, tend to score higher than men against those measures of said type of intelligence that has thus far been devised.

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