Intelligence

We call an excelling physicist (such as Einstein) intelligent, we call an ingenious wartime leader (such as Churchill) intelligent, we even call a great artist or musician intelligent (such as Picasso or Mozart). What makes these people intelligent? Is it the fact they have found their niche and filled it well, is it hard work and dedication or is it down to natural gifts? Maybe all three? I would argue that intelligence is relative, in a long term survival situation we would be more glad for a skilled farmer than a skilled astronomer. And say in this survival situation a baby called Albert Einstein is born. Albert has no exposure to mathematical education, but he does learn the best way to rotate crops and keep the land arable, he breeds the best cattle and he brings in the largest harvest. In the survival society Albert is regarded with more reverence than in our society today, with his physical progress. 

Would Albert of the survival society, in 200 years when everything is back to normal, be remembered as the intelligence he will be remembered for today? 

So what does make intelligence? Well paraphrasing all the theories that, in my opinion, explain it best; intelligence is the ability to think. Think about anything, some people are better at thinking about football and some about atoms. To divide them and measure their intelligence is surely madness.

The best blog you've ever read

People are always eager to know what the best car is, what the newest fashion is, who is the best at what. Sometimes you can determine a best, the fastest at 400 meter running is/was Michael Johnson, holding the world record. The fastest accelerating road car is the Ariel Atom. The best boxer in the world is. . . The best singer, the best thinker, the best looking, the best dancer are all things we can't know. They're matters of opinion. Today I read an article about the toughest sports, how can you compare sports? That's like comparing jobs and asking what the toughest job is, which very much depends on the individual; because if you hate animals undoubtedly your toughest job would be being a vet. If you are naturally very strong you might find powerlifting to be a very easy sport and if your hand eye coordination is poor tennis to be a very hard sport.

The same goes for almost anything that claims to be the hardest or the most fun or the most fulfilling, they are personal values. Not universal fact. The fact we buy into this way of having to have an objective best and turning opinions into fact says a lot about the way we live and the society we live in. Shouldn't we be content to make judgements ourselves and not have the verdicts given to us by advertisers? 

By going to a shop and choosing the product that claims to be the best, are you truly choosing or has that choice been made for you, in the design rooms when they invented their claim of superiority? 

Argument

In the workplace, classroom or lecture hall our debates are well structured, well cited and well presented. But in the real world; in the pub, over the dinner table or in the street when we argue we forget our balanced and objective arguments. We forget to back ourselves up with evidence. We forget to detach the argument from the human. Instead we quickly degenerate to pointless personal slights and arguments based on emotion and views. 

A good argument is rational, truthful, logical and follows a clear path. A bad argument attacks character, is threatening and is based upon pointless rhetoric mostly about emotions and beliefs. 

The trick to forming a good argument, wherever you may be, is to listen, keep calm and build upon your previous points. 

Remember, taking a few seconds out to quickly compose your response is more than worth it. Not only do you hit back hard the small pause might give a potentially heated opponent time to cool off; because arguing against an emotional man is harder than arguing against Socrates.

Morality

We hear a lot about morality, it's used to tap into our emotions in the news, to tap into our votes in manifestos and to tap into our sense of righteousness whenever we do anything out of the ordinary. Morality is a word we all know and we all use, but what does it mean? Are morals something all humans are born with, or do we learn them? Are they taught to us by our societies, or do we learn them from our own ideologies?

Morals are the bridge between a statement; there is a fire. And the consequence; I ought to save that burning child. Morals are how you decide that because the child is burning it would be good to put yourself in danger to save it. But do we even have morals?

If we do have morals are they mere values, or are they rules that can't be broken, ie. I won't go to the local mortuary and eat a dead body. The natural answer is yes, some things are so foul we have to make a moral law, draw a moral boundary. But what if you and your family are in a plane crash, the food runs out, and the only way to feed your family is by eating one of the perished passengers? Surely you wouldn't argue that was immoral? And if you take the, common, stance that it is infact moral to eat a already dead body to save a family, doesn't that mean you've broken the said moral law?
We could take a more extreme case, the aforementioned plane crashes. You have your family with you. Nobody dies in the crash. Would it be moral to take the life of one passenger to feed the rest? Can you balance one life with 300?

I would say morals are good ways to sleep at night, good ways to justify irrationality and good ways for society to work together. I wouldn't say there are moral laws that humans must abide by to be moral, only moral values that can be obeyed or disregarded.