If You've Ever Wondered What Pegs You As Intelligent Or Ignorant, These Subtle Signs May Reveal A Lot

What is a subtle sign that someone is really intelligent? These Redditors offer up their wisdom.

Elana

• Published in Interesting
• December 4, 2021

When considering the markers of intelligence, many people may quickly jump to IQ. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence.

The problem with IQ and IQ tests is that they have the potential to inaccurately measure an individual's intelligence and cause problems including low confidence, unrealistic expectations, and just a generally flawed understanding of a person's potential. The first IQ test wasn't even invented to measure intelligence quotient!

According to DiscoverMagazine: "In 1905, French psychologists developed the Binet-Simon test to identify children who needed individualized help outside of school. Yet, as time went on, psychologists refined the Binet-Simon test and developed many more — and started to attribute performance to someone’s “general intelligence.”"

Stefan C. Dombrowski, a psychologist at Rider University in New Jersey studies the validity of IQ tests using rigorous statistical techniques and he says that IQ tests do have meaning and are valid measures of intelligence — when they are interpreted correctly:

“In the field of psychology, we do not have, like we have in medicine, safeguards in place like an FDA,” he says. “We have an ethical code, but that hasn’t stopped a hundred years of inappropriate interpretive practices. Our field needs to evolve.”

With all of that taken into consideration, it's no wonder that our perception of intelligence may not be up to par. One Reddit user turned to the r/AskReddit community with an insightful question that provoked truly fascinating responses you'll surely take an interest in if you've ever pondered the marks of intelligence.

Reddit user Gisgiii posed this question to the AskReddit community:

It's cool to have a go-to, but diversity helps you form a more concrete opinion or deduction.

It is truly an obstacle to not come across condescending when trying to explain something to someone who doesn't understand.

"Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", although he did not care for the title, considering it to be in poor taste."

Meet someone at their level.

In contrast to the proverb "curiosity killed the cat," curiosity is a good thing.

According to Wikipedia:

""Curiosity killed the cat" is a proverb used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation. It also implies that being curious can sometimes lead to danger or misfortune. The original form of the proverb, now little used, was "Care killed the cat"."

Put your thinking cap on!

Make the complex simple, say this Redditor.

To which inspired these two interesting replies:

Inspire others.

Important Distinction

This Redditor expanded on that point:

"He was right."

Brevity, because not every answer can be totally serious!

Actually, we can't even argue with this one.

There's asking questions and then there's asking good questions.

This response to that comment is also totally noteworthy.

FACTS

Being willing and comfortable with "not knowing" is a big one.

xchernx's comment inspired this well-articulated response, as well, from usesr CompetitiveLoL:

"It’s weird because I’ve met some remarkably intelligent people who are insecure and/or socially awkward (like, not being rude, but legitimately may not be nuero-typical) and they don’t fall under any of the categories that are being described in this thread. Most of these comments seem to be based around people who are intelligent and humble, which, although incredibly admirable is not necessarily a guaranteed intersection. It seems like the focus here is more on people who are both socially and conceptually intelligent, but there’s plenty of very intelligent people who are in one or the other categories.

As an example, a fair amount of the really intelligent people I’ve met rarely ask questions or carry much of a conversation at all. They make mental notations of information they’ve digested and then go and learn more about the concepts independently, or if someone is struggling to keep up with their concepts they can get bored and move on. As nice as it is to think that intelligence is backed by social skills… it’s frequently not. A primary example is that Stephen Hawking’s work was slowed down tremendously when he to explain concepts to the people he worked, because it frequently would take him longer to adequately explain the concepts than to come up with them, but because his physical limitations he had to go through the process anyways.

I’m not saying that intelligent people are unable to explain concepts or unwilling to ask questions, but if they feel that work could be done more efficiently by the doing independent work or research they may not say much at all. Their learning patterns and socializing skills don’t necessarily dictate pure intelligence, sometimes it’s just a marker for being both intelligent and being able to effectively read others (socially apt).

Although this is just my personal experiences, others may have differing ones, and statically speaking if most folks upvoting feel that how willing someone is to admit lack of understanding or ability to expand on complex concepts simply is a better identifying factor for intelligence, it probably is, I’m guessing I just had anomalistic personal experiences so far.

Edit: Wow this got much larger than I expected. Y’all are awesome and have some rad insights.

I can’t respond to everyone but some excellent points were brought up and I wanted to get them into the post:

1.) The question said “subtle”. This is 100% correct, I guess when I was thinking I just felt that a style of intelligent person I had frequently met wasn’t being shown; but someone nodding and researching things later isn’t a very subtle queue, so I can see why the responses would be addressing a more vocal intelligent person.

2.) Some intelligent people are egotistical; This is something I’ve found to be accurate, and this is 100% IMO and based on experiences taking with friends/colleagues but a lot of that I think has to do with these folks being picked-on/standing out when they were young. Their intellect made them stand-out, and so they started using it as an armor for why they didn’t fit in (their words) and sometimes they led to an ego because they lacked self-confidence in other areas and so they doubled down on feeling proud of their intelligence. This isn’t “good” but I think we all have our (well maybe not all) own self-preservation mechanisms that we learned young and sometimes it takes a while to grow out of them (if ever). Mine jumps between humor being overly logical and dissociating cause feelingshurtbadwantfeelgood.

3.) Intelligence manifests very differently from person to person and trying to discern intellect is very challenging, some of the smartest yet most socially challenged people I know work with people who understand them at a pretty fundamental level and can be excellent at arbitration between them and folks who get lost in one-on-one conversations. Having intelligent bridge people is also incredibly important because a brilliant STEM engineer might have trouble figuring out how to get funding from a banking institution, but a less conceptually intelligent more socially apt STEM colleague can make an exceptional mediator to get help finance a joint venture. The cool thing about people is we can work together to shore up each other’s weaknesses and make some rad shit.

4.) Theres some really smart folk in this post and it was lovely learning from and chatting with all of you. Thanks. :)"

Read this response from Reddit user doublestitch:

"They apply knowledge from one realm into a new and relevant situation.

For instance one person described a situation (might have been on Reddit) where they were a new assistant in an academic research lab and fixed a snag that stumped all the senior researchers including the professor. The team was trying to video record their project using a strobe light and their footage wasn't working as planned.

When no one else made progress at diagnosing or solving the problem, the most junior individual spoke up and suggested that the strobe could be out of phase. They remembered that video typically records at a rate of 24 frames a minute second [thanks for the correction], and explained that along with suggesting a change to the strobe's flash rate so it would coincide with the recording.

This worked. And it really raised up that individual's reputation within the group.

Inwardly they were almost embarrassed about the source of this knowledge. They had a gaming hobby back in high school, and had taken some video footage of that, and discovered the standard frame rate while playing around in editing software.

But they remembered that detail years later and realized it made a difference in a completely different context.

That is intelligence."

There really are so many great responses.

Code switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation.

Gotcha on that one, eh?

Humor FTW

When biscuitboi967 mentioned humor, they inspired this response as well:

A moment of appreciation for the high functioning morons of the world.

Logical as heck, boiiiii

This right here, y'all.

There you have it, folks, all of these Redditors had something noteworthy to add to the discussion and it gives us all plenty to think about. Consider the smartest people you know, do they do these things, or are you reconsidering your perception of their intelligence?

What do YOU think is a subtle mark of intelligence? Share your thoughts in the comment sections now, serious or humorous.

Elana