wordpress prompt question

“Who’s the smartest person you know?”

The answer: there’s no such thing, and I’m quite serious about this. The concept “intelligence” is as fuzzy as it gets, and in my opinion has no single referent.

Some people I know are incredibly fast thinkers, others are great writers, others are extremely imaginative, others have incredible memories, still others are powerful and persuasive speakers, and so forth. Some people may shine in several of these areas simultaneously, but no one shines in all of them to an equal degree.

What we call “intelligence” is not a single quantity that can be measured and ranked, but more like a machine pieced together out of numerous heterogenous components, and just like machines it comes in countless different shapes. That’s what makes it so interesting to get to know people for the first time, since their internal thinking-machine always has features you’ve never encountered anywhere else before, and generally there are a few features of the machine that make you gasp in admiration.