Quotes About Intelligence

The two deepest questions about the mind are "What makes intelligence possible?" and "What makes consciousness possible?

A medida que los países se vuelven más inteligentes, se alejan de Dios.

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.

The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism.

meinstein n. My son, the genius.

a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation.

hándicaps racionales

And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

Recall that intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles.

Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I'll turn to in the final chapter.)

Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one.

We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.85

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

Dopeler effect n. The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

A definition is a dictionary's explanation of the meaning of an English word using other English words, intended to be read by a whole person, applying the entirety of his or her intelligence and language skills.

Because our propositional reasoning frees us from similarity and stereotypes, it enables the highest achievements of human rationality, such as science, morality, and law.

A definition that is more or less faithful to the way the word is used is "the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.

A list of ways in which we're stupid can't explain why we're so smart.

The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

And I'm slightly in love with Scarlett Johansson: she's just stunning. And she's bright, which is incredibly sexy.