Wandering Wandering Star

I always want one more stairwell to climb. I always want to have to walk up a walk up, you know, and not have an elevator built into my walk up to survive.

Because I think that’s when you lose focus, is you forget. You forget how you got to the top. And once you forget how you got to the top, you forget everybody that helped you and you forget everything that inspired you and then you wake up one morning and that inspiration and that creativity gives one ol’ middle finger. It says, ‘You, you forgot me. You denied me. And I’m the reason for you.’ So I’ll fuck myself up all the way to the top, just to keep it real.”

After decades of failed attempts to find the underlying thing that somehow could be partially-but-not-completely measured in this wide variety of ways, it dawned on people: there is simply no such thing as intelligence.

Or rather: what we intuitively respond to as intelligence is a composite, a symptom that can arise from a number of different factors in a number of different ways that are correlated but which function independently of one another.

It is true that people who think quickly can sometimes also learn more, and sometimes people who think quickly have more time to come up with creative results. But this sense of intelligence was an end result without a single cause; instead, it is what we see in the capabilities of a person who is able to harness any of a number of traits and get them to work together to produce a result.

In the end, a person can display intelligence by being very quick, or very knowledgeable, or very creative, or any mixture of these or other helpful traits.

“Part of the deal of working at The New York Times is that your readers, a portion of whom are church ladies and copy ninnies and fact freaks, they wait like crows on a wire for you to make the slightest error and then descend, caw, caw, caw-ing, every time you screw up. It still is something that wakes me up at night.

”… At least on the Web, you can amend. The ethic of the Web is to say what you know as quickly as you can, and then reiterate over and over again. The Web is kind of a self-cleaning oven, and what you have up there can grow more accurate as time goes by. That’s never true of print. It’s always there for the ages.“