Levels of "Wisdom"

[Reach]

I like the idea but I don't feel like there's much of a consistent foundation for these tiers outside of maybe Tier 2 and 3. Much of it relies on perception of ability without any objective assessment of ability. As such, as you've pointed out to an extent, this is more for fun than actually categorizing anything properly.

Tier 1 applies too subjectively because many people respond this way not because of capacity to respond, but because they don't give a shit about the topic matter and or are not well versed enough in it to comment either way. Obviously you'd have to differentiate between these for this tier to matter at all.

Tier 4 and 5 are just too nebulous and perception dependent for my tastes IMO. In tier 5 you emphasize traits such as 'down to earth' and 'very mature' and 'optimistic'.

These aren't really objective traits; they're entirely subjective and down to interpretation. Many people will consider someone 'down to earth' and someone else won't. Definitions of maturity vary so wildly I doubt you could find any consistency here.

If anything I feel like this is only pandering to people smart enough that they seem really smart to the average person without being so smart as to alienate them. Many of the most extremely intelligent people are not well received by their peers in terms of idea sharing etc because people have nothing in common with them and therefore have no objective way of assessing their ability.

This is a bit of an aside but most people you would probably consider really smart and extremely wise are only about 1 standard deviation above where you fall intellectually. People are not accurate whatsoever in differentiating and assessing the ability of people significantly smarter than they are.



Anyway, criticism aside I enjoyed the read and your ideas.

And intelligent quotients don't mean much either. They can sort of separate people into categories below 120-ish, but anything higher and using that measurement as an evaluation of intelligence is ridiculous.

I'd agree for the most part if you move this number up to 140ish.

IQ is well correlated with life outcomes and academic performance right up until you get close to the ceiling of the test (which is 145 for most basic tests and 160 for most of the bigger batteries like the WAIS).

And to be fair, even tests that have used extremely dubious normalizations to measure IQ well beyond 160, even they've shown half decent correlations between IQ and outcomes in the stratospheric range. (I think it was Silverman that did a longitudinal study that looked exclusively at 160+s if I recall correctly).


Now, whether you want to call what the test is measuring intelligence or not is another debate entirely, but whatever it is measuring is fairly useful and can be measured fairly accurately.