Re: Frank Walker (C97/30) : I found Frank’s comments difficult to follow, until I realised that he had confused intelligence with wisdom. I checked with several dictionaries, just to be sure that it was not my error, and arrived at these definitions:
1. Intelligence is the aptitude for thinking, reasoning, and understanding - the requisites for drawing conclusions from a body of knowledge
2. Wisdom is the judicious application of experience and knowledge, characterised by good sense and prudence
Thus, intelligence means one can act intelligently, whilst wisdom means that one does act wisely. It follows that, whatever an IQ test measures, it is not wisdom, so there should be no basis for expecting members of Mensa to be wise. Frank’s need to provide examples of the folly of considering Mensa members to be wise is therefore spurious.
Kate Manion
Kate : I’ll leave Frank to defend himself against the charge of confusion, but I would just like to say that the apparent lack of correlation between a propensity and a habituation requires some explanation - and one possibility is that the propensity is being incorrectly diagnosed. I expect another factor is that wisdom requires more experience to operate than does intelligence, and that intelligent people tend to over-estimate the quality & extent of their experience, as well as the value of their own thoughts, thereby being less self-critical than they ought. Hence the absence of prudence.
Theo