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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
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If I understand FF correctly, intellect is the ability to calculate the effect of water running into a bath-tub at one rate and out at another; intelligence is the mind-power to reason that this is a waste of water; Common (or Good, if you really must) Sense tells you to put the plug in.  (Actually, I do have some sympathy with FF's dislike of Common Sense. As wseiber suggests, it isn't really so very common and, when it does occur, it isn't always sense. Common sense told many good people, for many centuries, that the earth is flat.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Someone defined common sense as the set of prejudices one has developed by age twelve.
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526 |
Military/espionage meanings are specialized and like any specialized meanings, they don't have to correspond to everyday meanings, or even to scientific ones. I'm guessing intelligence comes in some kind of "level."
I've heard the term "raw" intelligence, for example. Perhaps these are little bits and pieces that are acquired through disparate means. I can imagine that the great bulk of this unprocessed intelligence must be almost useless.
There could be various levels of processing of this intelligence. Ideally, you want a clear picture of what someone else is doing and thinking. This raw intelligence is a bunch of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle - except in a jigsaw puzzle, you know what you're trying to piece together. But intelligence services can only postulate what the picture looks like and then see how closely they can get the pieces they have to fit into something that looks like that. The raw information must be very spotty. I doubt the situation today is much like the situation just prior to World War II, when the Brits were intercepting Japanese diplomatic messages and we knew practically everything they were doing and thinking.
But it must be worse than this; that is, it's worse than just that some key pieces are missing - the person whose activities you are attempting to discern knows you are doing this and puts out false pieces. Also, the other people whom you rely on for intelligence put out false clues. And very possibly one's colleagues put out false clues.
You take what you have. You try to make little pictures from it. That's one level of processing. Then you try to fit the little pictures into successively bigger pictures. But all of this must be flavored by what you think the end picture already looks like. (I say "must," but that's only a guess.)
Anyway, I'm not sure of the relationship between the uses of the word intelligence in espionage vs mental capacity.
k
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Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 24
stranger
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stranger
Joined: Mar 2004
Posts: 24 |
Ferreting their worth in waste, I Googled for "wasted intelligence" and "wasted intellect". The count is 127 and 37 respectively. Much of the "wasted intelligence" phrase is properly used and gives an indication of intelligence present but not applied/improperly applied whereas much of wasted intellect looks like a misfit, and in most cases the writers' attempt is to express wasted application of intellect rather than the intellect itself. In brief, it's very difficult to think of how intellect can be wasted the way intelligence can be. Therefore intellect = intelligence + wisdom
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891 |
Hmm, your wasted intelligence post reminded me of a very common expression here in Canada...brain drain.
Education in Canada is relatively inexpensive so many people get a higher education. Salaries for the "in demand" jobs requiring higher education are much lower in Canada than those in the U.S. and Europe so we experience a lot of brain drain as our graduates emigrate to get higher paying jobs.
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Joined: Jul 2003
Posts: 3,230
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2003
Posts: 3,230 |
brain drain
Also common here in Zild, although a former PM once said that NZers who emigrate to Australia raise the average IQ of both countries.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
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There's a plumbing company here called the Drain Brain, she offered helpfully.
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Joined: Jun 2002
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
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Trust you USns to get things back to front ... 
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veteran
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veteran
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
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I like it, jheem -
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