Ask HN: Do people stop thinking about intelligence when they leave academia?
Maybe you focus more on the task at hand rather than comparing yourself with other people in terms of intelligence?
I think of intelligence all the time. In fact, I am pushing the definition, intelligence: the mitigation of uncertainty. If it does not mitigate uncertainty, it is not intelligent.
I have to say, I barely ever compare myself with others.
There are many forms of intelligence, and I do criticize the poor language comprehension skills of ordinary people (I say there is wide spread "illiteracy", as there is a casm between capacity to read and reading capacity.
However, even the most modest person may harbor a surprising insight, experience, or intellectual gem.
Yes, focus upon tasks at hand, and don't be arrogant, for however intelligent Man is born a fool, lives his entire life a fool, and dies a fool. It is only his determination to be otherwise in between which may make it so.
One of the issues with academia and academic training is it defines intelligence very narrowly. For example, it teaches people that simply having the right answer (or even just saying the right answer) is enough to be "smart". And then these smart people get out in the world and struggle because they learned a lot of "correct answers" but they didn't learn bigger things like: how to solve a problem, how sometimes people don't like you when you seemingly have the correct answer, how to account for all sorts of things you don't know outside the confines of a test question or assignment, or how to get the social buy in to actually do the correct thing (because "people liking you enough to do what you suggest" can be just as important as actually knowing what to do, if not moreso).
The other thing is the academic environment teaches a competitive intelligence but in many business situations you need many kinds of intelligence. If you are not good at sales but you're selling something, a social butterfly sales person can make or break you. An actual project manager that knows how to run a project can be worth more than gold. An accountant can keep your books better than you can even if you are broadly better at math in general because tax law is its own thing.
Further, intelligence overall isn't broadly applicable to many areas. Think of the doctors and lawyers who don't know how to open a PDF or the many programmers who blow off license agreements and legal documents until they get sued.
Academia gives you a narrow definition and scope of intelligence. The world is much more complicated.