Why intelligence doesn't matter

We all need some way to calculate just how good a person is. No matter what that person is doing for us. This is a basic, intuitive process, for humans. Today most people seem to judge themselves and others based on intelligence. This illusive concept that means something like powers of the mind. But because we can be so different as individuals we’ve started to divide this concept of intelligence into slimmer and slimmer shards, or different kinds of intelligence. There’s social intelligence, emotional intelligence, mathematical intelligence and so on and so on…

This seems really strange to me. When intelligence becomes categorized by what we’re using it for… isn’t that competence? Sure it is.

So what we really need to be looking at is what kinds of competence a person has. But then, some of you might ask “what about what the individuals really know. Like facts and processes and such”. Well this is a fair and good question. But maybe just a few years old…

With Google and the always online society, why would we ever need to remember individual facts perfectly? We can just collect them when needed. One of my favorite authors calls this extelligence. Facts, information and knowledge stored in other people.

What we really need, in all situations, is not intelligence. It’s the right kind of competence and extelligence.