@WitIsWisdom: Very intelligent post here!
I know that I know nothing.
Intelligence is a tricky topic since there are several different kinds. Some people have book smarts and no street smarts, and others are quite the opposite. I barely graduated high school because I simply didn't care, but I always scored well in placement tests, scored in the top 2 percent on the ASVAB (which had the Navy trying to recruit me as a biochemical nuclear engineer and the Air Force as a pilot, however I joined the Marine Corps as an 0311 Infantry rifleman.. brilliant huh? lol) and never had a B in any college course. I also scored high enough on the official Mensa society test to be accepted into their ranks for a yearly fee of $200 which I turned down and still laugh at the irony to this day.
That said, some of the most intelligent people I've ever met don't have a degree and some of the most ignorant people I've ever met do. Degrees are simply a piece of paper to prove your reliance to see things through and do not reflect ones intelligence in the least, outside of a very small and select few fields.
The funny thing is that for whatever reason humans have built the infrastructure around the idea of genius level intellect to revolve around pattern recognition above all else.. which is something I excel in. Seriously like 90 percent of the questions are pattern solving. I guess I feel like intelligence is multifaceted and shouldn't be so hyperfocused on any single field, but that would have me questioning who gets to decide, and then we're back to ground zero since I took the test out of curiosity and not to try and claim a higher understanding.. and we are back to the fact that all I know is that I know nothing. Obviously those who make the rules base intelligence off problem solving and the ability to readily see things others can't.
Life is beautiful and mysterious and I'm ok with that. I take those tests out of curiosity more than anything else and these days I actually find them quite amusing and almost like a puzzle solving game... as if any singular test could determine things such as emotional intelligence, which in my opinion is far more important to the future of our species.
At the end of the day all we can do is to try and do right by others and regardless of our intelligence levels understand that when everything is said and done none of it will matter, so instead we should tackle the meaning of life, which I believe is helping others get through theirs in a collaborative effort for better reasoning and understanding as a society of parasites drifting in the endless vacuum of space hoping to reach enlightenment.. lol
I often times poke the hornets nest just to see the reaction I will get to better my understanding of the human condition, much as I do here revolving around politics (not trolling just genuinely curious to see what makes others tick while also understanding you're never going to shine light in an echo chamber so it's not as sublime as it is masochistic.. lol), although we all have differing opinions it doesn't necessarily reflect our level of understanding, yet shines light on the journey our lives have taken us. Most of the time we truly are a product of our environment and enslaved to a hypercritical society of peers that want to separate us into social classes rather than work together for the benefit of our species as a whole.
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