this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Intelligence is such an elusive concept, but here goes anyway…
Knowing stuff makes you knowledgeable. You’re either born intelligent, stupid or somewhere in between. No amount of studying will ever change that, unless studying also involves copious amounts of alcohol. In that case, you’ll only get dumber.
Anyway, studying gives you information and tools, and what you’re talking about is a bit of both. If you go through a training system like that, you’ll be equipped to process and evaluate information, but none of that changes how intelligent you are. Sure, you can sound really smart to other people by using fancy terms and explaining complicated things. Those words alone don’t make you intelligent. Having the innate ability to understand that level of information does.
I’m sure there are really smart people living in rural parts of India where they don’t learn to read or even count very far, but they can do really clever stuff when hunting birds or weaving baskets. Even though they didn’t receive much education beyond what they learned from the local villagers they can still be intelligent. If they were born in a wealthy family in UK, these people would probably go to Oxford and graduate with a PhD in no time.
I'm not saying people without formal education don't have the capacity for intelligence, I'm saying education increases intelligence through reevaluating your own thoughts.
From what I recall, it's generally accepted that your potential for intelligence is based primarily on your genetic luck and environmental factors. Your genetic potential being how well your biological processes work, the hardware you're given, and then environmental factors like injury, nutrition, and education that determine how much of your potential you reach or are hindered from.
If there were 2 clones, one born to a rich family with high IQ parents that understand how to nurture intelligence and one born to 2 mentally challenged parents who not only lack the ability to take care of their kid properly but require their kid to take on a caregiver role as a child. 99% of the time, one of them would reach their full potential while the other wouldn't.
You're mixing up knowledge, (or maybe "being smart") with intelligence. You also just repeats the post ls claim you're answering to, that an intelligent person in the UK will have better opportunities than in a poor country.
Knowledge is remembering facts, intelligence is pattern recognition and problem solving. Where did I mix the two?
Education gives you tools and information. Intelligent people are able to put those to good use. Stupid people are unable to, no matter how hard they try.
Tools and info yes, but the feedback is what I'm saying teaches people to adjust their confidence levels closer to their actual understanding of a subject.
Like if you wrote tests but never got graded or told what you got wrong, your confidence in your ability likely wouldn't match your understanding of what you were tested on. Someone who wrote tests and were shown what they got wrong has a better understanding of how well they know something. I think that constant feedback is important and not something many people consider as a takeaway from being educated.
And yes, "stupid" people don't have the ability to connect all the dots
Totally agree with you about the importance of feedback. With no feedback, you won’t know how wrong or right you are. You’ve also connected feedback with confidence, and that was a pretty good point. Formal education provides the feedback, which then adjusts your confidence to a more realistic level. Great observations, good post. 👍
However, many people get sidetracked by the way you mix up terminology. Maybe you should stop and think what exactly goes into the list you label “intelligence” or “being smart”. Are they the same thing, or are those lists different? Maybe they are separate lists, but there’s overlap? Either way, I suggest you sit down and reflect on the meaning of those terms. Maybe even write that list. Once you’ve done that, see how wikipedia describes intelligence.
As you can see from the number of comments, most people don’t agree with the way you use these terms. That’s the feedback you’re getting from this post, and it’s a great learning experience. Think of it like an exam, where the 100 teachers in this post are taking out their red markers and crossing out half your post.
I may have missed it but I've only seen you and 1 other comment say I mix up the terms, if you can point out where I'm mixing them up then maybe I can correct or clarify myself. I am fully aware of the difference between knowledge and intelligence.
That's interesting, because the original post certainly didn't sound like that. Thanks for the clarification anyway. I'm glad we're on the same page here.
Which part is ambiguous to you though?
Here's the first one.
This passage implies that you can increase your intelligence by getting educated, learning facts, gaining more knowledge, receiving feedback and getting a more realistic understanding on what you know and don't know. Based on some of your clarifications, that doesn't seem to be what you intended to say.
It literally says memorizing data isn't what makes someone intelligent. Second guessing yourself because of factual feedback you've received and not being falsely confident in everything you think is what makes someone intelligent.
Haven't read the stat in a while but it's something like an average increase of 5 IQ points for every year of school you attend. That increase isn't necessarily because of the data you've retained, it's from being tested on it and adjusting how you approach new concepts based on that feedback.
IQ is just a number that tells you how good you’re at doing specific kinds of tests. It’s associated with intelligence, but it’s still a proxy metric. It doesn’t actually measure the thing we’re really interested in. We don’t even know what intelligence really is, or how to measure it properly.
No it's not extremely accurate and it becomes less accurate the more times someone takes one or knows about the tests. But it is the only scale we have to gauge intelligence. In the same sense that if I don't have a measuring tape to tell you how long a stick is, I can give you a rough idea through many hand-widths long it is.
I don't know about others, but I refer to intelligence as the broad dictionary definition of someones ability to learn, that pattern recognition and problem solving. Learning in itself is a skill, which is why there are courses in post secondary that are specifically focused on teaching you how to study and learn efficiently. If what you're hung up on is whether or not intelligence can be increased through education or even at all through your life then I say with pretty good certainty, based on what we know so far, intelligence is absolutely something that requires work through your life to increase.
You need exposure to data, concepts, ideas, and even other people's ways of thinking to reach your full potential. I'll leave you with a scientific journal specifically analyzing the genetic and environmental factors (including education) that affect cognitive ability.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635