The 50th podcast. That’s fun to type. We’re closing in on a year at Men in Gorilla Suits…and that matters to us. Not that anything comes with hitting the 50th weekly show without fail, or even crossing the one-year mark on February 6. (The first show went up Thursday, February 7.) What matters is no matter what, we’ve put out a weekly show longer than many podcasts last.
Whether slammed with overtime at work, sick, busy with other things, or just wanting blocks of time off where we do nothing, we’ve proven our motto — that it really is as simple as chilling the fuck out…and making the damn thing!
The damn thing we’ve made for you this week is a podcast about…intelligence!
We start off defining what we see as intelligence, before discussing our own battle stories with IQ tests (and the results that followed taking the tests). After that, we ask the question: do we all start from different, measurable levels of intelligence? Without IQ tests, are there ways to measure intelligence?
Obviously, it’s rarely a simple thing, and we address that as we talk about different kinds of intelligence (book-smarts vs. street-smarts; survival mode vs. contemporary life). Some other questions:
- Does the intelligence of someone in a city scale if they find themselves lost in a jungle?
- Is the mechanic working on your car more intelligent than a college professor?
- Can one become more or less intelligent, or is it pretty much the same throughout one’s life?
- Is learning or education different from intelligence?
Then it’s genius time. Were Mozart and others like him a genius? How do average people stack up to those historically deemed geniuses? Is there even such a thing as genius, or is it all hype or adoration? Flipping genius on its head, does stupidity exist — and if it does, is it measurable? Are some people just more intelligent than others?
Finally, we wrap it all up by discussing the most intelligent person we each know (and, in the process, Gorilla Shawn settles a life-long family dispute)!
So put on your thinking caps and hit the comments to discuss your thoughts about…intelligence!
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The problem with deciding who is smart and who is not is that there is no baseline for what is intelligence. Who is to say what is smart and what is not? Are we just going on maximum contribution to society, or can we go on a case by case basis? I know a doctor of pharmaceutical medicine who can’t open bread without hurting herself. Does that make her smarter than me because I’m currently a professional philanthropist? I think there are so many factors to add in, like economics and personal mental health, that as a group, anything beyond “Can that person talk, walk, speak” and “Human vegetable” is too hard to pin down.
So much of it comes down to personal opinion too. One person might not think Mozart was a genius, simply because they do not care for his work. That person might think Pitbull is this generation’s Beethoven. Does that make Pitbull a genius? At making money, maybe. At music? That’s absolutely personal preference.
Thanks for replying, Monica! I’d never given measuring intelligence too much thought until Shawn pitched this idea for a show. As you mention, there are very smart people who have a hard time getting by and figuring out basic tasks. Sometimes it seems like an Absent-Minded Professor kind of thing, but other times…it’s just that the person is learned and tunes in on certain things, but has a hard time with basic things outside their field of interest. The people I worked with in group homes were anything but stupid, but they were not intelligent; still, they were, in so many ways, smarter than some “smart” people I’ve known.
I think one can look at certain talents and say one is better than another, but as you point out: so much factors into things…especially “genius.” I feel very confident in saying anything Alice Munro has written is better than E L James’s 50 Shades of Gray. But I’m not sure I’d say either is a genius, despite one’s reputation as a great writer and the other as a financially successful writer. My all-time favorite book is genius to me, but I’d guess not too many people would agree with me.
It was a fun show to record; I’m glad Shawn was smart enough to put it together! 🙂
Easy for you to say. You’re smart. 😉
I believe humans can collectively ratchet up their intelligence via recognizing and utilizing the intelligence of non-human animals. We need to jettison our myopic intelligence arrogance first. The ability to adapt oneself to an environment is a measure, just as the ability to adapt an environment to oneself is a measure.