Anecdotes on intelligence

I’ve met a lot of smart people in my life. I’m compiling interesting stories here (ongoing)

What is intelligence?

IMO intelligence is a measure of how little data/time you need to pick up a new skill. Contrary to popular opinion, I think it is NOT the level of your capabilities in a particular field. The smartest people I know have different capabilities in different domains, but the common thread is that they pick up new skills fast.

For example, I think a friend of mine has off-the-charts athletic intelligence. He may not be the most skilled (he doesn’t play competitively anymore) but he picks up new sports dizzyingly fast.

Other common things I’ve noticed amongst the smartest people (not sure why though):

• being talented in multiple domains
• taking riskier paths in life
• getting bored easily
• willing to stand out
• high curiosity / question everything
• cannot stand mediocrity or grift
• high agency

Stories

The athletic anomaly

Pranav’s an IISc grad who chose physics over a tennis career and is currently doing research in Germany.

• In high school, he took part in the selection camp for the state football team as a joke (he had never played soccer before). He learnt to play during the camp and almost made the team!! The coach said he’s good enough but knows that he won’t play soccer for long.
• I was teaching him the basics of basketball a few months ago. Within an hour, he started scoring faster than me and towards the end I couldn’t dribble past his defense at all. (And I’m no pushover)

Anyone who’s played a sport competitively knows how high the skill difference is between every level of play (new → casual → school/college → city → state → national). Pranav’s feat of jumping from “new” to “state-level” in the span of a few days is ridiculous if you think about it.

The Tata Titan

Mr Jamwal heads Tata Industries Limited (the venture arm of Tata). I interned there couple of summers ago.

• As a side project, they asked me to teach them some basics of Quantum Mechanics as they were interested in Quantum computing. Its a difficult subject and I didn’t expect anyone to actually understand everything
• Somehow, Mr Jamwal was able to keep up during all the sessions. He pretty much understood everything I threw at him and asked brilliant questions. He would have honestly done better than most physics freshmen at IITB despite being busy running a company (I would know, I was a TA for a year)