We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
How are being smart and being intelligent not synonyms?
To be smart you need to be intelligent, but being intelligent doesn’t mean you’re smart.
It has a broader definition.
To me, they certainly are.
However, many people seem to think that you can get smarter. There’s even a YT channel with a name like that, so I guess smart means something different.
Fair enough, we can split that nebulous concept into innate intelligence which refers to your mental capacity, and being booksmart, i.e. having read many books and knowing stuff. In that sense, you can get smarter by learning more information or mastering new tools.
Getting more intelligent happens naturally as children age, but eventually it’s all downhill. You can choose to drink alcohol and and reduce your intelligence that way, but I’m not aware of any method of increasing your intelligence. Many people seem to use this term in a very different way, so I might be in the minority here.
Either way, I would still argue that, intelligence isn’t something you can simply increase.
I think intelligence could be malleable to a degree. Neural plasticity is pretty powerful, and we’re still on the cutting edge of figuring that stuff out.
Yeah. Psychology is still largely qualitative at the moment, just like chemistry was in 1700s.