Intelligence is a multi-faceted characteristic that is manifest in many different ways. In great orators, such as Winston Churchill and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was evident in their ability to articulate ideas and inspire people. In great scientists and mathematicians, like Einstein, von Neumann and Gödel, it derives from a capacity to reason at deep levels of abstraction. In celebrated authors or playwrights like Shakespeare, Shaw and Tolstoy, intelligence is revealed in their ability to capture human nature through descriptive dialog. And in creative inventiveness, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison displayed a high level of intelligence that brought us inventions unimagined by most of our species.
What is the common element shared by all of these highly intelligent people? Creative achievement. In a 2014 interview, Elon Musk, when asked, “When you hire people, what skills do you want them to have?” responded, “What I’m really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability.” This does not necessarily mean a high IQ score, because there are many people of high IQ who never make any significant contributions or advance any field of intellectual inquiry. Although an IQ test is the best single measure of intelligence that we have, it does not measure long-term problem solving ability, creativity, inventiveness, intuition or the capacity to harness intellectual potential. Seeing what a person is able to achieve is perhaps the best evidence of a person’s level of intellectual ability. That’s how we assess Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Stuart Mill as intellectually brilliant, even though they lived before IQ tests were developed.
As explained in some detail in a previous Quora post, comparing the intelligence of people in significantly different fields leads us to different results, depending upon how we weight the various fields. Some would argue that Einstein was not as good a mathematician as von Neumann, but was deeper in his insights and intuition about physics. Comparing the intelligence of different gifted people is like comparing the physicality of Olympic athletes in the track events with the physicality of Olympic athletes in the field events. If someone is to assert that person X is smarter than Einstein, they would need to specify the realm, and even then, such assessments have a high subjective component.
When Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel died, Einstein was invited to become his successor. The revered scientist refused, stating that he lacked the natural aptitude for social interaction that would be required in such a political position. He felt his exceptional problem solving skills in physics would not easily transfer to this other context and compensate for his lack of experience in managing human affairs. We are fortunate that Einstein was not the Prime Minister of England during World War II and that Churchill was not commissioned to conceptualize a theory of gravitation.
