While working in the corporate world, I did a lot of hiring and like most other managers, I had to interview many candidates to find the one I wanted to hire. In particular I had problems with candidates from local state universities. They were generally very strong technically but many, though by no means all, were unhireable for my purposes. While they knew lots of things and were impressive in reproducing the data that they have studied, they were unable to explain how that data could be applied in the real world. Poor communication skills also meant that much of that knowledge never got into the minds of other people. Many of them looked across to their foreign-trained colleagues and could not understand why graduates of foreign universities tend to do better in the promotion race. My explanations about how applying and communicating count for more than knowing, however, could never dislodged their faith in sanctity of their treasure trove of technical knowledge.
Of course there were a number of local graduates who did very well and maybe it was not so much where you received your tertiary certificate but what the philosophy of your teachers were: the philosophy about what is intelligence and what is the intelligence that society requires and the intelligence that will help you succeed in life.
Understanding knowledge
Today, we have access to an unimaginable wealth of information and knowledge on the Internet. Within minutes, we can find technical, academic and very advanced papers & articles on whatever subject that catches our fancy. There is enough out there in the ether to cook an omelette - thousands of articles and videos actually - or to build a moon rocket. I no longer need to maintain a large library of books or travel to libraries to do my research; they are all on my laptop. So, having knowledge is no longer a prerequisite for intelligence.
That doesn't mean that we, as unschooled amateurs, can take access to knowledge for granted, especially when we venture into unfamiliar subjects. For one thing, good reliable knowledge is hard to find, particularly when asking a very specific question on rather obscure or arcane subjects. The ability to navigate the corridors of knowledge online is the first key to that knowledge. You need to know at least the contents page of each subject area and knowing how each chapter relate to one another. Knowing isotopes belong to both physics and chemistry helps you search for answers on some specific question on isotopes. You need to know the right questions to ask in order to ask Google or Chat GPT.
Often, the answer to a question depends on the context of the question and as such there is, sometimes, a sequence of questions that lead to the answer that we seek. Knowing how to navigate the map of that knowledge area enables us to structure and read the map in the way that leads as to the eventual answer.
Another problem is that answers found online may not be reliable. In addition to articles written by professionals and knowledgeable people in the field, they are also many more written by amateurs. Some of these amateurs are actually quite dedicated scholars who just never earned a degree in the field but have enough knowledge to provide alternative insights that professionals do not have. However, almost all amateur articles were penned by someone with a conclusion in mind and a smattering of research done to support it, or worse someone with an agenda - sometimes for self-esteem and social recognition gains if not monetary gains. Having prior knowledge of the subject area enables us to corroborate the article we come across to assess its reliability.
Cult of the amateur
The Internet has engendered what I call the cult of the amateur. This is where everyone believe they can instantly become an expert in any subject because the knowledge is all out there in the Internet. There is a general slide in respect for experts and this is clearly seen in the Brexit vote, where voices of experts were actively rejected on the basis that they came from experts. You can see this in Hollywood movies, where untrained heroes can pick up a gun they never fired before and defeat faceless soldiers with many years of training. The epitome of this philosophy was probably in the movie Armageddon, which is based on the premise that it is easier to train a miner to fly a spaceship than to tell astronauts to drill holes.
The recent lockdown has also led to a boom in amateur experts. It is understandable that in the face of a very disempowering pandemic, people would seek to recover their agency by going online to understand their situation and have some sense of control over their seemingly random fates. And they had plenty of time to do it. The problem is twofold.
First, most people are not trained to analyse and thus unable to critically think through the problem, or even understand what the problem is in the first place. There is a reason why professional managers who can structure problem statements to facilitate decision-making earn well. But its a specialist skill and critical thinking is not something taught well in school and thus not as widespread as we would like it to be or we think it is.
Secondly, most people have done little, if any, prior research in the medical field generally and virology in particular. As a result they are unable to sift out reliable knowledge from spurious conclusions, having insufficient knowledge to differentiate the two. It is therefore understandable when most people accept the first well-written contrarian article they came across that is aligned to their presuppositions and confirmation bias does the rest. Conspiracy theorists seem to have gained adherents during the pandemic.
Willingness to use the knowledge
Some of us are hoarders of information. As a teenager I used to scour libraries and transcribed specifications of military hardware into my notebook. Once, I came across the Annuario Pontifico, the handbook from the Vatican containing statistics of every single Catholic diocese in the world. It was many hours of joy copying the numbers of nuns and priests in every diocese onto my notebook. Today, I no longer hoard information, partly because I have grown up and also it is no longer necessary as everything is readily available on the Internet.
But knowledge is a bit like muscles: they need to be exercised. Having a huge library of unread books at home may help increase our self-esteem as well as our social standing among visitors but it does nothing to the intellect. Incorporating, internalising and utilising the knowledge familiarises us with the knowledge map and help us understand how the knowledge can be used. Using the knowledge teaches us application, without which the knowledge is absolutely of no use to anyone.
Knowledge does not need to be used for truly useful purposes for us to learn something. As a teenager, I used to devour the Guinness Book of Olympic Records every time a new one was published before the quadrennial event. While the lists of medal winners were interesting, what really fascinated me was the competition schedule of the events. I used it as a basis to prepare a schedule of my own Olympics, of course ignoring budgetary and logistical constraints. But planning my own Olympics did teach me from a young age the process of planning, in addition to the mechanics of competition in general and of each sport in particular.
Unlearning
I always remember a poster from the 70s with a quote from Alvin Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Knowing when to use a piece of knowledge or information also means knowing when not to use a piece of knowledge or information. While we should always be courageous to use knowledge or information that has no seeming relevance to the issue at hand, we should also be equally courageous to dump them. The problem is that sometimes we get too invested in the knowledge that we have worked so hard to acquire. We sometimes define ourselves by the knowledge that we have: I am an accountant and so I have to use my accounting knowledge. It is difficult for us to not use that knowledge as it feels like we are denying a part of ourselves and the sacrifices we made to get there.
But aren’t those past sacrifices sunk cost, to put it bluntly. Our toolkit should always be light and contain only what we need for the job at hand. Everything else should be in storage: always readily accessible if needed but until then, it is not worth the extra dead weight for us to carry around. I used to teach my team to leave the bag outside the door and bring in only what they think they need - they can always go to that bag outside the door if they need anything. Rather than to bring in the entire bag and then start leaving things out after assessing the situation: sometimes we are biased and define the answer based on the tools and knowledge we have. When you have a hammer in hand, every problem looks like a nail.
Imagination
All of us are trained to use knowledge and information in our work and we normally use it in the way that we've been taught or required by standard operating procedures. That is definitely necessary as the standard procedures exist for a reason. But how were those procedures developed in the first place? Yes, most of these procedures were developed using standard procedures for developing procedures but ultimately someone has to do something for the first time. And that takes imagination and creativity.
Einstein was not exactly a brilliant student in school but he came up with the theory of relativity. The story goes that one day he was just passing another boring day at the patent office where he was working and he imagined what it would be like if he were to run at the speed of light alongside a beam of light. Wouldn't that beam of light look stationary to him? And that really was the genesis of the theory of relativity. It was imagination not academic achievements that got him there.
We often talk about creativity without understanding or defining what it really is. Creativity is really about imagination; more than just thinking about something new; more than just thinking about something outside the box. Creativity is realising hitherto unknown connections between two disparate pieces of information, maybe even from two disparate subjects, to come up with new insight.
Relating and linking
There's another story about Einstein. He was once out walking with a friend and he stood in a pond ankle-deep in water, sinking into the mud. He told his friend. 'Have you noticed that if you were to stand on wet mud you do not sink but you would if you were to stand in the water. That is because the surface tension of the water supports you on wet mud.' Now, nothing in what he mentioned there was esoteric science; it is all high school textbook stuff but it was his ability to link what was in the textbook with whatever that he was doing: that was what allowed him to live interestingly. Two persons can look at the same thing but the one who can link it up with other knowledge that they have is the one who gain insights and see something more meaningful. We then do not get lonely because things that become meaningful talk to you and describe themselves to you in the same way that meaningless things stay dumb.
Wide knowledge
If anyone asked me what my specialism is, my reply normally is that my specialism is that I am a generalist. In my career, I changed not just jobs or industry every five years, but also professions. As a result, I know a little about every area required to run a company. I have always said that I may not know accountancy better than the accountant, but I know accountancy better than the salesman; I may not know sales better than the salesman but I know sales better than the operations manager; I may not know operations better than the operations manager but I know operations better than the IT person. And so on. I will never be the best in any field but always the second best.
But because I know a little of everything, I could see issues and solutions where no one else could. In companies I have been in, I often have to play the role of translator between different departments because I am the only understand the languages that each one of them use: what one person say is often understood differently by someone else from a different background and looking from a different context.
Having knowledge in more fields mean greater opportunities to link up disparate pieces of information and knowledge. This gains me more insight than someone with only specialist knowledge. And the network effect multiplies the connective opportunities exponentially the more fields they are. Thus, my learning curve is sometimes steeper than novices in the field, when it should not be because I derive insights through the contexts that novices do not have.
Integrating
Now, I am not saying that we have no need of specialists: they are absolutely necessary in order to provide the in-depth analysis and solutions required. But we need generalists to link up all these very useful disparate in-depth analyses into a single coherent picture. And that's the key skill of a generalist. Having wide knowledge in different fields is useless if you do not integrate them into that single coherent picture required for decision-making.
The higher you up in an organisation that you go, the broader are the implications of the decisions made. At the level of the CEO, the CEO is unable to say that a particular decision that they made is an accounting decision, HR decision or a sales decision. Every decision that a CEO made is an accounting decision, a HR decision and a sales decision. A generalist is required to make sense of all the in-depth analyses provided by the eminently capable specialists and to understand the business implications of each area. Only then, can developments in the business world be completely understood and a holistic solution be crafted.
The corporate management meeting room is a monarchy, not a democracy. We do not vote in making decisions at that management table. All decisions are made in one mind: the boss, who is the only one accountable for it. So, all the information needed to be processed in that one mind. All information need to be integrated into a single integral in that one mind that is going to make a decision. That is a generalist's mind.
A generalist do not need to have a big hard disk. A generalist need to have a very big RAM. And we all know RAM cost more than hard disk space.
Knowledge is integral
Today we train people to be specialist from very early on in their lives. Education has not always been like this. In the ancient world, there was no distinction between different subjects. The word philosophy in classical Greek means love of wisdom. Or knowledge. Philosophy was the mother of all subjects in ancient Greeks as it encompasses all subjects, before the subjects split up. Aristotle for instance was often variously called 'the father of logic', 'the father of biology', 'the father of political science’, 'the father of embryology', 'the father of natural law', 'the father of psychology', ''the father of criticism' and 'the father of meteorology’, among many others. Knowledge is integral; Knowledge is one.
So, what is intelligence?
So, what is intelligence? It is not about having a lot of knowledge or even a wide range of knowledge. It is about being able to link up that wide knowledge to gain insights that would is useful to understanding the world around us and to make decisions. Ultimately, it is about making better decisions and building a better world. But of course along the way, someone with such intelligence would find the world a more interesting place to be in and their lives a lot more interesting to live.
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