[spkthed]

That's a pretty good response. Intelligence has nothing to do with intellectual abilities. 'Idiot savants' can do brilliant and amazing things. The smartest people in the world have trouble remembering where they put their glasses. Some people can recall every detail of every minute of their lives.

People are simply different. The people that feel that they are smarter than others are often way down the line. The really smart people are the ones that want to learn everything from everyone.

As it turns out, when you're always trying to be the teacher, you miss out on many of life's lessons.

[pj]

That's a very good point. Perhaps that also adds to the nonviolence of the Engineering Dance. Less intelligent people want to maintain power by being the top dog and more intelligent people want to learn from those above them and therefore be the bottom dog where there is more room to grow and "move up" so to speak.

[spkthed]

If you take it a step further, there's always things that people are better at than you. Accordingly, you are constantly learning from everyone around you.

Unless you're always the smartest person in the room.

[azanar]

Intelligence has nothing to do with intellectual abilities.

I don't think this is quite accurate, but it's vague, and I can't really tell which one of these you are ascribing your examples to. In any case, intelligence and intellectual ability are multi-faceted. The ability to recall random facts may be a facet of intellectual ability, but it is tangential to intelligence. The ability to comprehend, and to be creative and synthesize new ideas, are both an aspect of intellectual ability and an aspect of intelligence. They do have something to do with one another, but in your defense, I don't think they are the same thing.

The really smart people are the ones that want to learn everything from everyone.

Agreed. But this hits on a conundrum I and a lot of geeky friends I have run into; this desire to learn everything from everybody can irritate people. It can lead to asking questions that probe for a deeper understanding, but instead elicit a scathing response demanding that I or whoever stop judging the person and what they believe. The usual reaction I have is confusion, and a wondering how asking questions can be turned into passing judgment. I can see how, if one is not careful, having this happen enough can breed a sort of smug prejudice that people who react this haven't thought about much of anything. It might be accurate for some, but assuming it for those that are not will force you to miss on many of life's lessons, as spkthed pointed out.

[byrneseyeview]

Your examples are accurate, but they miss the point: there is some correlation between different intellectual abilities, such that being good at math does predict being good at detecting analogies, or understanding a document (just not as well as it predicts being good at specific kinds of math).

People are different, but some people are generally smarter. Doesn't mean that someone generally smart, but bad at X, can pretend to be better at X.