Your suspicion rings true. Having more intelligence won’t make you more enjoyable to talk to on a subject you don’t care about! It also may not make a difference if the topic is simple to understand, but still feels worth talking about (personal conversations on all sorts of things).
Education isn’t the same as intelligence of course. Intelligence will help you gain and retain an education faster, through books or conversation, in anything that interests you.
Most of my high school friends were extremely intelligent, and mostly applied themselves to art and writing. A few mostly applied themselves to programming and tesla coils. I think a common characteristic that they held was genuine curiosity in exploring new domains, and could enjoy conversations with people of many different interests. The same was true for most of my college friends. I would say I selected for good intelligent people with unusually broad interests.
I still care a great deal for my specialist friends, and friends of varying intelligence. It’s easy for me to enjoy a conversation with almost anyone genuinely interested in communicating, because I’ll probably share the person’s interest to some degree.
Roughly, curiosity overlap lays the ground for topical conversation, education determines the launching point on a topic, and intelligence determines the speed.
Your suspicion rings true. Having more intelligence won’t make you more enjoyable to talk to on a subject you don’t care about! It also may not make a difference if the topic is simple to understand, but still feels worth talking about (personal conversations on all sorts of things).
Education isn’t the same as intelligence of course. Intelligence will help you gain and retain an education faster, through books or conversation, in anything that interests you.
Most of my high school friends were extremely intelligent, and mostly applied themselves to art and writing. A few mostly applied themselves to programming and tesla coils. I think a common characteristic that they held was genuine curiosity in exploring new domains, and could enjoy conversations with people of many different interests. The same was true for most of my college friends. I would say I selected for good intelligent people with unusually broad interests.
I still care a great deal for my specialist friends, and friends of varying intelligence. It’s easy for me to enjoy a conversation with almost anyone genuinely interested in communicating, because I’ll probably share the person’s interest to some degree.
Roughly, curiosity overlap lays the ground for topical conversation, education determines the launching point on a topic, and intelligence determines the speed.