There Are Many Ways to Be Smart

The beginning of Trump's second administration has been exactly what you'd expect: a hurricane of headlines. Every day brings another bombshell - major tariffs on Canada and Mexico, war with Panama, annexing Gaza Strip, auditing federal government departments, closing down offices. For even casual political observers, Trump remains a black hole of attention. A hallmark of Trump's presidency is the non-stop doing and undoing of things, which makes it genuinely difficult to know what is happening and not happening. 

Now Elon Musk has joined the administration as Trump's special assistant, with his agency DOGE focused on auditing the entire federal government. Each day brings new revelations about taxpayer money. More news. More headlines.

In response to this flurry of DOGE moves, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Musk "one of the most unintelligent billionaires" during a recent livestream, she wasn't just criticizing him, she was revealing something about how our country thinks about intelligence now.

She is appealing to her voters, the Democratic base is heavily composed of college-educated professionals and questioning someone's intelligence has become the common dismissal.

This might land differently today than it would have thirty years ago. We've become a nation of large organizations - 53% of Americans now work for businesses with over 500 employees, a dramatic shift from the era of small business dominance. In this world of credentials and corporate hierarchies, "smart" has come to mean something very specific: good at school, good at tests, good at navigating institutional approval. That's a big shift.

But here's where the attack falls flat: whatever you think about Trump or Musk, building and running successful companies for decades requires a kind of intelligence that can't be dismissed. Call them cruel, call them dangerous, call them unethical, these criticisms might stick. But unintelligent? That's when you have to wonder who's really failing to understand whom.

When someone calls Trump or Musk stupid, it just makes me think that person is stupid. This brings us to a useful philosophical concept. Wittgenstein’s Ruler.

When you measure something, you're not just learning about the thing being measured - you're testing the reliability of your measuring tool.

School is Not Life

But what bothers me the most about education = intelligence is that it is not only wrong, but fundamentally Un-American. While other nations build their societies around academic credentials, think of Korea, France, Japan or other places. America has always understood something different: school isn't life.

The single dimension of school performance, which dominates life in many other countries, is just one of many paths here. You can engage with other dimensions of life, take different risks, fail in interesting ways, and often end up better for it.

Take a look at the very American act of putting your low GPA on your license plate of your very expensive car as a flex.

Not understanding this cultural insight recently got Vivek Ramaswamy in trouble earlier this year and got himself kicked out of Doge when he tweeted about how american culture doesn’t doesn’t emphasize educational attainment enough.

Right Wing IQ Fetishism

A curious shift is happening in conservative circles. The Trump right wing has found its own measure of superiority: IQ scores. What began as scattered references in tech-adjacent spaces has evolved into mainstream conservative discourse.

The DOGE administration's frequent references to intelligence testing show how thoroughly this mindset has penetrated conservative politics.

Vance dropping IQ statistics into policy discussions.

IQ has become for the right what pronouns are for the left, a kind of tribal identifier and status marker. Just as listing pronouns signals belonging to progressive circles, casually referencing IQ correlations or cognitive science has become a way to signal membership in certain right-wing intellectual spaces.

There are problems with making IQ a metric for intelligence, as Nassim Taleb has written about. Taleb argues that IQ tests primarily measure test-taking skills rather than practical or creative intelligence, and that the statistical foundations of IQ research, particularly its reliance on linear correlations, are shaky and prone to misinterpretation. Taleb also points out that IQ scores can be manipulated through practice, are susceptible to environmental factors, and don’t robustly predict life outcomes, especially at the “tails” of the distribution, where extreme values are most meaningful. Overall, he views IQ as an overly simplistic number that cannot adequately represent the variety of human cognitive abilities.

American Measures of Success

The quickest way to understand a culture is to learn its worst insults. In France, calling someone uncultured or uncivilized cuts deepest. In Britain, it's suggesting someone can't take a joke or doesn’t have a sense of humor. In Germany, calling someone "unserious”, not to be taken seriously.

But in America, the biggest insult is simple: calling someone a loser. This reflects something fundamental about American culture. While other nations built hierarchies around birth, education, or cultural refinement, America created something different, a society that cares less about how you win than whether you win.

This isn't just about money, though financial success is certainly one measure. Winning in America can mean building a business, achieving creative freedom, or even, paradoxically, rejecting the traditional race entirely.

Consider the parable of the businessman and the fisherman:

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Story of American Businessman and Fisherman #inspiration #inspirationaltalk #fishermanstory #chriswilliamson #modernwisdom #modernwisdompo... See more

This is what Jeff Bezos means when he talks about "thousands of ways to be smart."

American culture, at its best, recognizes that intelligence manifests in countless forms - from the street smarts of a successful entrepreneur to the emotional intelligence of a great teacher to the practical wisdom of a skilled tradesperson.

That intelligence can come in many forms is an ancient concept. Ancient literature is filled with examples of all types of of people who exhibited diverse range of intelligence.

As we enter an age where machines can answer any factual question and solve any logical problem, which human intelligences will matter most?

In This Newsletter

1) The Four Faces of Intelligence: The Greeks recognized three distinct forms of intelligence that still resonate today.

2) If You’re So Smart Why Aren’t You Rich? Aristotle tells the Story of Thales of Miletus who was mocked for being a poor Philosopher by people in his town. He was challenged with the question we hear today all too often, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” Thales demonstrated that intelligence isn’t always confined to one domain.

The Four Faces of Intelligence

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