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Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

Another way to look at it would be that intelligence is just a tool every person has. A tool we are all free to use and abuse as we please. It allows one possessing a lot of intelligence to achieve once goals quicker and more efficiently. However, the goals them selves can be as good, evil, misguided, or downright stupid as humanly possible.

A very intelligent person with a good goal can achieve amazing things, including happiness. But very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want, and in that lies the problem. Given a misguided goal, high intelligence can quickly amplify your efforts of digging your self deeper and deeper into a whole.

So, in the end intelligence is like a gun, a nice tool to have as long as you use it wisely, carefully, and for it's intended purpose.

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> very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want

Here's a comic strip on the relative merits of questions and answers, http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

If your question can't really be answered, it's probably just ill-posed in the first place.

That is a very narrow mindset.

For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history. Maybe some of those could be answered today if, say, the whole world's GNP was redirected towards that goal... but this is not going to happen. Multiple people have multiple, often contradicting, worthy goals.

Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue. Of course, you need to believe that these other perspectives offer value that Science(TM) cannot before you even begin to consider them.

>For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history.

Ok, so they're well-posed questions. So?

>Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue.

This sounds like the place of the argument. I think these questions aren't well-posed: they're actually being used to imply a large number of smaller questions. You can usually get a well-posed question by trying to break down one of these questions, or expose the bad reasoning that led to considering things like, "Well gosh, what's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it?" real questions.

That's a keeper!

That was wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

That comic reminds me on the aviary example in the Theaetetus.

Very true! I think being 'wise' is for the most part pursuing worthy goals. But the article makes the mistake of equating wisdom with 'rationality'. Rationality is a tool too (as the article suggests a distinct tool from intelligence). It is not like being able to not worry about awkward conversations and not maxing out your credit card will lead you to good life.

A few years back I've heard about emotional intelligence. School enticed me to be academic smart, leaving family and society to grow the emotional counterpart, except it was easier to be comfy at answering math instead of understand my and others emotions. Which was a great loss. Balance is key.

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