Eli5: Why does general intelligence differ from person to person? I.e. Why is person A logically attuned and person B emotionally attuned?
In: 0
Because we’re not all exact clones of each other. People have slightly different DNA. There’s mutations. This gives a wide amount of differences between any two people.
sometimes its how they were taught to digest their feelings. there a million ways to skin a cat and dealing with emotions can also be solved in many ways.
general intelligence isn’t relevant here.
once you are taught X number of useful tools or have not bee taught any tools, your emotions will start to work on YOU.
if you are relaxed, meditate, eat well, exercise etc… you will deal with the emotion differently than if you smoked pot and drank all night.
regardless what worked for you enough to repeat is how you are ‘tuned’ and thats what formed a habit.
mind tools are weird in that if all you have is a hammer, then every problem tends to look like a nail.
so people who develop good habits and logical strategies to deal with emotions are following a different path and not necessarily of higher intellect. they have just been exposed to a different set of tools.
some tools double well with intellectual problems and some tools double well with emotional ones, furthering each set of niche successes.
People are all slightly different, and your brain vs someone else’s is different hardware, you might have a faster processing time, they might have more active memory, you might have mildly delayed sensory input, or an undeveloped fear center, minor differences in your hardware adds up to very different behaviours.
On top of that, we’ve all then had totally different software installed…your experiences, traumas, education, all give you reactions, tools, methods, to situations and problems.
So if you’re got a person with overall weaker original hardware, with a lot of unhelpful or traumatic experiences, strong emotional responses, no education etc… they’re probably going to be blown out of the water by someone with the exact opposite, faster and stronger hardware, low emotional interference, education that started early etc..
I think in terms of emotion vs logic, I think it’s important to know that most people do most things without thinking very much, whether you’re smart or stupid or emotional or logical… very few people think almost at all about like 99% of the things they do.
You don’t ‘logically’ take a shower, or come up with a strategy to walk across the room, or put much thought into even most things you say or most decisions you make, they’re low effort things.
People also don’t tend to question things that already align with what they believe, but if it doesn’t align, they tend to double check it.
The less someone is driven by those beliefs and emotions or especially fears, the more they’re willing to consider and reexamine how things work.
If you combine all that together with more computing power to begin with, the result is going to be someone massively more intelligent than another person.
Latest Answers