Daniel Greenfield write in his blog, Sultan Knish, Carny Nation, 11/10/12

Excerpt:

Fools come in all shapes and sizes, in all races, religions and bank account sizes. Dumb isn’t measured by degrees or IQ points. Dumb people can absorb a lot of knowledge and spit it back. They can even discuss it incessantly in their best Word-a-Day language skills. The difference between dumb and smart does not come down to literacy or being able to juggle isosceles triangles/ Memory is a skill and most people can learn something if they really want to and have the proper background for it. The difference between smart and dumb is the difference between knowing what’s real and what isn’t.

Intelligence is a bunch of brain cells packed by a few lines of DNA into a cranium. Those are mental skills and they come in handy when tackling Algebra or studying the history of the Mayans. King Solomon, that ancient chief executive of a kingdom despised by Carny Nation, wasn’t talking about learning as intelligence, but as wisdom. Wisdom isn’t just knowledge, it’s understanding that knowledge by drawing the right conclusions. The search for wisdom is the search for those right conclusions.

Fools are often very clever. Some have enormously high IQs and office walls packed with so many degrees that there is no room for a window. And they are still fools because they have no ability to draw the right conclusions. Knowledge is cheap. Your computer has access to more of it than all the wise men of history put together could ever dream of. Intelligence is a genetic gift. Wisdom is what you acquire with both or without either. It is the right conclusions that we draw about life from living it.

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