A Musing on Human Intelligence

George Carlin is often quoted, “think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” The idea, of course, is that when we think averages, medians, and so on, we’re thinking, in general terms, “in the middle.” The logic that follows is half the people must be above the average, half the people must be below the average, because the average is the center.

But it occurred to me some time ago reading this that intelligence is a bell curve. The truth is that we are all mostly within the same range of intelligence. Read that link! Only 2% of the population has an IQ score below 70. The gifted people of the world? Only about 2%. Bottom line? Basically all of society is being run by average people. This includes your favorite politicians, doctors, lawyers, engineers. The smartest person you know is probably in that “average intelligence” ballpark. Think about it. If you know 1,000 people and 2% of people are gifted, statistically, you know 20 “gifted” people. That’s it.

We had, at least when I was growing up, very person-centric education. We learned about great men, sometimes women, and their accomplishments. The founding fathers and the birth of a nation (not that one). The oratory mastery of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Stuff like that. I’ll stop there. Very much like I talked about in the esprit de corps post, we were never taught to think about all of the people that made these things possible. So even if we believe these people are somehow superhuman, then we must acknowledge the average-person societies that made their accomplishments possible.

If Einstein had been born in Constantinople on May 28, 1453, would anyone have ever known or cared? Same man, just a different setting in a world with different people during a different period of human history. Noted by Stephen Jay Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convulsions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Said another way: Top 1% rakes in about two thirds of the world’s new wealth. If 2% of the world is gifted and 1% of the world is taking in most of the wealth, then at best, about half of the gifted people are outside of the 1%. But since there is no meritocracy check for being born into a family trust, it seems inevitable that the majority of the gifted human beings on this planet are not making very much money. Most of the money in the world is going to average people, the institutions they run, or the institutions that benefit them.

We’ve seen this play out through current events. Take Billionaire Elon Musk, a very gifted person in many ways. He had this whole persona of intelligence, tech, saving the world. To many, he still does. The technologist. The free speech absolutist. The richest man in the world. He oops’d himself into being forced to buy Twitter for an inflated price and has since lost over half of the company’s purchase price value. There are two lessons you can take away. Either Elon is gifted and still managed to lose $20 billion or Elon is average and just happens to have a lot of money to make his cult of personality thing a reality.

Where am I going with all this?

I couldn’t help but feel that one of the obstacles faced in spreading the word about the fraud stuff, and alerting law enforcement, journalists, and the like, was a bit of educational discrimination. Here are these highly intelligent, underpaid people, law enforcement and journalists. Here’s a guy with no real degree saying “these folks broke the law and there’s no way these numbers could be accurate.” And they’re being told by somebody that makes more money on a whole lot less schooling. How could he know that? He’s not a lawyer. He’s not law enforcement. Haha, sounds like a conspiracy theory, dude, good luck with that.

Except I’ve spent the last 15 years transcribing legal testimony and arguments, with much of that time being spent in actual courtrooms. And even if we assume that I learned nothing from all that time, as a 25 year old I was able to argue and partially survive a motion to dismiss in a federal case by a New York City assistant corporation counsel and survive a motion to dismiss in a state case by a private attorney. Those cases were voluntarily discontinued or dismissed in part because I felt there was enough information in the record to protect me if problems ever arose again. But, again, the bottom line is that I am someone that could, without any legal training whatsoever, read the law, write a sufficient (inartful) complaint, and successfully counter trained lawyers on motions to dismiss. By myself. At 25. With all the developmental delay and disability I’ve blogged about or alluded to in the past.

Conceded that without the internet and the modern ease of accessing information, I’d be as well off as 1453 Einstein. Point is if I could do that, the capabilities of just about every person I know, or have ever known, or will ever know, are so much greater than acknowledged. I can’t tell you how many people tell me they can’t do math. I couldn’t do math either. Then I wanted to do some computer coding. All of a sudden I could do math. And I made an algorithm to create randomized practice tests for New York test takers. How many people that can do math are out there saying they can’t do math? Have you ever told yourself you can’t do something for years only to find out you were wrong? Maddening.

More maddening is that this points to intelligence being less a genetic issue — both barring and including the disabled — and more a mindset. I am aware of how unaware I used to be. I have a tiny idea of how unaware I probably am right now. But this opens my mind to solutions better than my own. That gives me a fighting chance to learn the things I have not learned and do the things I could never do. Multiplied by billions of humans.

This influences my political beliefs. Free healthcare? Hell yeah. Because people that aren’t living in abject terror about their genetic lot in life are more productive for our society and world. Higher wages? Yes, because then that’s more money circulating through the economy and changing hands, rather than sitting in the investment accounts of the average people that think they are gods because they make a lot of money.

And wherever I land on the intelligence scale, I probably seem weird to some of you. Would that I could upload my lived experience into every human being so that they could revisit in their memories the systemic failures that I have witnessed in both government, particularly law enforcement, and healthcare. I can share one that would shock many in my hometown. Years ago, as my medical condition was worsening, I walked into 61 Broadway and caused a scene. Such a scene that the doorman called the police. The police never came. In fact, from what I overheard from the one side of the phone conversation I could hear and the doorman’s reactions, they said they were not coming. Imagine that for a second. You’re a working person, and some guy who’s going through some medical thing that you have no clue about comes in and starts making your job difficult. And the mother fuckers that are supposed to protect you don’t bother. Don’t get it wrong. I think cops, in many ways, are heroes. And that’s what burned that day into my memory. I got to see my heroes do some very, very dark things that week.

For the record, I left voluntarily that day after a government worker from the agency I was trying to contact came down and spoke to me. I’ll never know if she knew that I was in crisis, but she was damn good at what she did.

So perhaps intelligence is not simply mindset, but also a perspective. People cannot live the life I’ve lived in the same way that I cannot live yours. We are smart about different things. And yet more often than not people put each other down simply for thinking differently. I’m guilty of it. I’ve been a “victim” too. I do not know what to do with that except leak it into the world, see if I can help others with my newfound perspective, and see if the world is open minded enough to understand. The benefit? If someone watching me ever has a child going through what I had to go through, they know someone that survived it, and chances are good they know they can come to me for support. Is it the Butterfly Effect? Who knows? For me, a hope that the actions of the past lead to a greater present for someone.

Think of how stupid the average person is. And realize we’re all smarter than that.

Addendum:

The district attorney in my borough was, according to this Law Journal article, looking at getting mental health assessments into precincts. I wrote the office to thank them. I’ve done a great many things to bring attention to the mental health stuff, and it was pretty cool to see that the people in power do seem to understand, on some level, that we need new strategies.

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I later came across a post explaining the NYPD overworks its officers to the point of it affecting their mental health. My heart goes out to overworked officers. Maybe one day we’ll find a way to address both the problems I talked about above and the abuse of working people — in this case, our officers.