I assume that people's ability to gauge others' intelligence varies widely from one person to another. Perhaps the most decisive factor in this ability is one's own intelligence. Perhaps age plays a part too, since experience tends to come with it.

But first: how do we even define intelligence? It’s a word we casually use to mean everything and nothing at once — and often incorrectly, for that matter. I don't claim to hold any kind of truth here, so I’ll simply offer my own definition: the bricks which, when combined, make up what I personally call "intelligence." I know the definition differs depending on the field (philosophy, psychology, etc.), but I have no idea by how much — and honestly, it doesn’t really matter.

So, if I had to define intelligence concisely, I’d say it's the ability to adapt to a changing environment, the ability to understand things deeply, the ability to analyze, and the ability to correlate bits of knowledge. I could add objectivity and neutrality, but those are more a matter of wisdom.

It's all a matter of standard deviation.

Culture or intelligence?

Part of what we call "intelligence" depends on the knowledge one has accumulated. Two people may have similar reasoning abilities, but if one has greater familiarity with a certain subject, they will appear sharper in that domain, even though the other may be equally capable in principle.

Furthermore, that “standard deviation” I mentioned earlier is multidimensional. Intelligence is not uniform. Some people are wired for numbers but struggle with social dynamics. One can be brilliant in one domain and quite limited in another.

And above all — above all — culture is not intelligence. Believing oneself smarter than someone else just because one has read more, or studied more history or philosophy, is a delusion. I say this from experience, addressing without mercy all those pompous dandies who love to lecture with pretension because they mistakenly believe that reading Nietzsche makes one intelligent. Intelligence lies instead in how one connects, understands, and interprets.

It's all a matter of standard deviation

I believe our perception naturally tends to flatten differences. We all understand that there are people smarter than us and people less smart than us. But we imagine that the gap is relatively small, never massive — and we assume that most people float more or less around the average.

It’s natural: the brain assumes similarity. In psychology we talk about the self-serving bias, but what I mean here is closer to a self-referential bias. It’s reinforced by the fact that, in social settings, we only see behaviors, not the inner processes that produce them.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum, I think the standard deviation is larger than most suspect. You’re probably underestimating how many people are significantly smarter than you — and there are a lot of them. This is normal: we tend to inflate ourselves, until reality — delivered either by others or by ourselves, if we’re lucky — gives our ego a well-deserved correction. Conversely, although we usually overestimate this one, your guess at how many people are really less intelligent than you is also skewed: there are far more of them than you’d think. I’d even say there’s an unsettling shit-ton of profoundly unreasonable people whose very existence is hard to wrap your mind around.

There are plenty of sharp people and plenty of genuine idiots. Nothing new under the sun. But they’re not all just “a little” more or “a little” less than you. And I think that simple realization is enough to make us look at our place in the world with a bit more caution.