Forrest Gump’s Fundamental Lesson About Intelligence
How would you define brilliance? Who is intelligent for you?
What We Commonly Attribute to Intelligence
First of all, intelligence is not something we decide to be but a quality other give us. We are not intelligent in the eyes of an individual until we have proved him the contrary by our actions. Likewise, we are not smart to society until we do intelligent things. And because school is, in essence, a society members’ incubator, it is not untrue to say that succeed at school conduct to succeed in society.
By resonating in this way, we obtain the following simple relation: “intelligence = good in life = good in society = good in school = having great marks.” In a nutshell, we can put it like that: intelligence leads to good grades, and good grades to good life. But, is it true? Can we say that your school results are a sufficient measure of intelligence?
Even if it would appear that there is a correlation between intelligence and grades, it does not always imply causation. Let me explain. Let’s say that there is a correlation between a children’s intelligence and their marks. That doesn’t mean children with bad results are unintelligent.
Yes. There is a correlation between the number of ice creams and sunglasses sold. No! People that buy ice creams are not more inclined to buy sunglasses. There is no causality link, just another parameter — the sun — , that makes people buy more ice creams and sunglasses at the same time.
Therefore, it is FALSE to declare that people with better results in class are more intelligent than others. The reverse too. It is FALSE to think that bad students are dumb.
We assume that because our environment does. There is a massive cognitive dissonance between us who intuitively understand that one factor cannot define intelligence and society. Nothing new here, society values more intelligence than muscle since the industrial Revolution. An advocate is better paid than a laborer. And based on all this, there is school, the only criterion to determine whether you have access to a high-status job or not. In other words, your studies reflect the value of your brain to society. Ultimately, better grades, more diplomas are just hazardous signals that you are more valuable to society, so more intelligent.
But education remains not enough to conclude on the stupidity of someone. The best performers in the eyes of society are not the ones who do best at school.
Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs are all dropout students. Still, they have contributed to our world more than any first-in-class students. That’s why IQ is popular. It is — for some people — a more accurate way to measure human intelligence and its disposition to succeed. Indeed, the correlation between top world-performers and IQ appears to be more precise than their ability to do good at school. So the popular belief went from “Long studies = intelligent = success” to “high IQ = intelligent = success.” It remains that IQ is just a number, and we shouldn’t fall into the dangerous eugenism and transhumanism movement that supports a selection based on it. IQ is, like school, far from measuring intelligence.
Until now, we have seen intelligence under a signaling angle, something evaluated by our environment. I believe it is the most common point of view. But aren’t we going in the wrong direction? Is intelligence only defined by the value we bring to society?
In the end, the main asset of intelligence is to help us succeed. And there are as many success stories as there are inhabitants on this planet. The common belief that is wrong about it is to think that you need to accomplish something big to be successful. On the contrary. You have only one extremely short life. As ardent is your desire to impact the world, as hot is your craving for recognition, a truth remains: We are just an infinity small part of the universe. We are monkeys on a rock, gravitating around a tiny sun in the middle of a galaxy, floating among others.
Eventually, your life will fade, your children will fade, your thoughts will fade, everything you left behind will fade, everything you know about life will fade. In this short single-player game that we are all playing, I think — as Naval Ravikant — that success is the timeless combination of the three following basics needs :
- Happiness,
- Wealthiness,
- Healthiness.
Society don’t care if you are happy or healthy. Mikael Jackson was very successful for sure, but I don’t think he was happy and healthy. The real intelligence wouldn’t be to earn lots of money, have a high status. Intelligence would be the ability to figure out how to be happy, wealthy, and healthy.
What Intelligence Really Is
In biology, intelligence is defined by the capacity of a species to survive. Or avoid eradication. For humans, it is a bit generic. So we can reformulate it this way: Intelligence is a person’s ability to make good decisions.
You can be amazingly great at math, a billionaire, a loved public figure. What matters isn’t how you are considered now on a fallacious “genius scale,” but how your decisions today will positively impact your tomorrow. The only right way to measure intelligence will be on your deathbed by assessing all the decisions made in your existence according to whether or not they have led you to happiness, wealthiness, and healthiness.
School doesn’t teach how to be happy, wealthy, healthy, how to make good life decisions. Neither does the IQ, which, whether the apostles of this measure like it or not, is an imposture. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has rigorously demonstrated the imprecision of such measurement, even qualifying it as pseudo-scientist. IQ indeed is efficient to measures extreme unintelligent, but no standardized test will reveal independent thinking — in my opinion, essential to live a fulfilling life. No such test will reproduce daily life environment, so measure performance associated with it. No measure that fails 80–95% of the time should be part of “science.” In the end, IQ simply shows what is evident. Mentally disabled people are already weeded out in real life, no need for tests. IQ is at best unnecessary, at worst, an immoral measure that put people in boxes and make us miss out on the Einsteins and Feynman’s.
The IQ is to intelligence what the shadow of a hand is to a hand. We can extract information from a shadow, like the morphology and some movements, but a shadow is far from describing all the complexity of a hand. We have here a brilliant dimensionally cursed phenomenon. At the end of the day, only life can judge intelligence.
History never ceases to show that you can be reputed to be intelligent and make the worst possible decisions.
- Maurice Gamelin came out major of Saint-Cyr, in 1893 — a prestigious military French school. Still, he is remembered for his disastrous command of the French military during the Battle of France (10 May–22 June 1940) in World War II.
- The main Nazi sponsors were all described as superiorly intelligent. They had all taken an IQ test at the Nuremberg trials, and the result is without appeal. They all had between IQ 120 to IQ 140. This did not prevent them from making the worst possible decision in the eyes of history.
And conversely, you can be described as unintelligent and make the best decisions possible. The Giáp general has succeeded in defeating all the best world armies, the most moved minds of the academies of his time, without any military educations during the Vietnam War. The fiction character Forrest Gump is also a perfect example. Forrest Gump’s life is a flawless string of the better possible decisions, from his situation, even though he is described as profoundly unintelligent. Forrest Gump is smart, and you owe it to yourself to never let yourself be taken advantage of when someone pretends to arbitrate your intelligence.
