I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but here are some random comments. I don't have any particular knowledge of it, but of course that doesn't prevent me from having and expressing strong opinions.
1. I believe that intelligence exists. I do not know that IQ actually measures real intelligence. I do think it is a proxy, but only within a very narrow range - what I would call trivial intelligence. Often we take other tests which are proxies of a proxy, so to speak - the GRE, SAT, etc.
2. There are usually several components - logic, pattern detection/matching, and verbal. Often the components are mixed. Often there are clear cultural components to the test and almost always there are subtle cultural biases. That doesn't mean the tests are useless or that they "don't mean anything."
3. I don't think that all cultures are equal or even equivalent - with regard to promoting intelligence or probably much of anything else. That doesn't mean that I don't think there intelligent - even brilliant - people in every culture. But I do think that those cultures which value it (ACTUALLY value it, as opposed to just saying that they value it) will promote it.
4. Intelligence of nearly any variety isn't always a good thing for the individual.
5. I'm vaguely familiar with Howard Gardner's ideas on multiple intelligences. This seems a good start to me in that it considers intelligence to be a vector rather than a scalar. It's a good start, but I suspect the idea could be expanded.
6. Most people consider "wisdom" very roughly to be how well one can translate intelligence into action. I'll settle for this definition; however, most people consider wisdom to be some sort of higher order function than intelligence, while I just consider it to be another axis of the intelligence vector.
