Intelligence And Knowledge

How each feeds the other so that both may be enhanced

Image credit: The Student Room

Some time ago I wrote an article called Sphere Of Ignorance in which I noted that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Conversely, the less we know, the more knowledgeable and competent we believe ourselves to be. This is a well-studied phenomenon and is perhaps best known (in part) as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

A well-meaning reader left a comment for me recently in which he proposed that intelligence and knowledge aren’t synonymous (true) and that it’s possible to be intelligent and also ignorant; conversely it’s possible to be highly educated but not intelligent. The reader further opined that I might find myself suitably impressed by the intellectual prowess of a bus driver.

This is a very similar argument to the one that says, “people are told that drinking and smoking is bad for us but my Aunt Maud smoked 400 cigarettes and drank 8 liters of gin each day and lived to be eighty-seven.” For any general proposition there are likely to be extreme outliers that give the illusion of falsifying the statement but which are in reality merely statistical artifacts.

For any large sample size, we expect the vast majority of results to cluster around the mean; there will be, however, a miniscule number of extreme outliers. So…