Hypothetical: If you could know with certainty your intelligence relative to everyone else, how would you react?
We’re talking way beyond pretentious Mensa member stuff here.
Everyone thinks they’re at least fairly smart. Lots of smart people are humble about how smart they are (but really wonder if they’re even smarter than most people give them credit for). Lots of not very smart people are awfully confident that they’re smarter than you think they are. Is it possible we’d be better off if we all knew for sure exactly how smart we are, or would this be a disaster?
Imagine there were a way to measure intelligence absolutely, taking into account all the factors that you perceive to make someone “smart”. So through some process, your knowledge, wisdom, intuition, insightfulness, critical thinking, and ability to articulate ideas clearly, across all subjects or expertise, could be factored down to a simple number.
Imagine also that this is instantaneously applied to everyone in the world, which makes it possible to know with certainty, based on a percentile, where you or anyone else really stood in relation to every other person on the planet in terms of intelligence. You might be 47% or 83% now, but suddenly, you would know for sure.
Then imagine that some technology (a digital readout across your forehead, online database searchable by your mobile device, whatever you want) allows you to not only know your absolute intelligence rating, but also any other person’s, anytime you want.
[Note: I’m assuming it is possible to change this number with effort. Studying, learning, even just gaining life experience would potentially add to your rating, assuming you were gaining intelligence more than others who are not trying as hard. So this number isn’t a lifetime sentence or privilege (though some might have a genetic head start or natural hurdle to overcome), but a totally accurate real-time measurement relative to everyone else in the world.]
If it were possible to know this, would you want to?
If it were possible to know this about everyone else (and for them to know it about you), would you want that also?
How would this knowledge impact your day-to-day life, and how you deal with the people in your life?