The Distinctions Between Intellectual People And People With A High IQ

An intellectual is someone who is interested in acquiring knowledge and understanding. He wants to know what makes the world tick, and so he reads and studies and discusses, becoming increasingly knowledgeable as he does so

IQ is a measure of what we call fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems that we’ve never seen before. This as opposed to crystallized intelligence, which consists of the knowledge and skills we’ve acquired — by reading a history of the Roman Empire, say, or learning to solve a quadratic equation.

You might think of the intellectual as someone who lifts weights, and the person with a high IQ as someone who is naturally very muscular so will be able to lift heavier weights if he trains.

But if the naturally muscular person doesn’t train, and the ordinary person does, the ordinary person will become stronger than the naturally muscular person.

Whereas if they both train, the naturally muscular person will be stronger.

So that’s the difference. The high IQ person can solve novel problems with fluid intelligence, while the intellectual both acquires knowledge and increases his crystallized intelligence and tries to solve them with his fluid intelligence.

As with the muscular person who doesn’t lift weights, you can have a high IQ person who has no interest in exercising his mind. And however smart he is, he’s not an intellectual.

Conversely, as with the ordinary person who does lift weights, you can have someone with an ordinary IQ who does exercise his mind, who does learn. And he can ultimately outdo the lazy high IQ person at intellectual tasks.