Are you "smart"?

Well that depends ...

Most of us would rather be considered “smart” (though not “too” smart, whatever that means) than not. That’s part of what education is for: less smart to more. Right? We have lots of tests to measure how smart kids are and to sort them accordingly.

In the same way there are many words for snow in the native Alaskan dialects, and many words for love and thousands of words to describe how people are different from each other, there are a number of words for SMART. We treat them as synonyms, but there are shades of meaning we should appreciate. Some distinctions make a real difference. Here are a few:

KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge is information acquired through diligent study over time. It is the product of exposure/education plus effort and learning ability. It is easy to test for (see achievement testing). You know stuff or you don’t.

SKILL/ABILITY

Skills and abilities are action items: you can DO something well. They are made up of a combination of knowledge and talent and exposure to an expert model/standard supercharged by practice and effort over time. Skills are easy to evaluate: give a person a task requiring a specific ability (hitting a ball, playing an instrument, assembling a machine) and sit back and watch. Ability is important in any field of endeavor where performance matters.

INTELLIGENCE/”IQ”

You know the old saying: IQ is what the IQ tests test. Circular to be sure. General intelligence (referred to as “g” in the academic literature) is a combination of knowledge and skill in areas such as reading comprehension, math computation and abstract reasoning. An individual’s intelligence has both genetic and environmental determinants. It tends to be relatively stable over time (since it is anchored to age/peer group norms). Any notions of inherent group (gender, “race” etc.) differences in intelligence have been thoroughly disproved when financial, educational and other environmental factors/barriers have been controlled for.

WISDOM

Wisdom is the most difficult of the “smarts” to define and measure. I like to define wisdom as

• the ability to take a fresh and accurate look at things (due to a tendency to be less influenced/limited by the “conventional wisdom” of the ambient group/culture)

• the ability to extract what really matters from all the other data (go “deep”; get to the “heart” of the matter)

• the ability to connect multiple things that really matter to illuminate things that matter even more

• the ability to see meaningful patterns in apparently random phenomena

• the ability to make complex things as simple as possible, but no simpler (A. Einstein)

Wisdom is different from skill and knowledge because it is less age/time/practice dependent. I have known adolescents and young adults who are less knowledgeable and skillful than older people but more wise. I believe wisdom is a very rare trait in the population whose determinants are largely a mystery.

Smart Thoughts

Being smart has multiple moving parts (knowledge, skill, talent, effort, practice, education and other critical resources/inputs). We should be careful about making snap judgments about how smart someone is. Appearances can be deceiving and stereotypes (‘isms) about group differences abound. An individual can be

• confident without being knowledgeable/skillful (we tend to equate self-confidence with competence; BIG mistake!)

• knowledgeable/skillful without acting confident

• talented without being skillful (needs to practice practice practice)

• wise without being knowledgeable

So in the game of smarts, it’s important to be clear about what we really mean, and that involves using the right words and the right means of assessment.

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