Intelligence is basically how quickly you learn from experience, so being smart should allow you to get to the same level with much less time put in (which seems to be what the OP is hinting at). I’d also expect diminishing returns, especially if you always socialize with the same (type of) people. At some point, each social group (or even every single person) becomes a skill of its own. Once your generic social skills are at an acceptable level, pick your specializations carefully. Life is too short to waste it on bad friends.
Intelligence is basically how quickly you learn from experience
I am not at all sure it is true (at the very least it depends on the type of learning, intelligent people often do not learn music or sports movement fast) but to the extent it is true, it would be then very useful to send highly intelligent people through the equivalent of an obstacle course where they gain a lot of different type of experience, like a month long summer camp for gifted students with a different profession or difficult activity tried every day.
Because, you see, we tend to have literally the opposite. Usually the highly intelligent are shut-in savants who have hardly any experience that does not involve a computer, books or paper.
My school was largely about memorizing things and barfing it back. No understanding or practical use required. To be fair, this is part of why places like the US or UK tend to be ahead from most places, because their education is more… life-like? Because mine, in the rougher parts of Europe was pretty much exactly what Feynman wrote about Brazil in Surely You Are Joking. PDF: http://buffman.net/ebooks/Richard_P_Feynman-Surely_Youre_Joking_Mr_Feynman_v5.pdf then Ctrl-F for “I discovered a very strange phenomenon”. My schooling was very similar.
But even in the more pragmatic type of US / UK style schooling, it is still purely dry theoretical intellectual academic things. How many highly intelligent geeks there learned at school and by the school how to climb a rock, swim, or not get lost in a forest? Or something far, far more important: to present an idea before an auidence, like they do at Toastmasters?
Show me one school in the world that does something more or less Toastmasters’-like on a mandatory basis… this is one of the most important skills for the intellectuals. A scientist has to be able to give a presentation that convinces the fat cats to give a budget to the research project. Without money nothing moves forward.
That’s why I said “supposed to do”. The core argument behind schooling is that we can make a person much more capable by exposing them to things they would not otherwise be exposed to, and that it is valuable to give a broad background in many different topics. Fundamentally this is similar to what you’re suggesting, and the differences you point out just indicate that school has a bad choice of curriculum and teaches it badly. The primary novelty in what you’re suggesting is that you want “a lot of different type of experience” with a shallow view on each topic (“a different profession… every day”), whereas school typically spends a lot of time on a couple of different topics but with essentially the same type of experience. I do not intend to comment on whether I think this will work better.
For the record, I don’t know what Toastmasters does, but the schools I’ve to had Drama class and occasionally required giving presentations.
Intelligence is basically how quickly you learn from experience, so being smart should allow you to get to the same level with much less time put in (which seems to be what the OP is hinting at). I’d also expect diminishing returns, especially if you always socialize with the same (type of) people. At some point, each social group (or even every single person) becomes a skill of its own. Once your generic social skills are at an acceptable level, pick your specializations carefully. Life is too short to waste it on bad friends.
I am not at all sure it is true (at the very least it depends on the type of learning, intelligent people often do not learn music or sports movement fast) but to the extent it is true, it would be then very useful to send highly intelligent people through the equivalent of an obstacle course where they gain a lot of different type of experience, like a month long summer camp for gifted students with a different profession or difficult activity tried every day.
Because, you see, we tend to have literally the opposite. Usually the highly intelligent are shut-in savants who have hardly any experience that does not involve a computer, books or paper.
That’s exactly what school is supposed to do.
My school was largely about memorizing things and barfing it back. No understanding or practical use required. To be fair, this is part of why places like the US or UK tend to be ahead from most places, because their education is more… life-like? Because mine, in the rougher parts of Europe was pretty much exactly what Feynman wrote about Brazil in Surely You Are Joking. PDF: http://buffman.net/ebooks/Richard_P_Feynman-Surely_Youre_Joking_Mr_Feynman_v5.pdf then Ctrl-F for “I discovered a very strange phenomenon”. My schooling was very similar.
But even in the more pragmatic type of US / UK style schooling, it is still purely dry theoretical intellectual academic things. How many highly intelligent geeks there learned at school and by the school how to climb a rock, swim, or not get lost in a forest? Or something far, far more important: to present an idea before an auidence, like they do at Toastmasters?
Show me one school in the world that does something more or less Toastmasters’-like on a mandatory basis… this is one of the most important skills for the intellectuals. A scientist has to be able to give a presentation that convinces the fat cats to give a budget to the research project. Without money nothing moves forward.
That’s why I said “supposed to do”. The core argument behind schooling is that we can make a person much more capable by exposing them to things they would not otherwise be exposed to, and that it is valuable to give a broad background in many different topics. Fundamentally this is similar to what you’re suggesting, and the differences you point out just indicate that school has a bad choice of curriculum and teaches it badly. The primary novelty in what you’re suggesting is that you want “a lot of different type of experience” with a shallow view on each topic (“a different profession… every day”), whereas school typically spends a lot of time on a couple of different topics but with essentially the same type of experience. I do not intend to comment on whether I think this will work better.
For the record, I don’t know what Toastmasters does, but the schools I’ve to had Drama class and occasionally required giving presentations.