There’s a lot of worship of intelligence in our society. Some of it is justified but much isn’t.
I’m reasonably intelligent: I’m at the level where I’m startled if someone is much smarter than I am; it doesn’t happen often.
But it does happen. There are people who make me feel stupid.
Intelligence is essentially two things: ability to perform mental operations, and speed of operation. A smart enough person can perform operations a less smart person can’t; can more swiftly learn how to do operations available to both, and processes faster.
Intelligence at its highest levels leads to polymaths: people who have mastered multiple subjects. All that speed matters.
Generally speaking, though, a smarter person will just get to the same conclusion a stupider person who knew the same things would get to faster. Think the kid at the front of class putting his hand up first.
Intelligence is not judgment or creativity.
Creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas or new combinations of ideas. Intelligence is a multiplier for creativity: the faster you perform mental operations the more ideas you can come up with, but if you don’t have creativity to multiply by, intelligence matters little.
Plenty of creative people are not at the highest levels of intelligence, especially if the type of creativity is largely artistic. But even many extremely intelligent scientists are just grinds who rarely come up with anything new: they work thru the implications of other people’s ideas and the current scientific paradigm in their field.
Judgement is the ability to know what ideas and mental operations are useful and appropriate. People without judgment apply the processes and paradigms they have learned and come up with “correct” answers which are wrong in the real world, or which are harmful.
For the paradigm of this think Larry Summers. Brilliant, but no judgment. He’s a reliable indicator of what you shouldn’t do because he applies the economic paradigm without any judgment, and since economics is a crap discipline to start with, being based on faulty axioms, he produces very intelligent garbage results. He’s a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) machine.
Judgment tells you what old and new ideas are fruitful and what they’re fruitful for. Ideas are tools, you have to use the right ones for the job. World system analysis is worthless for day trading. Marxist class systems don’t explain societies well where the major cleavages are not along class lines, and so on. (Although they often claim to.) Keynesian economics doesn’t deal well with supply issues: it’s demand related, since that was the problem Keynes was dealing with at the time.
Intelligence is a multiplier for judgment, but if you have bad judgment, intelligence makes you more likely to get the wrong answer. Intelligence is jet fuel for foolishness.
Intelligence without judgment leads to ideas which fail to achieve their goals.
Intelligence without creativity leads to fast orthodox solutions.
Intelligence without creativity or judgment leads new foolish ideas.