What use is intelligence if surpassed by another's knowledge?
You're probably mostly right, but over time, with more and more people living longer with high-calorie diets, our intelligence level is likely, very slowly, inching up. And if not the average, then certainly the highest levels. The smartest person out of 7 billion is probably very much smarter than the smartest of 1 billion.
I think intelligence is about the capacity to process ideas originally. It's separate from knowledge. School does a good job of inputting knowledge. No doubt, we are far more knowledgeable than the Greeks. But because modern education is still designed to reward rote rule following above all else, I'm not convinced it furthers intelligence more than a smidge - and maybe not even that.
Wisdom, a very separate third thing, is in simplest terms the ability to be maximally correct. But this kind isn't about being a know-it-all but about being the opposite - for one to be humble enough to admit literally **everything** he doesn't know, which depending on the conversation could happen - maybe - always. (Making wisdom one of the rarest commodities around - the only classic example I can even think of are the Platonic dialogues...whose words were Socrates's? Eh it's not clear to me.)
In all, I'd say that all of us are just superchimpanzees. Just as we've been throughout the last 200,000+ years of hominid evolution. We're always consumed by the noise, anxious about death; self-absorbed; we grab our junk and that's a life. It's my belief that ever so rarely, an Aristotle, Kant or Bohr arrives with the gift to dampen his noise to realize that our representation of reality is not reality itself - that what we perceive through our eyes or hands are just useful hallucinations or shadows of what the universe's objects actually are. It's seems like a small thing. But to become and stay that self-aware. So daunting.
It's super fruitful though. Those guys' intelligence ultimately fuels our revolutions in knowledge. But being born after Einstein and reading his papers enables very-very-very few to stand on his shoulders. Because reading special relativity isn't 1-for-1 with understanding it like Alfred did. Even today, some physicists argue that fewer than five of their colleagues worldwide understand it instinctively.
A great question to any of the 6 billion alive today (and their innumerable ancestors) is this: So we got those aforementioned guys and Tesla and Hume and Emerson and Rumi and however many dozens of names you care to add to your list. Each, orders of magnitude more clear-headed than a superchimpanzee. (...) Why so few?
