Intelligence cannot be measured.

If you want to convince me that you are intelligent, do not brag about your IQ. Even more importantly, do not brag about how well you did in school. IQ testing is invalid, and grades seem to have an indirect inverse relationship with intelligence.

Part of the problem with seemingly objective measures of intelligence is that intelligence is really a matter of opinion. Different people value different things when trying to establish whether or not an individual is intelligent. For example, I care far more about your ability to form your own thoughts than your ability to repeat what others have told you. Trivia games such as Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit target known facts rather than mental process, I am particularly unimpressed with people who are successful in these games. Other people, however, view trivia games as intellectual.

This brings up a closely related issue with measuring intelligence. How can anyone possibly measure how well anyone can come up with ideas and think for themselves? You can’t exactly have a one-of-a-kind idea on an answer sheet to provide an accurate measure of how well the thought was formed. What I value most in terms of intelligence is absolutely impossible to quantify.

What can be quantified? Testing can probably exceed wild guesses in your vocabulary, short-term memory, and ability to figure out patterns that others created. These tests will really be a sampling since you can’t test every possibility in these areas. There are also other factors in scores such as mood, rest, and distractions. Obviously, even objective testing is not perfect.

The biggest concern with intelligence testing is that it tests a very limited subset of what should be considered to be a part of intelligence. Quantifying absolutely everything that can be quantified would take more than a lifetime to complete. Like I said before, many components of intelligence are impossible to quantify. The subjective components of intelligence are far more significant than the objective components, but all that we ever test is a limited subset of the objective components.

I have had people insist that they are more intelligent than I am purely based on the argument that they graduated college. Because I feared the mentally harmful components of schooling, I did not attend any more schooling than I felt obligated to finish. If I changed paths and became a college graduate, I would have to become far more mindless than I am confortable with. Anyone who brags to me about being a college graduate is unimpressive to me at the least. I am fairly open about my beliefs that schooling is mentally harmful. If anyone who knows anything about me insists that collegiate success automatically makes them more intelligent then anyone who lacks a stupid piece of paper, I will view them as imbeciles. Of course, that’s just my opinion. In the end, that’s all that intelligence really is.